Over the past year,  we’ve been engaged in a series of conversations with a small group of researchers specializing in IP, AI policy, and data governance about what CC  licensing means—and does—in African contexts today. These discussions began informally and continued at the AI Summit in Rwanda and later through presentations and discussions on the NOODL license, Mozilla Data Collective, the ESETHU License & Framework, and NaijaVoices.

What started as an organic exchange in various spaces has revealed something larger: a strong appetite to move these conversations into the open. At stake are not only questions about CC licenses but deeper issues of data sovereignty, equity, governance, and power in global knowledge systems. This blog post summarizes the themes emerging from those discussions and asks a broader question: how must “open” evolve to remain just, relevant, and community-centered?

A Shift 

CC licenses were designed to reduce friction in sharing knowledge. For many years, CC’s focus has been on legality, access, and reuse. By all accounts, we’ve been successful in meeting these goals and objectives. But in today’s digital and AI-driven landscape—particularly in the Global South—that framing is no longer sufficient.

Across the discussions, participants raised concerns that CC licenses, especially CC BY and CC0, are sometimes (inadvertently) enabling extractive practices. African language datasets, cultural knowledge, and community-generated data are increasingly being reused in ways that benefit global institutions and corporations, while the originating communities see little agency, recognition, or return. This governance and equity issue rightly challenges some long-held assumptions about openness. When data producers are required to share their data with a specific permissive license, it introduces a potential conflict between the requirement to share and whether that specific data should be shared at all.    

Key Challenges Identified

Colleagues highlighted the following challenges and concerns that are arising in their context and within their communities:

1. A perception gap around extractive use

CC licenses are often viewed as neutral tools, but in practice they can amplify existing power imbalances (as we know, infrastructure is not neutral!). For example, marginalized language and data communities may lack the leverage to negotiate how open resources are reused. Yes, open data can lead to communities having better access to information about where they live like air and water quality, but that same data can be used by large corporate entities to make decisions on where, for example, to build a new factory. 

2. Equity blind spots in traditional openness

In the context of the CC licenses, openness has historically been framed as a legal condition answering the question: can something be reused, modified, or shared? But we know that openness is much more than a set of legal tools; it is a set of values, a way of belonging, a wish for a better future. As large AI models continue to train on the billions of works and datasets made available via the CC licenses in the commons without giving back and while hoarding power, communities are responding by asking for openness that also accounts for agency, consent, reciprocity, and governance.

Data Governance and the Limits of One-Size-Fits-All Licensing

One of the most challenging threads in these discussions centers on data governance, particularly for African languages and community-curated datasets.

Several tensions stand out:

• Funders often mandate CC BY or CC0 for publicly funded research, leaving little room for community-specific governance models or the potential for a powerful interplay between CC licenses and community-created fit-for-purpose open licenses like NOODL. 
• CC licenses, by design, cannot prevent extractive reuse once content is made open.
• Local languages, cultural data, and community knowledge are not interchangeable with generic datasets—but licensing frameworks often treat them as such.

Openness is not binary, and context matters. Standardization matters and can amplify efforts to make knowledge accessible but only works when paired with governance. CC has worked with major funders of research to harmonize CC BY or CC0 across funders, but this work is built around the assumption that the license terms are adequate for all data and data distribution contexts. When there is no governance, what is the cost of harmonization? This community of researchers are asking whether CC can use its influence not only to promote CC licenses and legal tools but also to validate and support alternative, community-driven approaches where CC licenses fall short.

Open resources do not exist outside systems of power. Historically, openness has favored those with infrastructure, capital, and technical capacity—often institutions in the Global North. Simply making something open does not make it equitable, accessible, or just.

If the idealized version of openness has not delivered on its promise, is it time for CC to redefine it? What role can CC play in holding space, convening dissent, and legitimizing plural approaches to openness?

Where Do We Go From Here?

These conversations are not about arriving at neat conclusions. In fact, the goal is the opposite: to resist premature certainty and instead listen, reflect, and adapt.

For us as a community, this may mean:

• Being clearer about where CC licenses work and, just as importantly, where they don’t
• Acknowledging the limits of license-centric thinking
• Using the CC platform to amplify community-led definitions of openness
• Accepting that “the new open” may be more complex, more contextual, and intentionally less frictionless

The future of open knowledge depends on trust, dialogue, and shared governance. 

A special thank you to Vukosi Marivate, University of Pretoria; Chijioke Okorie, Data Science Law Lab, University of Pretoria; and Melissa Omino, CIPIT, Strathmore University; as well as members of the CC board of directors for convening these dialogues and sharing their perspectives with us at Creative Commons.

We want to know: Does this resonate with you? What are you seeing within your own context and community? We plan on continuing this dialogue throughout 2026 as we celebrate our 25th anniversary. What better time to reflect on our past contributions and challenge our thinking about the future. 

Over the past year, Creative Commons communities around the world have continued to show what’s possible when people come together around shared values of openness, collaboration, and care. From regional gatherings and thematic conversations to hands-on creative work, CC’s communities have remained active as the digital landscape grows more complex.

In 2025 we were focused on gathering feedback on our ongoing preference signals explorations, creating and gathering feedback on new governance frameworks for future implementation, streamlining community communication channels, and transitioning to an open source chat platform for community collaboration.

As we look ahead, we want to share how we’re thinking about deepening community engagement, strengthening connections across the network, and creating more meaningful ways for everyone to contribute to CC’s work in partnership with one another.

A Clearer Path Into the Commons

One theme we’ve heard consistently is that people want more clarity about how to get involved with CC and more connection once they do. In response, we’re beginning work on a set of new engagement opportunities that enable community members with varying degrees of expertise and diverse skillsets to participate in our work.  We will work to support community members in getting involved, learning more, and leveling up their experience and expertise along the way, from participating in conversations to leading community initiatives.

