When I opened the email, I almost couldn't believe it - oh happy day: Pixabay was added to a handful of selected media search services on Creative Commons.
What is this Creative Commons?
Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization, that provides free easy-to-use copyright licenses and waivers to share and handle creative works and knowledge. With these legal tools, you can effortless change copyright terms from "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved". And so, people all over the world may use and profit from your work - without being at risk of violating copyrights.
On Pixabay, we make exclusively use of CC's Public Domain Deed CC0. It is no license, but a copyright waiver and may loosely be described by the term "no rights reserved". And thus, anybody may use images from Pixabay free of charge for almost any application.
Considering virtually every country has it's own set of copyright regulations, it's a really complex task, accounting for all of them in only one license. Therefore, CC's tools are incredibly useful and CC0 is the basis on which Pixabay could be founded. Thank you Creative Commons!
And now, somewhat more than one year after our launch, CC has included Pixabay on par with Google Image Search, Flickr, YouTube, Wikimedia Commons, and a few other services, on their official CC Search site. With this, Pixabay has come one step closer to achieving our vision of providing the most useful image database out there - including 100% quality and 100% public domain :)
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