San Francisco, CA – July 9, 2008

Today Creative Commons (CC) announced the official launch of the Metrics project, a broad-based open web-based initiative to encourage and collect research efforts on the adoption of CC licenses worldwide. With the launch of the Creative Commons Case Studies project last month, CC expanded the qualitative information available about license usage. The release of the Metrics project today extends the quantitative data available for further exploration and understanding of how Creative Commons licenses are spreading globally. The project wiki also extends an open invitation for users to join the research community to participate in analyzing data about Creative Commons licenses.

Nathan Yergler, CC’s CTO commented, “We’re extremely excited about the possibilities of opening up research on this topic to the public. Semantic Mediawiki, an extension that adds database-like capabilities to wikis, is a huge help in building a community around these issues.” Anyone is able to review the research aggregated at the Metrics portal, contribute information on existing works, or add their own original research. While it is impossible to do an authoritative search and calculation of the number of licensed works on the entire Internet, this project’s intent is to lower the barrier for participation in discovering more accurate statistics on CC licensing collaboratively.

Creative Commons license use is growing. As of June 2008, Creative Commons estimates that a minimum of 130 million creative works are licensed by creators opting to provide clear expression of how their works may be used. The Metrics project aims to facilitate understanding of how this mass adoption is shaping business and culture at-large. As Mike Linksvayer, Vice-President of CC, stated, “If we’re doing our job well, Creative Commons is enabling more creativity, innovation, and participation in culture. Metrics are vital to understanding how CC is transforming the creative ecosystem.”

Linksvayer added, “The Metrics project complements existing collaboration between CC and research groups internationally.” This includes the work by Giorgos Cheliotis and Warren Chik at the Participatory Media Lab, a research center based in Singapore, that is working with CC to tackle some of the analytical questions surrounding its progress worldwide. Cheliotis recently launched the Commons-Research website and mailing list which supports interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers studying commons-based peer production.

The release of the Metrics project is set to coincide with the First Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on Free Culture being held in Sapporo, Japan from July 30th to August 1st. This workshop, spearheaded by Cheliotis with Tyng-Ruey Chuang and Jonathan Zittrain, will bring together researchers and scholars from around the world to discuss commons-based peer production research and present their latest works in progress publicly. More information on how to participate in the Metrics project and relevant upcoming events are available on the Creative Commons Metrics project website.

LINKS

CC Metrics Project

Commons-Research Website and Conference

Commons-Research Mailing List

CC Case Studies Project

ABOUT CREATIVE COMMONS

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public. For more information about Creative Commons, visit https://creativecommons.org.

CONTACTS

Jon Phillips
Community and Business Development Manager
Creative Commons
jon@creativecommons.org
+1.510.499.0894

PRESS KIT

https://creativecommons.org/presskit