The commons belongs to everyone and no one. It is composed of the gifts of nature, including the coalescence of human creations. The knowledge commons is the amalgamation of our creative instincts, a shimmering web of art and discovery. Every work we make is superimposed atop those that came before it, using tools that our…

The commons is a commitment The commons is a way of structuring relationships to our resources. Instead of a property mindset, where the only question is: does someone own it? The questions in a commons are: how do we ensure this resource can be shared by all of us? What is our mutual commitment?  Too…

The commons needs gardeners The commons is a bonsai, and we are all its artists-gardeners.  Sure, we could let it grow wild and unruly: it could be abandoned to the law of the jungle—left as a free-for-all—or fall victim to the tragedy of the commons, and shrivel due to overexploitation.  But because we, as a…

What does the Commons mean to you? Glad you asked! For Creative Commons’ 25th anniversary, we asked some of the people behind CC: What does the commons mean to you? Their answers became this four-part series of personal reflections. We’re kicking things off with four perspectives.

Five months after Creative Commons hosted an Exploratory Dialogue at UNESCO House that brought the international community together to consider the promise of equitable access to heritage, we returned to Paris with a smaller group of UNESCO Member State representatives and open heritage champions. This time, the conversation had a different purpose: moving from exploring why open heritage matters to underscoring the urgency of taking action to establish international standards.

What does it mean to be part of the CC community today? It’s a question we ask ourselves regularly at CC—and one we recently brought directly to our community through our annual Community Survey. This year, 62 community members from 23 countries shared their experiences, priorities, ideas, and hopes for the future of the Commons.

On September 21st, Creative Commons convened leading experts, practitioners, and builders for a day of conversation about the collaborative underpinnings of openness, investigating all the layers of the stack for a better, shared understanding of what openness can—and cannot—do to help communities and nations drive towards digital sovereignty.

Creative Commons has been exploring questions around artificial intelligence for a long time: how this profound technological shift might affect people’s motivations to share, whether the intentions behind sharing work before AI became mainstream still hold when we consider how those works are being used now, and how we sustain a thriving commons when the fundamental bargain of the open web has shifted.

Creative Commons (CC) is happy to announce the launch of a new publication entitled Guidance for Indigenous Collections and Indigenous Data: Recommendations from Creative Commons and Local Contexts. This publication is the result of a collaboration with Local Contexts, as both organizations share commitments to equitable knowledge sharing, proper attribution, and respect for diverse cultural and community protocols. It aims to support cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) in navigating the complex legal, ethical, and cultural issues regarding open access to Indigenous heritage and associated data. 

Since 2002, Creative Commons (CC) licenses have served as legally enforceable tools for digital sharing. Beyond their functionality, they also signal a commitment to open sharing in the public interest.  CC’s general guidance has been to acknowledge and support all valid uses for each of our current six licenses and two public domain tools.