Creative Commons. "DeviantArt." CC Wiki.

          This case study is about the "world's largest, most vibrant, and relevant online community focused specifically on ART" (DeviantArt, or simply DA), which was founded in 2000 by Scott Jarkoff, Angelo Sotira, and Matthew Stephens. The site hosts around 55 million works by 4.5 million users, spanning all categories of art from skins to photomanipulations, animations, stocks, paintings, literature, and more. There are free memberships as well as subscription based memberships. Those with subscriptions enjoy more benefits, such as earning fifty percent of any revenue from prints versus the ten percent non-subscriptions members would earn. DA offers an advertising service (adCast), which gives discounted rates to "non-profit and community-related products".

          DA began using CC licenses in November, 2006. The default on the site is still regular copyright, but users have the option of placing their work under a CC license. DA administrators operate under the same system of take-down notices that many places do when works infringe on copyright. If someone complains that their work has been used against their wishes, the administration deletes it. The owner of the deleted work still has the opportunity to argue that it was not copyright infringement though. CC is seen as preferable to watermarking images and though DA doesn't believe it will solve all the problems, it is excited about its ability to help alleviate them.

       DeviantArt is a truly wonderful example of how CC, copyright, and online community norms come together. Many users license works under CC, mainly for the purpose of becoming part of a photomanipulation later on. The beauty of this is photomanipulation for many people would be impossible without the stock provided by other artists. This is just one of the things that DA and CC facilitates. However, as an online community, DA also has a standard of norms. The case study briefly mentions the messaging network that helps connect DA users to one another, just one of the services on the site that allows for this community to grow. More importantly, the community knows that many artists do not use CC licenses, preferring to list their own rules in journals or comments on their images when CC does not offer enough. Most artists request a link to the finished work. In this way, the artist can see how their work is being used and the creator of the new work is also able to share their work with others. DA is really a flourishing example of how online communities add to the commons, be it through CC or their own standard practices.