Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works, whether they are owned or public-domain. Creative Commons has created a set of copyright licenses that are available free of charge. These licenses indicate that copyrighted works are free for sharing, but only on certain conditions. The Creative Commons licensing tools allow authors to define the nature of the agreement in terms of attribution (giving credit to the original source material), commercialization, derivative works, and distribution. Creative Commons enables authors and creators to label their work "Some rights reserved" or even "No rights reserved." The license is expressed in three ways: a Commons Deed (a simple, plain-language summary of the license), a Legal Code (to ensure that the license will stand up in court) and a Digital Code (a machine-readable translation of the license that helps search engines and other applications identify the terms of use).

BioMed Central and Public Library of Science employ Creative Commons licenses for all the research articles that they publish. The Creative Commons team recently launched the Science Commons project which aims to "enable scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs to make the most of this historic opportunity and its promise for broadening collaboration and accelerating the pace and depth of discovery. Science Commons will work to counter the application of locks and legal restrictions on scientific data, discovery, and experience, while developing the incentives and means to ease their movement, examination, and productive use among researchers and industry."

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 by cyber-law and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, Eric Saltzman and Lawrence Lessig, together with MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson, and publisher Eric Eldred (See the Interview with Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig in Open Access Now, May 10, 2004. Creative Commons was initially supported by the Center for the Public Domain and staff at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Creative Commons is based at Stanford Law School, where it shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school's Center for Internet and Society. Creative Commons receives support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation.

Many people have long since concluded that all-out copyright doesn't help them gain the exposure and widespread distribution they want. Many entrepreneurs and artists have come to prefer relying on innovative business models rather than full-fledged copyright to secure a return on their creative investment. For whatever reasons, it is clear that many users of the Internet want to share their work - and the power to reuse, modify, and distribute their work - with others on generous terms. Creative Commons helps people express this preference for sharing by offering a set of licenses.