Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization run mostly by volunteers devoted to expanding the range of creative works for others to legally share and build on top of. They offer content creators a series of copyright licenses, the Creative Commons licenses, which allow creators to easily determine and mark their materials for sharing in whatever manner that they sees fit. There’s even an easy-to-use license building tool to help people pick out the correct license they need.
Recently, Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito put out a call on their blog for donations, saying their organization had a tough year. “It has been particularly challenging for us as corporations and major donors have had to slash, if not completely cut, their philanthropic support,” he wrote. At the time, the organization was entering the last couple of days for the Creative Commons annual fundraising campaign and was still $12,000 short of their $500,000 goal. After the blog posting, Creative Commons got word that Microsoft upped their pledge by $15,000 to put them over the top for the year. (Microsoft has been a corporate sponsor for the past four years.)
It’s great to see that Microsoft is continuing their support of this important organization. We wish the best of luck to the Creative Commons team in 2009!
