"It still needs to be accepted at a broad level beyond a community of people that basically agree with themselves," he said.

Ito took over as chairman from Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and one of the driving forces behind Creative Commons since it was formed in 2001. Lessig remains as on the board of the organization and as its chief executive officer. The chairmanship was transferred with the symbolic hand-over of a torch between the two in the Second Life online community.

Ito is no stranger to cyberspace. An early user of the Internet, he is a prolific blogger and sits on the boards of organizations including the Open Source Initiative and the Mozilla Foundation. His company, Neoteny Co. Ltd., is an investor in Six Apart Ltd., the company behind TypePad, Moveable Type, Live Journal and Vox, and he has personally invested in Technorati Inc. and other companies.

Among other goals he holds for 2007 as chairman of Creative Commons is keeping the organization running smoothly while spreading Creative Commons around the world, he said.

"As we proliferate internationally, there is a whole management issue of how do you organize 100 different groups in very different countries. As a multinational corporation it's difficult, as a semi-volunteer organization it's even more difficult," Ito said.

The organization offers licenses for a growing list of jurisdictions and is looking to expand not just the number of countries in which the license is localized but also knowledge of Creative Commons in those countries. Ito estimated that it's already reasonably well-known in the U.S. but in Japan those with knowledge are "in the low single-digit percentages" and even fewer know about Creative Commons in detail.

The organization is also collecting money. A current fund-raising drive seeks to raise US$300,000 by the end of the year. As Dec. 29 began in the U.S. it was only a few thousand dollars away from the goal.