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Creative Commons began in 2001 with the aim of establishing a fair middle way between the extremes of copyright-control, and the uncontrolled exploitation, of intellectual property. Its primary tool is the use of a range of copyright licences, freely available for public use, which allow creators to fine-tune control over their work, so enabling as wide a distribution as possible. Originally those licences were, although written for worldwide use, grounded in American law and practice. International Creative Commons works to establish national projects. By 2005, over fifteen million webpages, and many other works, had come to use these licences.

Creative Commons came to the United Kingdom in December 2003, when Damian Tambini, Christian Ahlert, and Yo'av Mazeh of the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford teamed up to start a UK project. After a while Prodromos Tsiavos joined the team and became the main coordinator of the legal work, and a first draft licence was published in February 2004.

The United Kingdom, however, is made up of three legal jurisdictions (England and Wales; Scotland; Northern Ireland), and after the then Creative Commons UK project got underway, it became recognised that there was a need to have separate licences and projects for each jurisdiction that could take into consideration the differences between their laws. After some debate, separate projects for England and Wales and for Scotland came into being at the beginning of 2005, and the UK project ceased to exist as such.

Although independent of each other, like all Creative Commons national projects, the projects co-operate in this joint website and also have a joint mailing list for discussion. We hope that a project may be set up for Northern Ireland later in 2005, so covering the entire United Kingdom.

The projects

For more information on each of the projects, go to the links on the sidebar opposite. For information on projects in other countries, go to the menu at the top of the page.