By now you’ve probably heard that Facebook modified their Terms of Service and after facing a huge community backlash, returned them to their original state. Most of the issues at play were outside the scope of what we work on at CC, but the incident brings up something that we are very much interested in:…

Due to overwhelming demand, and thanks to the work of our international project leads and tech crew, the summaries of our licenses are now available in nine different languages. Note how this is different from the iCommons process, which involves translating and adapting the licenses themselves (the lawyer-readable part of things) to various languages and…

Have a look at our new, streamlined license selection process and Commons Deeds (an example). Thanks to all of you who have written to us these first nine months with suggestions for improvements, and please let us know if you see anything in these new pages that could be improved.

San Francisco, CA — Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the creative reuse of intellectual works, launched its first product today: its machine-readable copyright licenses, available free of charge from creativecommons.org. The licenses allow copyright holders to easily inform others that their works are free for copying and other uses under specific conditions. These…

At Creative Commons, we believe that addressing global challenges like the climate crisis requires opening the knowledge about those challenges. We are thrilled to announce the release of our “Recommendations for Better Sharing of Climate Data”— the culmination of a nine-month research initiative from our Open Climate Data project. These guidelines are a result of…

"Choices" by Derek Bruff, here cropped, licensed via CC BY-NC 2.0.

One of the motivations for founding Creative Commons (CC) was offering more choices for people who wish to share their works openly. Through engagement with a wide variety of stakeholders, we heard frustrations with the “all or nothing” choices they seemed to face with copyright. Instead they wanted to let the public share and reuse…

“Volga River. Caspian Sea (7-03-2023)” by Miguel Masegosa is licensed via CC BY 2.0 and contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2023 processed by Sentinel Hub.

At CC we believe that to solve big problems, the knowledge and culture about those problems needs to be open and freely accessible. In line with our Open Climate Campaign, which focuses on opening up climate research, we recently launched the Open Climate Data project, to facilitate better sharing of climate data on a global…

In 2022, five working groups of the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform collaborated on a diverse range of topics related to better sharing of cultural heritage. In this blog post, we highlight their incredible contribution to the open culture community. Digital Community Heritage Led by Bettina Fabos and Mariana Ziku, the Digital Community Heritage Working…

Macrofotografia Drops & Flowers by Mario Jr. Nicorelli, slightly cropped, is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Curious about Creative Commons licenses? Join Creative Commons staff for an overview of the six CC licenses and two public domain tools. We will describe the CC license and tool elements, their legal, machine-readable, and human-readable layers, as well as show practical use cases for each of the licenses and tools. Participants will engage in…

Today the United States White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued dramatic guidance to all US federal agencies: update all policies to require that all federally funded research and data is available for the public to freely access and re-use “in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.” Creative Commons…