We are excited that our new unified Community Intake Form will allow for more collaboration across interest areas and lower the barrier to entry for participating in CC’s work. Alongside this, we’ll be working to strengthen our onboarding process with more information about CC’s work as well as more opportunities to plug in and connect with longstanding efforts and leaders in the Open Movement.

Strengthening the Network

CC’s community doesn’t live in one place, and we want our engagement approach to reflect that. Over the coming months, we’ll be:

• Creating best practices for chapters, a model for supporting community-driven working groups, and a workflow for volunteer translations
• Researching and reaching out to adjacent movements and open communities to create more intentional bridges across the broader open ecosystem
• Facilitating peer sharing and documenting best practices and effective strategies across our communities through regular sharing and more frequent communication
• Supporting regional and topical groupings to share knowledge directly with one another, including experimenting with topic-based show-and-tells in place of more formal meetings

The goal is simple: reduce friction, encourage peer learning, and help communities align and collaborate on their own terms.

Supporting Communities to Tell Their Stories

As Creative Commons approaches its 25th anniversary, storytelling—especially community-led storytelling—will be central. 

One part of these efforts is publishing a 25th anniversary zine which will commemorate our community’s contributions, achievements and memories over the past quarter of a century. We plan to launch the zine full of community-created work at Wikimania as part of our anniversary activities. The call for zine submissions is open until March 31, 2026. Submit your work here!

For our anniversary, we are also developing training and templates to help communities document and share their own stories through writing, visuals, or other creative formats. Our aim is not to centralize narratives but to create tools and support that make it easier for communities to speak in their own voices.

Listening, Learning, and Building Capacity

Looking ahead, we’ll continue to prioritize listening as a core part of our work. This includes conducting an annual community survey, which helps us understand what’s working, what’s missing, and where we should focus our energy.

We’re also beginning work on guidance for chapter activities, informed by what chapters are already doing well. By supporting regional and topical groups to share practices and lessons learned, we hope to strengthen the network as a whole, not by prescribing solutions but by amplifying what’s already effective.

An Ongoing Invitation

This work is iterative by design. Not everything is fully formed, and that’s intentional. Community engagement at Creative Commons isn’t about rolling out a finished product; it’s about building relationships, creating space for experimentation, and learning together.

We’re grateful to everyone who continues to show up, share knowledge, ask hard questions, and imagine what the commons can be next. More updates and more invitations to participate are coming soon.

Stay connected, and thank you for being part of this work. We’ll also be launching a new series of community office hours.

• March 20, 12 pm EST: Register here.
• June 8, 5pm EST: Register here.

Sign up and stay tuned for more details if you’d like to chat! 

It is time to update our mental models about open knowledge

I like to say I am a “writer who lawyers”. I begin here because I want to name my biases up front. I am a lawyer, but I come to this work first and foremost as a writer thinking about the conditions that will allow us to continue to share knowledge publicly. And in spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that I am a lawyer, I have a healthy skepticism about the power of legal terms and conditions. The law will play a role, but the challenge of keeping the internet human will ultimately be navigated by the stories we imagine and tell. 

We need new stories. 

I spent the first 15 years of my legal career working in intellectual property. For most of that time, I was part of the open movement, fighting overly restrictive intellectual property laws to promote access to knowledge. But over time, I began to feel like the message of open licensing did not resonate with me in the same way, especially in my identity as a writer. Eventually I left the open movement to go into the field of privacy. 

Immersing myself in digital privacy led me to realize why the story of open felt incomplete. We had been undervaluing the role of boundaries around reuse. The tension between the instinct to share and the need for boundaries around reuse is the point. And right now, that tension is completely out of balance. Instead, what exists online is a free-for-all.

If you are familiar with the concept of a commons, you know it requires shared rules that govern reuse of resources. Those shared rules represent a mutual commitment by producers and reusers, and they ensure that the cycle leads to collective benefit and begins again. A free-for-all, on the other hand, has no shared rules. As a result, we are losing the instinct to share. 

What happened to the commons? 

It would be easy to blame AI for this situation, but it is not so straightforward. AI is simply speeding up and exacerbating longstanding challenges with open knowledge. As privacy scholar Daniel Solove has written, “AI is continuous with the data collection and use that has been going on throughout the digital age.” 

In preparation for this talk, I went back and reread the brilliant CC Summit keynote “Open As In Dangerous” by Chris Bourg from 2018 and the seminal Paradox of Open report by the Open Future Foundation. For many years, these and countless other voices have been warning us about the vulnerabilities that open knowledge creates. Whether it is the use of CC-licensed photos for facial surveillance technology or the creation of Grokipedia, it is clear that open content is particularly vulnerable to abuse. 

But of course, it is not just open content that is vulnerable. All content online today has essentially been treated as fair game. The free-for-all extends to everything online. 

This has led to a vast renegotiation of what it means to share publicly, still currently underway. We see this in the massive wave of litigation against AI services, the rise of paywalls and commercial licensing deals, the introduction of new technologies to increase control over content in ways that scale back the open web, and the extreme backlash against AI by creators and the general public.

All of this constitutes a threat to open access to knowledge. It is unlikely that the incentives to share can outweigh all of the growing countervailing forces at play: economic, moral, safety, more. We cannot respond by accepting these risks and harms as inherent and inevitable costs of public sharing knowledge.  

Changing our mental models

To meet the moment, we need to rethink our most fundamental assumptions about open knowledge. 

The old taxonomies no longer apply. 

For a very long time, we have used categories to help us determine the appropriate rules for sharing knowledge. Open content could be licensed one way, while open data had different parameters. This distinction no longer applies when everything online is used as data by machines. Even the difference between copyrighted material and public domain is not very useful, since even copyrighted works are largely used by machines for the public domain material within them (e.g., facts and ideas). 

Copyright is not the main event.

