Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 by larry-lessig to provide flexible licensing tools for creative and educational works. It is the most direct institutional extension of stallman's copyleft framework beyond software.
Lessig founded Creative Commons explicitly drawing on stallman's gpl-copyleft-mechanism as a model. The CC license suite allows creators to grant permissions in advance, using legally reliable instruments analogous to the GPL. The "some rights reserved" framing echoes Stallman's use of copyright to guarantee freedom rather than restrict it — the free-as-in-freedom-concept applied to cultural works.
stallman has endorsed specific Creative Commons licenses as compatible with the free-software-definition: CC0 (public domain dedication), CC BY (attribution only), and CC BY-SA (attribution and share-alike, which is the copyleft variant). He has criticized other CC licenses — particularly NonCommercial (NC) and NoDerivatives (ND) variants — as non-free, because they restrict the four-freedoms applied to creative works.
The fdl (GNU Free Documentation License) was Stallman's own attempt to create a copyleft license for documentation; Creative Commons BY-SA is now considered a more interoperable alternative for non-software works.
The relationship between Creative Commons and the free software movement is analyzed in copyleft-as-legal-hack and free-software-influence-on-creative-commons, and Lessig's work is the primary example of stallman's ideas extending beyond software into culture and education.