At the recent Founders Fireside Chat, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig referred to himself as “hopelessly naive.” It struck me that this sort of naivete—the kind that is about believing in the potential for good when sharing knowledge with other humans—is the glue that holds the entire Creative Commons movement together, across borders and belief systems.
Over the past 25 years, Creative Commons has helped transform openness from an aspiration into a global practice. Through open licensing, communities around the world have built new models for sharing. The Legacy Of series reflects on four interconnected movements—Open Access, Open Education, Open Science, and Open Culture—and the people who helped shape them.
Twenty-five years ago, a small group of people made a bet. They believed that if you gave creators a simple set of tools and licenses in language that a lawyer, a machine, and a human could all read, millions of people might choose to share their work with the world instead of locking it down.
“We said, oh gosh, if a million people use these licenses, that would be amazing,” Hal Abelson recalled, laughing at how small that ambition sounds now. Today the number “starts with a B.” Hal’s quote was one of many memorable moments during Creative Commons’ Founders Fireside Chat, a special benefit event for CC’s 25th anniversary.
In this post, we outline our plans to build upon and strengthen CC signals in order to support our goal of sustained access to human knowledge. We do not have all the answers yet. What we do have is a framework for how we will work toward them.
How can equitable access to heritage help solve global challenges? That is the question we addressed during our Exploratory Dialogue, a major event we hosted on 29 April, 2026, at UNESCO House in Paris, France, to celebrate the Open Heritage Statement and explore its synergies with UNESCO’s priorities in tackling the most urgent problems facing the world today.
It’s been a while since we last shared an update on CC signals and our work around AI and the commons. Over the past several months, we’ve been deep in research, in conversation, and in active collaboration with communities, policymakers, and practitioners. We took the time to understand where power is consolidating, where harms are emerging, and where meaningful intervention is actually possible. We are now at a point where we believe we can act in ways that will have real impact.
Today, we are sharing our newest report, Licensing Best Practices for Sharing Scientific Data. This report builds on our 2023 report Recommended Best Practices for the Better Sharing of Climate Data with the goal of extending the open data practices originally designed for climate data to other disciplines.
Gathering is a vital part of relationship building among and across movements, and we know we have supporters around the globe excited to get more involved in our work. Creative Commons has chapters around the world—communities of practice in a wide variety of topics from science and culture to open source—who are best suited to…
Today, we kick off celebrations for CC’s 25th anniversary. Please join us throughout the rest of 2026 as we commemorate a quarter century of sharing.
On Monday 2 March 2026, Creative Commons (CC) and Internet Archive Europe, together with the support of Open Nederland, hosted an event entitled “Ensuring equitable access to heritage in the digital environment: A leading role for the Netherlands on the global stage.” In this blog post, we offer a recap of the dynamic discussions and share why they matter for CC.