The original “enemy” of the open movement was copyright, and things were simpler back then. Even the most restrictive open license was more permissive than the default under copyright law, so any boundaries we set around the commons were still fighting the copyright war. Overly restrictive copyright laws still cause problems today, but they are no longer the biggest threat against the commons. In fact, it is copyright’s weakness in the context of machine reuse that is the real challenge. The inapplicability of copyright in protecting against unwanted machine reuse guts the CC licenses of the same ability, creating the free-for-all even on CC-licensed content. And importantly, because the aim was to avoid having CC licenses impose restrictions on activity that was otherwise allowed under copyright, this was by design. 

We have to stop confusing property with morality.

This is where I depart from my younger self and from many of my peers in the open movement. I think we have let important principles like the notion that facts and ideas should not be privately owned, or the fact that some permissionless reuse plays a critical role in free expression, convince us that the scope of copyright is an ethical line. The logic goes: if no one can own it, then no rules should apply. This leads to an impoverished sense of morality, where the only justification for constraint is property rights. As Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “In that property mindset, how we consume doesn’t really matter because it’s just stuff and the stuff all belongs to us. There is no moral constraint on consumption.” 

The ethics of sharing—which is what open is about—needs to be broader than what we can own. 

Boundaries benefit us all.

Boundaries on reuse are what create the reciprocity that fuels a commons. Without them, there is no assurance that sharing leads to collective benefit, and people lose their instinct to share. But boundaries can also have social value in their own right. Even when sharing in public, people rightfully expect some boundaries around how their works are used, regardless of what copyright law says. This is foundational in the field of privacy, but somehow we lose sight of it when we are sitting in the realm of content sharing. Daniel Solove writes: “People expect some degree of privacy in public, and such expectation is reasonable as well as important for freedom, democracy, and individual wellbeing.” Similarly, we establish boundaries around reuse of knowledge because those protections serve us all. 

Open should not be a purity test. 

The open movement has had incredible success creating global standards, and this has helped make it so successful. But the emphasis on standardization has led us to hyper-focus on definitions, and this focus is distracting us from the bigger picture. What matters is not open versus closed, or even abundance versus scarcity. We need to focus on values, not prescriptions. Open licensing has always been conditional, and it has always been a spectrum. This means we have to accept that there will be gray areas. What we lose in certainty, we will gain in relevance and moral clarity. As Rebecca Solnit says, “Categories are where thoughts go to die.” 

Where do we go from here? 

All of this leads back to where we began. We have to reconstruct the mutual commitment that keeps the commons cyclical.

Rebuilding the mutual commitment that comes with sharing knowledge requires us to balance opposing values. On the one hand, we must protect important freedoms of the reusing public. On the other, we must establish boundaries around responsible reuse. The goal is to be as open as possible and as restrictive as necessary. And before we start panicking about slippery slopes, we should remember there is an important limiting principle we can leverage:  does the boundary shift power in ways that further concentrate it or redistribute it? We can also ask whether there are ways to mitigate a boundary’s effect on access. 

We already have a good sense of the dimensions of boundaries around responsible reuse. They all have roots in the existing CC license suite.

Attribution: While the AI landscape complicates methods and norms for attribution, the principle is more important than ever for informational integrity, authors rights, and transparency. 

Reciprocity: Molly Van Houweling calls this “extractability,” the idea that those extracting facts and ideas from others’ works have a moral responsibility to ensure that knowledge remains extractable by others. This is essentially about crafting a ShareAlike obligation for the age of AI. 

Financial sustainability: This has been a longtime challenge in the open movement, and it is more urgent than ever. It is not about preserving business models, it is about financially sustaining the production of knowledge and culture as public goods. 

Prohibitions on harmful use cases: This dimension may feel less familiar in open licensing, but the sentiment is one we hear regularly. There are simply some use cases or even actors that feel out of bounds for people sharing knowledge because of the harm they cause. 

How do we catalyze a mutual commitment around prosocial boundaries in the current free-for-all environment? Open Future Foundation’s Paul Keller has written: “For any response to succeed in preserving a diverse and sustainable information ecosystem, collective action is required—both bottom-up, through coordinated action by information producers, and top-down, through political will to enable redistribution via fiscal interventions.” There is no single solution, and we need to tackle it from all directions. 

For the bottom-up efforts, we can leverage the tools we have. Norms and social pressure have a role to play, though it is hard to put full faith in voluntary action right now. We can also explore methods for legal control, including both contract and copyright law. As Nilay Patel has said, “Copyright is the only functioning regulation on the internet,” which makes it impossible to avoid considering it as one lever to employ.¹ Finally, there is the strategy of controlling access. This is the most uncomfortable tactic because of the collateral damage it risks, and it requires extreme care. But if AI companies will not pay attention voluntarily, technical controls around access look increasingly necessary. 

There are many in the open movement already experimenting with these efforts, including the Mozilla Data Collective, the differentiated access model proposed by Europeana and the Open Future Foundation, the NOODL license, and many more. Creative Commons is also actively thinking about how to build a framework that re-instills mutual commitment into the ecosystem. Many of you have been following along as we experiment with an AI preference signals framework we’ve been calling CC signals. While the path we will take is evolving, the goal is the same. We need to come together to define and sustain the boundaries that serve us all. 

I will end with the words of Ruha Benjamin: “We need to give the voice of the cynical, skeptical grouch that patrols the borders of our imagination a rest.” 

We can imagine a better way. 

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¹ While copyright law is ill-equipped to function as a method of control over machine reuse (and rightly so, considering the importance of not treating facts and ideas as private property), copyright law still has a role to play because of the uncertainty around its application on a global scale. Granting copyright permission in exchange for agreement to certain conditions could still be a valuable offer to some reusers. 

