As Creative Commons approaches its 5th birthday it makes sense for papers to appear with titles like Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons Licenses and Evaluating Its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and for Copyright Law. This paper, presented a few days ago at TPRC 2007…

It has been a long time since we’ve posted a proper update on Creative Commons license adoption statistics, so a presentation on this topic was eagerly awaited at this year’s Creative Commons international meetings at the iSummit. I led off with an overview presentation (PDF; Scribd; Slideshare). Here are the major points: Metrics based on…

In April we belatedly blogged license adoption estimates for December 2005, which had been published elsewhere in December. That estimate, based on Google queries restricted to CC-licensed content, came to 45 million web pages under a Creative Commons license. What a difference six months make. Our current aggregate estimate, also based on Google queries for…

Yesterday Yahoo! announced that their search index had grown to 20 billion documents. That, along with continued adoption of Creative Commons licenses, explains 53 million linkbacks to our licenses according to Yahoo! linkback queries. In May, when Yahoo!’s index apparently consisted of 8 billion documents, we found 16 million pages with license links. So discounting…

Flickr, who we interviewed last year, has reopened the area of their site devoted to Creative Commons licensed images. If you’re looking for a photo to drop into a collage, a report for school, or even onto a t-shirt, this is a great place to browse and search for specific licensed photos. We’re also happy…

Folks love a license distribution breakdown, so here’s another, this from the current index of 1.2 million pages (larger crawls forthcoming) used by the Creative Commons search engine: Allows commercial use Allows derivative works Allows both Audio 32 78 32 Image 19 48 16 Interactive 31 65 27 Text 28 69 23 Video 13 65…

Last week we mentioned there were over 5 million web pages linking to Creative Commons licenses. This week, it has come to our attention that Yahoo! has updated their index to find well over 10 million web pages that link to our licenses. If you’re curious at all to see what licenses people are choosing,…

At the end of 2003, we were proud to announce that over 1 million web pages had linked to Creative Commons licenses. Today, we are even more proud to say that this number is now well over 5 million web pages. Thanks to you, a vibrant base of free culture is flourishing.