The evolution and practices of the Creative Commons in relation with Web 2.0 and business models

Abstract

Since the first release of its licenses in 2002, Creative Commons (CC) increasingly expanded its activities, and today there are more than 1.4 billion contents under various CC licenses in over 50 languages worldwide. Over the recent years, methods of exploiting potentials of the licenses and the organizations of related agents have importantly diversified. Today, the initial public image of CC as being modeled “by and for the lawyers” in order to “promote free contents circulation” is dynamically evolving into a more real-world business compatible system. In this paper, we present an overview of the evolution of CC licenses so that to render a possible horizon of the movement, from the point of view of “business model” and “Web 2.0”.