 

In November 2025, we had the privilege of supporting and participating in Semana de la Cultura Libre (Open Culture Week) in Montevideo, Uruguay: a week-long celebration of open culture organized by CC Uruguay. Through panels, workshops, concerts, and conversations, the week offered a powerful reminder that free culture is not an abstract idea but a living practice shaped by local communities, histories, and needs.

• Read CC Uruguay’s recap on our We Like To Share community blog.

What stood out most was not only the richness of the programming but how clearly this event illustrated both the strengths and the challenges of open culture work today, especially in a rapidly enclosing digital environment.

Free Culture Is Alive—Even When the Licenses Aren’t

One of the most striking takeaways from conversations with Ileana Silva and Jorge Gemetto, who lead the CC Uruguay chapter, was how deeply DIY culture thrives in Uruguay. Artists and organizers share freely, collaborate generously, and remix constantly, often without explicitly using CC licenses.

This speaks to something important: openness as a cultural instinct often precedes openness as a legal or technical practice. At the same time, the chapter shared a recurring challenge they face in outreach: many people conflate content that is merely available online with content that is truly free and open. For example, a common response to projects like Musicalibre.uy, which curates openly licensed music, is: “Why would I need openly licensed music? I already use Spotify.” 

This points to a growing need to remind people why the commons matters, even before getting into how to use CC licenses.  As platforms become increasingly proprietary and extractive, user convenience can obscure a loss of agency, access, and collective ownership underneath. These topics, such as the political economy of the internet, feel especially important to continue to surface in the face of AI. 

Opening the Week: Free Culture in a Time of Extraction

The opening panel, “What do we talk about when we talk about free culture? Practices and challenges,” set the tone for the week. Speakers addressed themes including:

• Cultural and data extractivism, particularly from the Global South to the Global North
• The ways AI complicates and challenges long-standing commitments to openness
• The need to defend cultural participation as a collective right

We were thrilled to use this space to introduce attendees to the Open Heritage Statement and the work of the Open Heritage Coalition (formerly TAROCH), and look forward to more engagement from Uruguay! 

📺 Watch the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2prAjdbiHLQ

Tools, Practices, and New Generations of Makers

It was great to see workshops throughout the week showing the many ways people use open source tools for creative practices and for aiding research as well as demonstrating how art has always been a practice of inspiration and remixing. 

One notable observation: some of the most active participants in these sessions were younger creators who used open source tools in their creative process that were not CC licenses. This raised compelling questions about how CC might further support open resources for design, publishing, and artistic production to encourage the use of digital technology in the creative process outside the scope of what AI has to offer. 

Technology, Power, and Accountability

Content warning: discussions included references to genocide and mass surveillance.

One of the most powerful moments of the week came during the panel on Apartheid-Free Technology. 

Panelists shared their experiences and perspectives on technologies and AI tools being used in systems of surveillance, repression, and genocide. These conversations underscored the importance of allowing CC chapters the autonomy to convene discussions that reflect their political viewpoints as they intersect with today’s technology and all of its uses.

Music, Radio, and the Commons in Practice

Live music programming brought joy and immediacy to the week. Local bands who release their music under Creative Commons licenses performed for free, demonstrating that openness is not a theoretical commitment but a practical, sustaining choice.

The relaunch of Radio Común, a CC-licensed online radio station, offers an enduring home for this work—extending the spirit of Semana de la Cultura Libre well beyond the week itself.

📺 Watch a clip from the performance: https://youtube.com/shorts/JyVbDasxiiY?feature=share

Small Investments, Big Impact

We supported Semana de la Cultura Libre with a small grant—an approach we are piloting to engage more with regional events in the community.  With the help of these funds, the chapter was able to:

• Compensate local spaces and collaborators
• Pay a graphic designer
• Provide speaker stipends
• Support local musicians releasing work under CC licenses

We were thrilled to be invited to attend the event as a participant rather than a host. This allowed the chapter to center the issues that matter most to their community, while highlighting their work to CC HQ.

Looking Ahead

In the coming months:

• We will soon be sharing a framework for selecting a couple more regional events to support with a small stipend as a part of our 25th anniversary celebrations.
• The Uruguay chapter has expressed interest in making Open Culture Week a global phenomenon next year. If you are interested in participating please be in touch with them at contacto@creativecommons.uy. 

We’re grateful to CC Uruguay for their leadership, care, and vision, and we look forward to building what comes next together.

This month, CC will be represented at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, an international gathering shaping the future of AI policy and practice. The 2026 Summit follows the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, where CC underscored a simple but essential truth: without civil society, there can be no public interest.

Last year, our interventions focused on why civil society participation matters, the importance of openness in AI, and the need for local solutions grounded in local contexts. This year, we aim to build on those foundations with a clearer, stronger position on data governance and data sovereignty as prerequisites for a thriving commons. Specifically, we want to talk about building shared governance infrastructure that centers on a democratic and participatory approach, with the ultimate goal of rebalancing power in the ecosystem. 

The Commons in the Age of AI

The commons is not an abstract theory or merely a set of values. It is tangible and woven into everyday life. When you read an article not locked behind a paywall, consult Wikipedia, use openly licensed images or music, explore public domain artworks online, or rely on open mapping tools, you are benefiting from the commons.

Today, the commons increasingly takes the form of datasets that train and shape AI systems. These datasets embed human knowledge, creativity, language, and culture. Where this data comes from, who created and stewarded it, and the contexts that give it meaning all matter. These questions are at the heart of data governance and data sovereignty.

For communities in the Global South, these issues are especially urgent. Too often, local knowledge, languages, and cultural expression are extracted, abstracted, and redeployed without meaningful agency, recognition, or benefit flowing back to the people who created them. Addressing AI’s impacts without confronting historical and ongoing asymmetries in power, infrastructure, and representation risks reproducing old patterns of extraction in new technical forms. It is with this in mind that we shape our contribution to AI governance. 

