There are over a billion Creative Commons licensed works at present, more than three times the number in the last five years.
Founded in 2001, "Creative Commons is a global charity, with a powerful affiliate network of researchers, activists, legal, education and policy advocates, and volunteers who serve as CC representatives in over 85 countries," according to its website.
In 2006, there were only 140 million CC licensed works, but now the number has grown by 185% within four years.
CC-marked works were viewed 136 billion times online in 2015, the report said.
The license suite, which was translated into different languages in 2014, has led to CC being used in every continent, including Antarctica.
The Creative Commons-licensed works have been shared in 34 languages, with more than 90 million views in the last decade.
Several images (391 million), text (46.9 million), videos (18.4 million), multimedia (23,000), research (1.4 million) and other kinds of content can be found with the Creative Commons mark.
The free licensing system allows people to share, recreate, collaborate with the works, and it can also limit the commercial use of those works.
From "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved" the CC suite offers a variety of licenses. This licensing system is meant to work alongside copyright, enabling the creator to change the copyright terms best suited to them.
Flickr.com, the image hosting site, says that it has 50 million CC images in Flickr Wall Art.
The "free culture" allows sharing and modification of works of art, text, images and research, of which Wikipedia is an example.
