Creative Commons Statistics Generator

Choose a Jurisdiction

Generic Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Brazil Bulgaria Canada Chile Croatia Hungary Finland France Germany Israel Italy Japan Korea Malaysia Netherlands Poland Slovenia South Africa Spain Sweden Taiwan UK: England & Wales UK: Scotland Version 2.0 Version 2.5

An introduction and explanation

This statistic generator queries Yahoo! for back-links to Creative Commons licences. To be licensed under a Creative Commons licence, content (text, pictures, graphics etc) needs to link to a licence URI. The number of backlinks gives some insight into the amount of CC licenced works available on the Internet.
The inherent weakness of this approach is that it relies heavily on the effectiveness of the Yahoo! search-engine. Whenever Yahoo! changes the way their search-engine works this is reflected in the number of licences returned by this script. This results in two, as of yet, unexplained phenomena. Firstly the number of licences can vary strongly from day to day. Secondly, it has been observed that Yahoo! seems to sometimes return slightly different numbers depending on the IP-address of the requesting computer. One should therefore realise that a certain margin of error must be assumed when analysing these statistics.

Why Yahoo!?
Currently Yahoo! returns the highest number of backlinks. Google returns a much lower number. This could indicate that Google isn’t indexing backlinks very effectively. The script can easily be adapted to search Google, however until they have altered their method for indexing backlinks this will not return good results.

Using the script is easy. Select the Jurisdiction from the box above and indicate which version(s) of the licences you are interested in. After clicking “Generate Stats!” the script queries Yahoo! and returns the number of licences. This may take some time. The last cell of each row contains a link to the Yahoo! page which lists all the documents licenced under that specific licence.

The statistics generator has been created as part of a quantitative and qualitative survey into the usage of Creative Commons licences kindly supported by the Arts Council England. The project is managed by OpenBusiness.cc and focuses on Creative Commons in England and Wales. The tool itself is licensed under GPL and available for download