CC’s Core Interventions at the AI Impact Summit

As we build our schedule for the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, CC is focused on a set of concrete interventions—areas where our experience, infrastructure, and global community position us to make a distinctive contribution to AI governance in the public interest.

Filling Gaps in Shared Governance Infrastructure

Asserting preferences to communicate how data holders wish their data to be used in AI is at its core a data governance mechanism. Data governance relies on a shared set of rules (formally or informally enforced), as well as a shared vocabulary, both of which require a collective and cohesive approach to be successfully implemented at scale. With decades of experience developing globally recognized, machine-readable licenses, CC is uniquely positioned to help translate expressions of intent into collective, interoperable governance tools that can function at scale.

Participatory and Democratic Approaches to Data Governance

The process of practicing data governance is often as important as the tools used to express it. CC’s licensing frameworks did not emerge from closed rooms; they were shaped through open, global, and deliberative processes involving creators, institutions, and policymakers.

At the Summit, CC will advance the idea that participatory governance is not a luxury but a requirement for legitimacy—especially in AI systems that affect billions of people. We will explore how CC can continue to evolve its own processes to be more democratic and inclusive as we develop frameworks or legal tools that balance the needs of those sharing and those reusing. 

Enabling Counter-Power for Creators and Communities

Many current data practices in AI are extractive by design: opaque scraping, unilateral terms of service, and consent frameworks that offer little meaningful choice. CC’s intervention is not to block AI, nor to litigate its development, but to equip creators and data-holding communities with legible, scalable forms of agency.

By supporting collective norms, shared infrastructure, and visible expressions of creator intent, CC can help rebalance power between AI developers and the communities whose work and knowledge underpin these systems. This form of counter-power is especially vital for creators, cultural institutions, and knowledge communities in the Global South, where legal and economic leverage is often limited but cultural contribution is immense.

Choice, Agency, and Human Flourishing

And how do we tackle these issues while keeping the internet human? How do we preserve trust in information? How do we ensure that guardrails for machines do not create undue barriers in access to knowledge or stifle innovation and scientific discovery? In other words, how do we build an AI ecosystem that operates in the public interest, that is standardized when possible and contextual when required? 

At its most fundamental level, data governance is about making decisions, about choice. This is where CC has always lived: not in blunt binaries of open versus closed but in enabling choices that empower human creators and the communities they belong to, alongside the machines they choose to use.

We share the view that the promotion of human flourishing should be the overarching principle guiding data governance. We also believe that a flourishing commons is a prerequisite for human flourishing. The knowledge commons made available through the internet is deeply interconnected with shared resources in the physical world, and both require care, stewardship, and collective responsibility.

If you share our belief that AI governance must center the public interest, respect data sovereignty, and strengthen rather than diminish the global commons, we invite you to connect with us at the AI Impact Summit. Let’s work together to build the future of sharing—open, equitable, and grounded in human flourishing.

If you’ll be in Delhi, you can connect with the CC team, represented by Rebecca Ross and Anna Tumadóttir, at the following places:

• • CivicSabha 2.0 
  • PAIRS India 
  • OpenMined Community Meetup 
  • Strengthening Data and AI Collaboratives for Economic Growth and Social Good as part of the main Impact Summit Sessions
  • DPGA Events
  • Making AI for everyone: The case for personal, local, multilingual AI hosted by Current AI
  • Several Project Liberty Institute events 
  • And many more!

In 2026, Creative Commons will continue to ensure that technological change strengthens, not erodes, the commons and improves the acts of sharing and access that are part of our everyday lives. We do this by applying first principles, practical strategies, and lessons learned from decades of advancing the commons. Sharing of research, educational materials, heritage, and creative works are acts of generosity—these are the gifts people give to the commons. Access to these same shared resources enables collaboration, innovation, and understanding. Together, this is how we improve access to knowledge and build a more equitable future.  

But as we’ve been discussing over the last year, the conditions under which sharing happens have changed. 

Advances in AI and shifts in the technological environment have unsettled long-standing motivations to share openly. Some creators who once shared willingly now question whether openness leads to exploitation. Those who are contractually required to share may feel their contributions are being extracted without recognition or reciprocity. Communities working to preserve culture and ensure representation are often forced into an impossible choice: allow extraction or accept exclusion. At the same time, all of us who depend on access to trustworthy, verified information may find it harder than ever to know what to trust.

If no one shares, the commons has no hope of thriving. The public good that we all benefit from atrophies and eventually disappears. Yet it is equally clear that we cannot simply maintain the status quo. We must negotiate a new balance, one where access to knowledge is protected, communities retain agency, and conditional access may be a necessary countermeasure to unchecked commodification.

These tensions are real, and they demand leadership. 

Our Focus in 2026

We recently reflected on our work in 2025—the achievements and the road ahead. That reflection reaffirmed our purpose and sharpened our priorities in this age of AI. In 2026, we’ll continue to work in service of our three strategic goals:

• Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing: In the long term future, we will know we’ve been successful when a strong and resilient open infrastructure empowers sharing and access in the public interest.
• Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons: In the long term future, we will know we’ve been successful when a thriving creative commons exists to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
• Center community: In the long term future, we will know we’ve been successful when communities leverage CC’s open infrastructure to share knowledge in the public interest.

Strengthening the Open Infrastructure

The tools we steward, like the CC licenses and public domain tools, and new frameworks we’re developing, like CC signals, do not exist in isolation. They operate within complex legal, technical, and data governance environments. As those environments evolve, so must we. 

In 2026, we will engage deeply in defining attribution in the context of AI. Attribution is not a nice-to-have; it is foundational to the commons and the sustainability of our information ecosystem. Creators deserve credit, and users deserve to know where their knowledge is coming from. We will also explore strategies for mandating credit and, where appropriate, compensation, working carefully to minimize any unintended consequences. This means thoroughly understanding the legislative and regulatory environments that impact the use of tools, and meaningfully engaging with stakeholders on what acceptable tradeoffs might be.

