The Creative Commons organization was founded in 2001 at the Stanford Law School on the intiative of the professor of law Lawrence Lessig. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public.

Easy to use and integrated in web standards, these non-exclusive licenses allow rights holders to authorize the public to do some use, while getting the opportunity to reserve commercial operations, derivative works, or the degree of freedom (in the sense of free software). These open access contracts can be used for any type of creation: text, movie, photo, music, websites…

Teams of volunteer lawyers are involved in the translation of texts in their own language and in the adaptation of the specific provisions to their national legislation in order to allow the use of these licences in their country. The CERSA, the Research and Studies Center of Administrative Science, a research laboratory affiliated with the University Panthéon-Assas Paris 2 and the National Center for Scientific Research - CNRS is the institution affiliated with Creative Commons in France.

Site: https://creativecommons.org/