The creators of the Creative Commons licensing suite are celebrating the licences' tenth birthday. As part of the festivities, local groups are organising events all over the world from 7 to 16 December. The organisation behind Creative Commons was founded in 2001 and produced and published the first set of licences in December of the following year. The organisation was founded by, among others, law school professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig, with the goal of giving both creators and consumers of content more freedoms than are usually afforded under traditional copyright licences.

The Creative Commons organisation provides a suite of licences that have been localised to different jurisdictions and each imposes different levels of requirements that afford various freedoms to recipients of works. These requirements range from licences that require only attribution of the creator to licences that do not allow commercial use of content. Creative Commons also introduced the CC Zero licence which aims to give creators the ability to effectively place their work into the public domain, a task that is somewhat complicated in a number of jurisdictions.

Celebrations of the anniversary of the licences have already begun and the Creative Commons web site includes a list of all events. The Creative Commons community in the UK is meeting on 12 December in London. The organisers welcome all attendees, but ask them to register ahead of time on Eventbrite. Speakers for the event include the Head of Intellectual Property at the British Library, Benjamin White, and Spencer Hyman, the Founder of the online artwork market place ArtFinder.

(fab)