Creative Commons On December 16, 2002, Creative Commons released version 1.0 of its Licensing Project, and the first release of content under its Founders' Copyright. These are the first two projects in a series that Creative Commons will launch, all designed to help expand the amount of intellectual work, whether owned or free, available for creative re-use.The Licensing Project will build licenses that will help you tell others that your works are free for copying and other uses but only on certain conditions. You're probably familiar with the phrase "All rights reserved" and the little © that goes along with it. Creative Commons wants to help copyright holders send a different message: "Some rights reserved" and our "CC Creative Commons" logo.

Lawrence Lessig is associated with this group. Bill Walle and I saw him speak at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference last spring and this idea was introduced at the conference.