As we address these challenges head-on, we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the public good. Doing nothing isn’t an option for Creative Commons.

Bringing some agency and nuance back to sharing is what led to the development of CC signals. Like any intervention in a rapidly evolving ecosystem, CC signals and any other AI intervention must be approached with an R&D mindset. We have to test, evaluate, and refine to see what works. We will bring this same mindset to explore if new licenses are warranted, or if we need to consider versioning existing licenses. 

This work has to be thoughtful and intentional, even when the world demands speed. The commons moves at human pace and human work is messy. This is a feature, not a flaw, and allows us to counter the need for speed with values-driven design decisions.

Defending a Thriving Creative Commons

For over two decades, CC has been at the forefront of the global movement for access to knowledge. Through policy, advocacy, institutional partnerships, and license adoption, we have helped the commons grow.

This work continues today with even higher stakes. People all over the world participate within the commons daily. It has become so commonplace that we often don’t notice it as something that needs protecting. But it is one of our most valuable human assets—and while it belongs to all of us—it needs guardians, stewards, patrons. Without a healthy commons, knowledge becomes privatized and creativity stalls. In this era of AI, users are one or several steps removed from the original source. We are entering a period of humanity where content is reduced to its lowest common denominator and divorced from context and community. This is where our sector-specific interventions make the greatest impact. By focusing on increasing access to education, science, and culture, we contribute to a thriving creative commons for all of us.    

In open science, we will continue to support the rapid, open dissemination of scientific outputs. As research moves beyond traditional publications toward preprints, modular outputs, and digital-first formats, open access infrastructure must evolve alongside it. We will accelerate adoption of CC BY for preprints and deepen our work on modular science with the Continuous Science Foundation, exploring how licensing can function as foundational infrastructure that incentivizes reuse and collaboration.

In open culture, we will be building on the launch of the Open Heritage Statement, with plans to host an event in Paris at UNESCO headquarters to encourage support from UNESCO member states to carry forward this work through formal channels.

For almost five years, our work in open culture has been made possible by support from Arcadia, but this funding concludes later this year. We’re actively seeking grants to continue building on the gains we’ve made and realizing the goal of open heritage becoming the norm, and a shared asset we can all benefit from.

We’ll continue deep engagements in sectors where we’ve historically had great impact with adoption of the CC licenses and driving forth the ideals of openness. Building on expertise and relationships, we’ll help think about what the best tools and frameworks are for sharing and access today and how needs might be changing alongside technology. We’re here to help those who create or steward content make the best possible choices, and we acknowledge that needs will differ by sector and region. Our prototyping work for CC signals will be explored within the education, science, and culture sectors as well.

Centering Community

We’re excited to tackle all of the big, open questions (pun intended!) alongside our community. This year we celebrate our 25th anniversary. We’ll be hosting public conversations with experts, advocates, and dissenters (yes!) and developing resources on the basis of these learnings that are available to anyone who wants to further educate themselves across the full spectrum of our work. We’ll be throwing in some celebrations along the way, too.

Our motto for the year: “If nothing else, credit.”

Historically, sharing and access have reinforced one another. The tools we developed to enable sharing expanded access, and vice versa. In the age of AI, that relationship is under strain—but the core principle remains unchanged.

At Creative Commons, it comes back to choice and credit.

If you choose to share knowledge, you should always be attributed. If you access knowledge, you are entitled to know where your information is coming from. 

As Creative Commons enters its 25th year, I’m hopeful we can work together, in community, to advocate for CC’s core values in a changing world. Come find us on Zulip or sign up for our newsletter to hear all about what we’re up to as we celebrate our 25th anniversary.

This year marked the first year of a new strategic cycle for Creative Commons, and it began amid profound change.

The ground beneath the open internet continues to shift. Powerful technologies, driven largely by multibillion-dollar companies, are reshaping how knowledge and creativity are shared online, concentrating power in the hands of a few and testing long-standing assumptions about openness and access. To call this a David vs. Goliath moment would be an understatement. Yet, buoyed by a global community of advocates, creators, and partners, our small but determined team of 20 continues to stand up for the public interest and for access to knowledge worldwide. 

This year, our three strategic goals served as anchors in this rapidly evolving environment:

• Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing: We will know we’ve been successful when a strong and resilient open infrastructure empowers sharing and access in the public interest.
• Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons: We will know we’ve been successful when a thriving creative commons exists to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
• Center community: We will know we’ve been successful when communities leverage CC’s open infrastructure to share knowledge in the public interest.

As we begin shaping our plans for 2026, we want to pause and reflect on what we’ve accomplished in this first year of our new strategy.

Strengthening the Open Infrastructure of Sharing

Introducing CC Signals

2025 will go down in history as the year we kicked off CC signals. 

Building new open infrastructure is complex—and expensive—and these challenges are magnified by the rapid advancement and scale of AI. But in many ways, this is familiar territory. By applying first principles, practical strategies, and lessons learned from decades of advancing the sharing of knowledge and creativity, we are well positioned to help ensure that technological change strengthens, rather than erodes, the commons. 

AI systems depend on vast amounts of human-created content, often collected without the knowledge or participation of those who made it. This dynamic has concentrated power and undermined trust in the social contract of the commons. CC signals responds by supporting community agency while preserving Creative Commons’ core commitment to access and openness.

CC signals is a framework that helps creators and custodians of collections of content or data express how they want their works to be used in AI development. Its goal is to uphold reciprocity, recognition, and sustainability in the way human creativity fuels machine learning.

