Creative Commons Around the World

On Saturday Lawrence Lessig will be inaugurating the launch of Creative Commons licenses in Greece. This prompted me to investigate how pages licensed under creative commons licenses are distributed on the internet.

To compile the metrics I used the Internet Systems Consortium July 2007 list of top-level domain names by host count distribution. From that I selected the 71 domains with more than 100,000 hosts. I then run a Google search for all pages in each domain (for instance .edu) and a search for the pages in that domain containing the string "creative commons". The results, ordered by the percentage of pages containing the consecutive words "creative commons", (most of which are presumably licensed by a corresponding license) are striking.

Rank	Domain	Total Pages	CC Pages	% CC Pages
1	Yugoslavia	5,230,000	866,000	16.56
2	Chile	7,690,000	937,000	12.18
3	Hungary	17,100,000	1,830,000	10.70
4	Croatia	7,930,000	820,000	10.34
5	Spain	22,300,000	2,300,000	10.31
6	Brazil	25,600,000	1,950,000	7.62
7	Portugal	11,200,000	723,000	6.46
8	Argentina	10,900,000	702,000	6.44
9	Italy	41,400,000	2,280,000	5.51
10	Taiwan, Province Of China	23,200,000	1,150,000	4.96
11	Greece	13,400,000	606,000	4.52
12	Luxembourg	4,140,000	182,000	4.40
13	Mexico	9,380,000	411,000	4.38
14	Korea, Republic Of	16,000,000	581,000	3.63
15	Morocco	2,180,000	62,500	2.87
16	Belgium	30,800,000	869,000	2.82
17	Estonia	9,770,000	274,000	2.80
18	United States	53,600,000	1,350,000	2.52
19	Netherlands	42,300,000	1,050,000	2.48
20	Japan	76,200,000	1,820,000	2.39
21	Austria	23,100,000	456,000	1.97
22	Commercial	4,420,000,000	86,900,000	1.97
23	China	60,300,000	1,160,000	1.92
24	Bulgaria	7,140,000	135,000	1.89
25	Romania	13,700,000	251,000	1.83
26	Poland	22,400,000	392,000	1.75
27	Germany	131,000,000	2,080,000	1.59
28	Niue	6,870,000	107,000	1.56
29	Sweden	31,400,000	452,000	1.44
30	Venezuela	4,630,000	65,400	1.41
31	France	155,000,000	1,860,000	1.20
32	Iceland	6,330,000	69,900	1.10
33	Switzerland	68,400,000	705,000	1.03
34	Hong Kong	12,400,000	120,000	0.97
35	Indonesia	4,250,000	40,900	0.96
36	Ireland	11,500,000	108,000	0.94
37	New Zealand	14,200,000	114,000	0.80
38	Networks	407,000,000	3,260,000	0.80
39	Norway	24,700,000	195,000	0.79
40	Finland	22,500,000	170,000	0.76
41	Colombia	4,560,000	34,300	0.75
42	Thailand	6,690,000	48,300	0.72
43	Israel	14,900,000	104,000	0.70
44	South Africa	12,000,000	81,500	0.68
45	Russian Federation	49,700,000	326,000	0.66
46	Denmark	25,700,000	166,000	0.65
47	Australia	64,300,000	399,000	0.62
48	Canada	143,000,000	873,000	0.61
49	Czech Republic	25,200,000	148,000	0.59
50	United Kingdom	298,000,000	1,630,000	0.55
51	Philippines	5,650,000	27,900	0.49
52	Singapore	9,470,000	46,200	0.49
53	India	13,600,000	61,900	0.46
54	Slovakia	9,810,000	43,400	0.44
55	Peru	5,060,000	18,600	0.37
56	Ukraine	9,760,000	31,300	0.32
57	Lithuania	7,040,000	20,000	0.28
58	Turkey	10,400,000	26,900	0.26
59	Organizations	2,580,000,000	6,090,000	0.24
60	Educational	1,150,000,000	1,470,000	0.13
61	Malaysia	8,950,000	9,710	0.11
62	Uruguay	3,940,000	2,350	0.06
63	Government	502,000,000	281,000	0.06
64	Moldova, Republic Of	2,710,000	897	0.03
65	United Arab Emirates	2,640,000	593	0.02
66	Pakistan	3,020,000	601	0.02
67	Viet Nam	5,830,000	777	0.01
68	Latvia	7,320,000	890	0.01
69	Egypt	2,250,000	220	0.01
70	US Military	4,940,000	28	0.00
71	Cyprus	1,800,000	3	0.00

I was expecting (US) educational institutions and non-commercial organizations (the .edu and .org domains) to be leading the league, but with a rank of 59 and 60, they are near the bottom. In contrast, the percentage of creative commons pages hosted under the .com (commercial) domain is an order of magnitude higher. This discrepancy makes arguments concerning the inherent benevolence of educational institutions and civil society organizations slightly suspect.

There are many potential problems with my method.

• Google's coverage is far from universal
• Not all content is equally important; contrast the value of an MIT lecture to that of a MySpace page
• I may be ignoring localized versions of creative commons licenses
• Some large but relatively unimportant sites may be contributing many pages (almost a fifth of the creative commons pages in the Yugoslavia domain come from the forum site MyCity)
• Many sites may have liberal content distribution policies that are not codified under a creative commons license (the US Government, ranked 63rd, and many open source project come to mind)

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