CC10: ten years of Creative Commons

Ten years ago, in December, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig basically invented a revolutionary kind of copyright protection: the Creative Commons license. The aim was to to facilitate the broadcasting and use of content in the digital world and to provide a legal alternative to authors who found traditional copyright too restrictive. And, since then, this has been the mission of CC.

The idea of universal access to contents, information, art, culture etc. is made possible by the Internet, but legal and social systems don’t always freely allow that. That is because Copyright was created long before the mass phenomenon of Internet, and it can make it hard to legally perform actions we tend to take for granted: 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. This is what Creative Commons exists for.

So, it was time to celebrate and, all over the world, the community of CC users have been joining the CC10 - this is how the 10 years celebration has been called - between December 7 and 16. There have been online activities, events, tweets and competitions. As well as dozens of real parties. And a very interesting dedicated website - 10.creativecommons.org - featuring articles on the best CC platforms providing services for artists and authors, interviews, videos, news and updates.