Hi concerns2me,
We're so happy you've joined the CC community, and are excited to share more about our work.
There's no better place to start than where it all began: the CC license.
You may have heard of the Creative Commons license. Perhaps that's what brought you here in the first place.
The first set of Creative Commons licenses were released in 2002 — over 20 years ago! — giving everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to share their work openly, while protecting those who may use the content from concerns of copyright infringement.
Lawrence Lessig and Eric Eldred, CC founders, designed the Creative Commons licenses in response to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, a law they believed was unconstitutional. The Act extended the term of copyright for every work in the United States — even those already published, so that it equaled the life of the creator plus 70 years. That's a long time!
Lessig, Eldred, and many others saw this legislation as a major threat to creativity and knowledge. At that time, the internet was only just beginning to take shape, and many were eager to preserve the promise of this new, open landscape as a place for the free exchange of knowledge, ideas, and creativity. The CC license was one way to do this.
Since 2002, CC licenses have grown in popularity, popping up in all corners of the world wide web.
Currently, over 2.5 billion works are licensed under one of six Creative Commons Licenses or public domain tools, all offering different levels of permissions to the public. This includes all Wikipedia content, in every language, since 2009 when Wikipedia transitioned exclusively to CC Licenses.
Later in 2006, CC launched CC Search, making open content easier to discover and use. Now CC Search made an exciting transition to openverse.org in collaboration with the WordPress community.
We invite you to learn more about our CC licenses and other ways to get involved in our work by visiting our website or following us on Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Thank You!
CC Team 
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