Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organisation that enables the sharing of creative works, through a set of free to use licenses which enable organisations to modify their copyright terms to best suit their needs.
Europeana greatly encourages cultural institutions to use Creative Commons licenses as a tool to open up their collections.
One third of the content you can find in Europeana is ‘open’. This means that the material is either in the public domain and free from any copyright restrictions, or the rights holder has made the material available using one of the two open Creative Commons licenses (CC BY and CC BY-SA).
Currently nine million objects are licensed using one of the six licenses provided by Creative Commons. However, there is also a lot of misuse of these licenses. CC licenses can be applied only by the rights holder in the first place or by an institution holding a permission from the rightsholder.