Creative Commons China Mainland conducted a survey with the aim of gathering knowledge about how well Creative Commons licenses are known and used by the Chinese Community. The special focus of this survey was on Chinese bloggers and on the non-commercial use aspect of CC. The survey was carried out both online and offline from October 28 through November 15, 2006.

We received a total of 122 valid responses to our questionnaire. Of this total, 9 were received online and 113 were received offline.

The survey shows that 90.1% of the people questioned have their own blogs, 78.7% have an account with social network websites such as Flickr, Myspace, or Facebook, and 28.7% create their own podcasts. The high percentages largely resulted from the fact that most participants in the survey were attendees at the Chinese Bloggers Conference held in Hangzhou from Oct. 28 to 29, 2006.

(Chart 1) Respondents’ Web Activities

The survey asked about the kinds of content incorporated in the online activities engaged in by the respondents. The results showed that 87.7% use texts, 53.3% use still photographs, 13.4% used video files, and 10.0% use audio files.

(Chart 2) Main Types of Web Content

Most of the people surveyed had limited knowledge of CC and CC China Mainland licenses and they indicated that they wanted to know more about them and were interested in adopting CC licenses for their works. The survey showed that 41.8% of the respondents indicated they “knew a little” about CC, 27.0% said they “have no idea” of CC, 23.8% reported they “know more than a little ”, and only 7.4% of the respondents indicated that they “know very well” about CC licenses.

(Chart 3) Awareness of CC

The survey further shows that 32.8% of participants have already adopted CC, 34.4% say they plan to adopt CC, and 86.8% say they want to know more about CC and CC China Mainland. Among all those surveyed, of those who indicated that they have adopted or planned to adopt CC, 71.2% said they would like to adopt the ported CC China Mainland licenses.

Regarding the “non-commercial use” aspect of CC, 69.7% of those surveyed said they would use a CC license that restricted usage of their content to non-commercial use, 58.0% said they were not clear on what the “non-commercial use” restriction meant, and 39.2% of those surveyed said they did understand what ”non-commercial use” meant.

The majority of respondents indicated that they understood “non-commercial use” to mean the utilization of the works without the aim of making any profit. More specifically, 61.3% of those surveyed said the use of creative works on web pages where advertisements were posted by the web site provider would not be considered as a “non commercial use” and 59.4% said the same would be true if the ads were provided by Google or some advertising provider.

Finally, a majority of respondents offered suggestions about the use of CC and CC China Mainland and indicated they hoped to strengthen the promotion of CC and make more people aware of the option of adopting CC licenses.