Creative Commons (CC) is an international nonprofit organization that empowers people to grow and sustain the thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture we need to address the world’s most pressing challenges and create a brighter future for all.

Our Vision

A world where education, culture, and science are equitably shared as a means to benefit humanity.

Our Mission

CC empowers individuals and communities around the world through technical, legal, and policy solutions that enable the sharing of education, culture, and science in the public interest.

Our Strategy

Download CC’s full 2025–2028 strategy.

Goal 1: Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing

In the long term future, we will know we’ve been successful when a strong and resilient open infrastructure empowers sharing and access in the public interest.

CC serves the legal layer of the open infrastructure of sharing. Our tools remove friction and barriers in sharing and accessing knowledge. Infrastructure is often taken for granted or assumed to be neutral and enduring. For many users of the internet today, it is as if the CC infrastructure has always been here, and will always be here, as a way for individuals to express values and increase connection and collaboration. However, in today’s legislative, political, and socio-economic context, there is nothing neutral about sharing knowledge, and there are no guarantees that the infrastructure of sharing online will be preserved and protected.

We imagine a world where CC’s foundational open infrastructure is funded by default, and where individual creators and rightsholders reclaim agency in contributing to and benefiting from the commons. If we can ensure a strong and resilient open infrastructure of sharing that enables access to educational resources, cultural heritage, and scientific research in the public interest, we’ll have a viable alternative to the concentrations of power that currently exist and aim to restrict sharing and access. Because the commons must continue to exist for everyone. We cannot allow an undesirable future to emerge unchallenged.

Goal 2: Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons

In the long term future, we will know we’ve been successful when a thriving creative commons exists to solve the world’s greatest challenges.

Stronger open infrastructure enables the thriving creative commons that is required to solve the world’s greatest problems. Knowledge must be accessible, discoverable, and reusable. In tandem with a strong and supported open infrastructure of sharing, a thriving creative commons redistributes power from the hands of the few to the minds of the many, and cements a worldview of knowledge as a public good and a human right. We cannot and must not take the commons for granted. 

The richness that is shared within the commons is interwoven into our lives through art, cultural heritage, science, medicine, education, and so much more. Sharing in service of the public interest should be the norm, not the exception. A thriving commons can only exist with reciprocity, because without reciprocity the commons will stagnate. It’s time for new approaches that tell the stories of how we can all benefit from the commons, and for an increase of reciprocal sharing of the knowledge that will advance solutions to the greatest problems of our time.

Goal 3: Center community

In the long term future, we will know we’ve been successful when communities leverage CC’s open infrastructure to share knowledge in the public interest.

We steward the open infrastructure of sharing and contribute to a thriving creative commons with, and for, community.

Community is not a means to an end. It is central to everything we do and at the heart of our mission and vision. We need to recalibrate our commitment to serve and recognize those who have built the commons on which we all rely. We aim to better center the community of open advocates, who are credited for the global usability and adoption of the CC legal tools, alongside the rich generational and geographical diversity of open advocates with varying needs and awareness of CC.

It is not only open advocates who benefit from the commons or who need clarity on how their work is being used with emerging technologies. It is everyone who benefits or contributes, whether they consider themselves part of the movement or not.

By centering our community, we can model the world we want to see, of distributed power and reciprocity.

Past Strategies

2021–2025 Strategy