A simplified one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license.

The organization was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred[5] with the support of Center for the Public Domain.

[7] The founding management team that developed the licenses and built the Creative Commons infrastructure as it is known today included Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Glenn Otis Brown, Neeru Paharia, and Ben Adida.

[16][17] The licenses are also used by Stack Exchange, MDN, Internet Archive, Khan Academy, LibreTexts, OpenStax, MIT OpenCourseWare, WikiHow, TED, OpenStreetMap, GeoGebra, Doubtnut, Fandom, Arduino, ccmixter.org, Ninjam, etc., and formerly by Unsplash, Pixabay, and Socratic.

Creative Commons has been an early participant in the copyleft movement, which seeks to provide alternative solutions to copyright, and has been dubbed "some rights reserved".

[19] According to its founder Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons' goal is to counter the dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture that limits artistic creation to existing or powerful creators.

[21][22] In mid‑December 2020, Creative Commons released its strategy for the upcoming five years, which will focus more on three core of goals including advocacy, infrastructure innovation, and capacity building.

Since then, CC Korea has been actively promoting the liberal and open culture of creation as well as leading the diffusion of Creative Common in the country.

Bassel Khartabil was a Palestinian Syrian open source software developer who served as a project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria.

Rather, the duration of copyright used to be limited to much shorter terms of years, and some works never gained protection because they did not follow the now-abandoned compulsory format.

[38] The maintainers of Debian, a Linux distribution known for its strict adherence to a particular definition of software freedom,[39] rejected the Creative Commons Attribution License prior to version 3 as incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) due to the license's anti-DRM provisions (which might, due to ambiguity, be covering more than DRM) and its requirement that downstream users remove an author's credit upon request from the author.

[40] Version 3.0 of the Creative Commons licenses addressed these concerns and,[41] except for the non commercial and no-derivative variants, are considered to be compatible with the DFSG.

[42] Kent Anderson, writing for The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, criticized CC as being grounded on copyright principles and not really departing from it, and as being more complex and complicating than the latter – thus the public does not scrutinize CC, reflexively accepting it as one would a software license – while at the same time weakening the rights provided by copyright.

Anderson ends up concluding that this is the point, and that "Creative Commons receives significant funding from large information companies like Google, Nature Publishing Group, and RedHat", and that Google money is especially linked to CC's history; for him, CC is "an organization designed to promulgate the interests of technology companies and Silicon Valley generally".

Creative Commons has not sought to resolve the confusion, in part because of high consumer demand for the noncommercial license as is with its ambiguity.

Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation being required.

However, one picture depicted 15-year-old Alison Chang posing for a photo at her church's fund-raising carwash, with the superimposed, mocking slogan "Dump Your Pen Friend".

The photo was taken by Chang's church youth counsellor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under the Creative Commons license.

[58] The case was thrown out of court due to lack of jurisdiction and subsequently Virgin Mobile did not incur any damages towards the plaintiff.