The licences should be published in the next few days and will be followed by a version for Scotland in a few weeks.
Founded in 2001, Creative Commons is a non-profit US corporation based on the notion that some people may not want to exercise all of the intellectual property rights the law affords them.
Its aim is to encourage creativity and innovation by paving a middle ground between "All rights reserved" and anarchy. It describes this as "Some rights reserved".
Inspired partly by the GNU General Public License developed by the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons has drafted licences that give the public some rights to use and manipulate the work of authors and artists, while allowing the authors to retain some rights, such as those permitting commercial exploitation.
While the original model is US-based, international licences are being developed that comply with the laws of the specific countries involved. International licences are already in operation in 14 countries worldwide, including Japan, Finland, Germany, Brazil and the Netherlands, while the process for developing the licence is underway in 10 more countries, including the UK.
The UK process is almost complete, and on Wednesday the group held a launch party for the England and Wales versions of the licence. They should be available on the web site shortly.