Creative Commons

Al Jazeera

In early 2009, Al Jazeera launched a Creative Commons Repository–a section of their website dedicated to posting videos under the CC Attribution license. These videos were shot in Gaza, highlighting the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Whereas most Western media had no access to the area, Al Jazeera was visibly present. As a result, the footage was both eye-opening and highly functional—it was footage that anyone could view and use freely, from the general public to rival news networks, as long as Al Jazeera was credited. More recently Al Jazeera launched Al Jazeera Blogs, a website featuring posts written by prominent journalists and correspondents from Al Jazeera television network, all released under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

Google

Google has utilized CC licenses in a variety of instances throughout their digital services. Either by enabling CC-search capabilities through their main search engine, image search engine, and book search engine, or by allowing users to CC license their own content in Picasa, Google Knol, and documentation at Google Code. YouTube, which is Google-owned, has also used CC-licenses in their audio-swap program, allowing users to swap “All Rights Reserved” music for similar-sounding CC-licensed tracks, as well as enabling CC-licensing for select institutions.

Nine Inch Nails

When Trent Reznor decided to shake up the music industry through a new distribution model, the Nine Inch Nails front-man used CC as an anchor point, releasing the Grammy nominated Ghosts I-IV under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. While Reznor gave the first disc away for free digitally, NIN sold tiered offerings ranging from a $5 download of the full album to a $300 premium box set. Limited to 2,500 units, the box set netted $750,000 in profit for the band. Ghosts went on to become the #1 paid MP3 download on Amazon.com for 2008. NIN’s next album, The Slip, was released for free under the same license, fueling a sold-out tour.

OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare has been releasing its materials under a CC BY-NC-SA license since 2004. Today, MIT OCW has over 1900 courses available freely and openly online for anyone, anywhere to adapt, translate, and redistribute. For more on MIT and OCW, see “OCW as a transition to college” and “Two MIT OCW Courses Reach Million Visit Milestone.” The OpenCourseWare concept has now spread to dozens of universities worldwide.

Public Library of Science

Open Access journals are a key component to the knowledge sharing cycle in scholarly communication. There are a number of journals that are leading the way in ensuring and enabling the sharing and reuse of scholarly content, most notably the Public Library of Science (PLoS), BioMed Central, and Hindawi. PLoS, for example, publishes seven scientific journals, including the high-impact PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, and PLoS ONE, a web-centric rethink of the scientific journal. All PLoS content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution license – the freest license in the Creative Commons suite, and also in compliance with the definition of Open Access.

In addition to PLoS, there are now hundreds of open access scholarly journals published under the most liberal CC license, including publications from BioMed Central and Hindawi Publishing Corporation. Similarly, Nature has recently begun to use Creative Commons licenses for a few of its initiatives, from its podcasts, to Nature Precedings (a preprint service), and two of its other journals, aiming to increase sharing and reuse of the material. Combined, their work is increasing access to knowledge and facilitating innovation among scholars, educators, and the general public worldwide.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia recently migrated its licensing structure from the GNU Free Documentation License to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The world’s largest and most cited collaborative encyclopedia made this move via a community vote and for good reason. By changing to a CC BY-SA license, Wikipedia (and the entire collection of Wikimedia sites) allows content to legally flow in and out of the site with ease, enabling one of the great cultural resources of the digital revolution to legally interact with an endless array of similar cultural institutions.

Whitehouse.gov

The Obama Administration has used Creative Commons licenses in a variety of ways, from licensing presidential campaign photos, releasing information on transition site Change.gov via a CC Attribution license, to requiring that third-party content posted on Whitehouse.gov be made available via CC Attribution Only as well. The US Government’s stance on openness is unsurprising, as its CTO, Aneesh Chopra, has gone on record stating that CC licenses have directly informed his perspective on how intellectual property should be accessed, shared, and reused—not to mention derived, adapted, and remixed.