We’re still in the pilot stages of this work. After kicking off a public feedback period in July, we’ve been identifying early adopters who’ll work with us to shape this framework so that it is responsible, adaptable, and grounded in community context. Is that you? If so, please get in touch. We’re also exploring where elements of the broader CC signals framework could be integrated into emerging standards.

The Enduring Value of the CC Licenses and Legal Tools

We are able to do this work because of the reach and enduring relevance of the CC licenses and legal infrastructure of sharing—a digital public good dedicated to the public domain, powering the digital commons, built by you for you.

The CC licenses and legal tools continue to serve as critical infrastructure that must be actively maintained. Copyright law is not uniform around the world, nor are clear global standards emerging that clarify the application of copyright law to AI training. 

This year, we released guidance on using CC-licensed works for AI training, which we’ll continue to update and enhance as we conduct further research and track legislative developments globally.

We believe the CC licenses are more important than ever as a tool to increase human-to-human sharing. At the same time, we have a responsibility to navigate the tensions between openness for humans and legitimate machine use (like text and data mining for archiving and research purposes), and unchecked extraction by AI companies, who are taking without giving back to the ecosystem from which they derive value. 

Defending a Thriving Creative Commons

While everything we do involves not only defending, but growing, a thriving creative commons, we’ve been fortunate to be able to invest in two critical sectors in 2025: scientific research and cultural heritage.

Open Science

In the field of open science, we’ve focused on two primary interventions:

• Advocating for CC BY as the default licensing option for preprints.
• Advocating for the adoption of CC’s recommendations for better sharing of climate data.

Our work with preprints, initially supported by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, will continue into 2026 with the generous support of the Gates Foundation. The project has run the spectrum from hands-on implementation of licensing options in preprint servers (like openRxiv), to deep dives with funders of scientific research to ensure alignment with their funding policies, to knowledge sharing through Wikipedia. We believe CC BY is the right choice for preprints. The sooner scientific findings are shared and open to interrogation and reuse, the more progress humanity can make.

Barring new support, our work on climate data will wind down at the end of the year, after three years of funding from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. This project began with deep community engagement to develop recommendations for sharing climate data, followed by focused efforts to support partners in implementing them. We’ve worked closely with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and most recently we’ve formalized our consultation with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). 

If there is a funder out there who wants to continue a targeted intervention for improved, uniform sharing of climate data from global entities, please reach out to us. We believe this work is absolutely critical so that all scientists and researchers have unfettered access to current climate data!

Open Culture

In the field of open culture, we’ve continued to advocate for, and show the need for, a global standard for open cultural heritage at the international level, through a community-driven coalition. This work culminated in the launch of the Open Heritage Statement in October of this year. 

Too many barriers still limit access to our shared heritage. Removing these barriers through open solutions is essential not only for cultural rights, but also for scientific discovery and the enrichment of learning materials. This work is a necessary precondition for UNESCO to adopt an international instrument, as they did with the Recommendation on Open Science in 2021 and Recommendation on Open Education Resources in 2019. Our shared commons of education, science, and culture are inextricably linked. We remain grateful to the Arcadia Fund for their multi-year support of our work in open culture.

Across sectors, our approach to growing a thriving commons remains consistent: building shared resources and developing best practices for open sharing, working directly with institutions to adopt open access policies, and emphasizing not only licensing but also provenance of data. Where we get our information has always mattered, but never more than it does today.

Centering Community

We’ve spent 2025 thinking about how best to understand, coordinate, and align existing efforts on community engagement. This includes the governance of CC’s global network, the sector-specific community groups we host in education and culture, and making progress on the virtual engagement spaces we host (join us on Zulip!), all to facilitate connections and knowledge sharing. 

All of this work is based on insights and input from you. This year, we brought hundreds of folks together for our CC signals kickoff and the launch of the Open Heritage Statement, and very much look forward to creating spaces for dialogue in 2026 as we enter our 25th anniversary year. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed.

Outside the legal tools we develop and host and the specific sectors we work in, we continue to keep track of key developments in the policy space and share our work each quarter. We advocate for a balanced copyright system, where noncommercial and research entities can continue to benefit from the commons without restriction. Through making comments at WIPO, to having discussions with the World Economic Forum, and working with UNESCO as a newly minted official NGO partner, at their Mondiacult conference, and in direct engagements, we’re carrying our message far and wide.

2025 Reflections

Many questions remain. We need to dig deeper into the role and function of the CC licenses by legal jurisdiction with regards to text and data mining for AI training purposes. We need to consider if there is a way to imagine conditional access as a necessary and fair part of our modern digital commons. Not to mention overarching questions around what attribution should look like in AI systems.

Like many nonprofits today, securing funding for research and development of new open infrastructure is an ongoing challenge. We also rely on sustained investment to ensure that the CC licenses and legal tools remain stable and reliable as the backbone of the open movement. For CC signals to be a meaningful intervention in a world rapidly shaped by AI, we need to move quickly—but we can only do so at the pace our funding allows.

As we grapple with big open questions and wind down 2025, we’re taking time to consider even more nuanced positioning and actions for our work in the year ahead. If no one shares, we all stand to lose. Onwards we go in driving forth access to knowledge in uncertain times. 

We thank each and every one of you for your advocacy and support in the past year. If you have the means to become a sustaining donor through our Open Infrastructure Circle, we’d welcome you with gratitude and high fives.

As we look back on 2025, it’s clear that the internet as we know it is changing. Technology-enabled access to knowledge should be flourishing. Instead, information is being removed from the web or locked away in walled gardens. We are experiencing a crisis in the commons, driven in part by current AI development practices. New systems are emerging in response—from content monetization schemes and licensing agreements designed to protect large rightsholders, to the ongoing morass of lawsuits about how AI services are using content as data. We are in the midst of a major reconfiguration of how we share and reuse content on the web.

CC Signals: A Refresher

It is within this environment that we continue to develop CC signals. 

