As part of CC’s renewed commitment to investing in the core open infrastructure it stewards, we are excited to announce several updates to our legal team. 

Sarah Hinchliff Pearson is returning to Creative Commons as General Counsel. She will manage in-house legal work and play a leading role in shaping CC’s stewardship program and its work in emerging technologies. Sarah spent the last couple of years at DuckDuckGo, where she spearheaded legal risk management for the launch of the company’s first paid service. She brings a fresh perspective on distributed leadership and working in the open after her experience with DuckDuckGo’s unique company culture. CC has missed Sarah, and we are pleased she is back to once again serve as the organization’s General Counsel. 

Kat Walsh will be transitioning from General Counsel to Copyright and Licensing Counsel, where she will focus squarely on stewardship of the CC licenses and public domain tools. We are delighted that Kat can bring her full expertise to matters of copyright and licensing, especially as questions arise daily about how the licenses interact with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. We are grateful to Kat for all of her work while serving as General Counsel these past couple of years. She is a mainstay in the open community, and on our team.

All of us are excited to be working together again. Kat and Sarah first worked closely together in the 4.0 licensing version process more than a decade ago! We could not be happier that we’ve been able to bring these two long-time experts of open licensing back together as CC faces hard questions around artificial intelligence. Between the legal experts on our team, our board, and in our global community, we are ready to move the dialogue forward. 

If you are trying to reach the legal team and do not know where to direct your message, use the legal@creativecommons.org email address.