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The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That someone is Creative Commons.

The commons can be defined as those things we hold in common as a people. The National Park system is one example of the commons, so are the state parks.

Public

We work with the global Open Educational Resources movement, providing the legal framework for Open Educational Resources (OER) — learning materials that are freely available to use, remix, and redistribute.