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Creative Commons announces major funding support from Omidyar Network

San Francisco — 2008 May 28

Creative Commons announces that it has received $500,000 as the first
installment of a gift of $2.5 million over five years from Omidyar
Network. This gift is made to Creative Commons as part of the "5x5
Challenge" grant program, from which Creative Commons expects to
receive $2.5 million annually in general operating support for each of
the next five years. The 5x5 program was initiated at the invitation
of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In addition to the
Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network, other major funders
participating in the 5x5 Challenge include the International
Electronic Trade and Services Initiative ("IETSI"), a nonprofit trust
founded to support the development of ecommerce, globally, as well as
Google, Mozilla, and Red Hat.

Creative Commons is the San Francisco-based not-for-profit
organization, which provides free copyright licenses that allow
creators to mark their works with a range of permissions granted to
others. To date, Creative Commons licenses are attached to millions of
artistic, scientific and educational works distributed by their
creators over the Internet.

This gift comes at a historic moment for Creative Commons, which
recently launched an initiative to explore its possible roles in
connection with a digital copyright registry system.

"Omidyar Network has been a leader in encouraging nonprofit
organizations to become both more finely tuned to their users' needs
and more self-sustaining," said Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito. "Omidyar
Network's grant will support Creative Commons' basic promise: to
provide free, simple tools that allow the creators of the world to
share their works on generous terms. In addition, the grant will allow
us to explore providing fee-based, value-added services, which can
benefit our community and help support the organization financially.
The registry is our first big project in which we plan to explore
these possibilities."

"Creative Commons has transformed the way people think about
intellectual property," said Matt Bannick, managing partner of Omidyar
Network. "Creative Commons licenses have dramatically lowered the
transaction costs for use of many digital works, and an open,
interoperable digital copyright registry system would continue to
decrease those costs, as well as increase the visibility of many more
creative works. We are delighted to help enable the exploration of
this system and to see Creative Commons, an organization that we have
long supported, take an important step in its growth toward
sustainability."

For more information on the Creative Commons registry project, see
http://creativecommons.org/projects/registry.

About Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001,
that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works,
whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright
licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and
educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms
that build upon the "all rights reserved" concept of traditional
copyright to enable a voluntary "some rights reserved" approach.
Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous
support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain,
Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation,
as well as members of the public. For more information about Creative
Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org.

Contact

Mike Linksvayer
Vice President, Creative Commons
ml AT creativecommons.org

Press Kit

http://creativecommons.org/presskit

Attachment: CC Press Release re ON Funding 20080528.pdf
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