When Creative Commons’ model was forming, members of the founding team often cited an example of one day being able to search for photos of the Eiffel Tower that could be used noncommercially — an arbitrary example to articulate our vision. Our licenses, and metadata schema were built to make this a reality.

We can now proudly say that there are photos [1] [2] of the Eiffel Tower available for noncommercial use, and the search engine is beginning to find them — a milestone to say the least.