Creative Commons was founded by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred. They worked together to create this non-profit organization that allows people to share their creations through the use of simple copyright licenses.

This is a unique company because it allows the creator (user) to choose how the public can use their creations, ranging from “all rights reserved” or “some rights reserved.” This free license of their choosing enables the creator to make their work very protected, and therefore not able for others to replicate, or very public and reusable by all.

Ordinary people can choose to use the services of Creative Commons, but several huge companies are currently using CC licenses within themselves. For example, Flickr and Google are two companies that have chosen to use CC in their programs in order to make their services more user-friendly and public.

I found the official site of Creative Commons (creativecommons.org) the most helpful when conducting my research. It gave me simple and direct information that helped me to understand what Creative Commons is all about. The way the site is organized was very user-friendly because I was able to find the things I needed to know very easily. For instance, the “About” section gave me general information while the “Licenses” section gave me more precise information about the licenses employed by this organization.

I’ll most likely be crediting my work from now on using the Attribution license. This is considered the “most accomodating of licenses offered” because it allows anyone to tweak, edit, or build upon your creative work but always giving you credit for the original creation. I really like this option because it lets other utilize my original work and make it even better, but still giving me credit for the original thoughts and ideas. So nobody is stealing my work and claiming it as their own.