Growth of CC Works

I've been going through a lot of metrics on the growth of
free software
and free culture movements, measured in several ways.

I decided to publish a bit about the growth in CC licenses
in my blog
at Free Software Magazine:

"""
Some numbers on Creative Commons
By Terry Hancock
Online on: 2007-03-05

The number of the current, freshly-released version of the
Creative
Commons licenses: 3.0. The total number of CC licensed works
on the web
at last estimate: 145 million. The percent of those that we
would call
“free”: 29%. The time it takes to double the number of
free, Creative
Commons licensed works: approximately 115 days.

[...]
"""
http://
www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2116

I plotted the numbers from CC's "License
Statistics" page, and just
"eyeball fitted" some growth curves onto them (not
too hard -- the
pattern is quite clear). Roughly speaking, the total number
of CC
licenses grows by about 0.5% to 0.6% per day -- which adds
up to a
doubling time (100% growth) in just under 4 months, or a
factor of about
8.5 per year (nearly an order of magnitude a year).

More interestingly, free licenses (i.e. Public Domain, By,
By-SA) are
growing right along with the rest -- and in fact they are
growing just a
tiny bit faster. This suggests that the idea that non-free
CC licenses
are growing at the expense of free licenses is unfounded.
Even if there
is some opportunity cost (people using NC who would
otherwise use a free
license), the end result is still exponential growth.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancockAnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpac
eworks.com

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