Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses for free to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. Wikipedia is one of the notable web-based projects using one of its licenses.The organization was founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, however first set of copyright licenses were released in December 2002.