We introduced the CC signals concept last June during a live webinar, and further explored the motivation behind this work in our report From Human Content to Machine Data. We also shared the outcomes of our open feedback period following the CC signals kickoff. Since then, we’ve been experimenting in partnership with values-aligned stakeholders and developing pilot projects to test ideas raised by the community.

The goal of CC signals is to help creators and custodians of collections express how they want their content or data to be used in AI development in ways that uphold reciprocity, recognition, and sustainability. Today’s AI systems depend on vast amounts of human-created content, often collected without the awareness or involvement of those who made it. This has concentrated power and undermined trust in the social contract of the commons. 

CC signals responds by promoting community agency while preserving Creative Commons’ core commitment to access and openness. Ultimately, through CC signals and other interventions that infuse concepts of reciprocity in standards and practices, we envision an open internet where participation is equitable, creators are respected, and innovation advances the commons—not unchecked extraction.

CC Signals: Where Are We Now?

CC signals is an evolving, values-driven framework—currently being tested through a series of pilot efforts. Our strategy is to explore modular approaches across legal, technical, and normative dimensions to encourage responsible AI development practices. This allows CC signals to adapt as norms, technologies, and standards continue to evolve.  

At present, two key implementations are underway:

• Implementing CC signals on Mozilla Data Collective: We are working in partnership with our friends at Mozilla, looking at how implementation of CC signals would work on the Mozilla Data Collective platform, which is purpose-built to enable ethical dataset sharing and fair value exchange. Our plan is to test various ways of incorporating some measure of legal enforceability into CC signals. We also hope to use this as an opportunity to test which CC signal elements are most popular and impactful, and which ones have the biggest impact on AI developer behavior. 

• Adapting the CC signals contribution element in the RSL framework: Using the framework of the ecosystem contribution signal element, we are working with the RSL Collective to embed the notion of reciprocal contribution into this evolving standard. As a platform that will let rightsholders set machine-readable licensing terms for their content, integrating the contribution element ensures that standards such as RSL provide mechanisms for AI developers to contribute back to the commons at the collective or community level, not simply a one-to-one payment. 

Beyond CC signals itself, we are also exploring whether updates to CC’s license infrastructure could further strengthen and support the commons in the age of AI.  

Looking Ahead

We are actively seeking expressions of interest from dataset custodians who are interested in participating in the Mozilla Data Collective pilot project. If that’s you, we’d love to hear from you.  

We are also exploring sector-specific CC signals integrations, particularly within cultural heritage and science. 

Ultimately, CC signals are incarnations of what we want to see in the world—more recognition for authorship, sustainable commons communities, mutual commitments to shared resources. We are focused on building a vocabulary and vision for the values we think a successful commons needs to thrive. 

This work is resource-intensive. We need your support to ensure this work continues to be led by public interest organizations. Please donate today.

As we’ve discussed before, the rise of large artificial intelligence (AI) models has fundamentally disrupted the social contract governing machine use of web content. Today, machines don’t just access the web to make it more searchable or to help unlock new insights; they feed algorithms that fundamentally change (and threaten) the web we know. What once functioned as a mostly reciprocal ecosystem now risks becoming extractive by default.

In response, new approaches are emerging to support creators, publishers, and stewards of content to reclaim agency over how their works are used.

Pay-to-crawl is one approach beginning to come into focus. Pay-to-crawl refers to emerging technical systems used by websites to automate compensation for when their digital content—such as text, images, and structured data—is accessed by machines. We’ve recently published our interpretation and observations of pay-to-crawl systems in this dedicated issue brief.

CC’s Position on Pay-to-Crawl

Implemented responsibly, pay-to-crawl could represent a way for websites to sustain the creation and sharing of their content, and manage substitutive uses, keeping content publicly accessible where it might otherwise not be shared or would disappear behind even more restrictive paywalls.

However, we do have significant reservations.

Pay-to-crawl may represent an appropriate strategy for independent websites seeking to prevent AI crawlers from knocking them offline or to generate supplementary revenue. But elsewhere, pay-to-crawl systems could be cynically exploited by rightsholders to generate excessive profits, at the expense of human access and without necessarily benefiting the original creators.

Pay-to-crawl systems themselves could become new concentrations of power, with the ability to dictate how we experience the web. They could seek to watch and control how content is used in ways that resemble the worst of Digital Rights Management (DRM), turning the web from a medium of sharing and remixing into a tightly monitored content delivery channel.

We’re also concerned that indiscriminate use of pay-to-crawl systems could block off access to content for researchers, nonprofits, cultural heritage institutions, educators, and other actors working in the public interest. Legal rights to access content afforded by exceptions and limitations to copyright law, such as noncommercial research (in the EU) or fair use exemptions (in the US), as well as provisions for translation and accessibility tools, have been carefully negotiated and adjusted over time. These rights could be impeded by the introduction of blunt, poorly designed pay-to-crawl systems.

Proposed Principles for Responsible Pay-to-Crawl 

Pay-to-crawl systems are not neutral infrastructure. It’s vital that these systems are built and used in ways that serve the interests of creators and the commons, rather than simply create barriers to the sharing of knowledge and creativity, and benefit the few.

We’re proposing the following set of principles as a way to guide the development of pay-to-crawl systems in alignment with this vision:

1. Pay-to-crawl should not become a default setting.
   Pay-to-crawl represents a strategy that may work for some websites, and not all websites share the same underlying concerns. Pay-to-crawl systems should not be deployed as an automatic or assumed setting on behalf of websites by others, such as domain hosts, content delivery networks, and other web service providers.
2. Pay-to-crawl systems should enable choice and nuance, not blanket rules.
   Pay-to-crawl systems should enable websites to distinguish between—and set variable controls for—different types of content users (such as commercial AI companies, nonprofits, researchers, or even specific organizations), as well as types and purposes of machine use (such as model training, indexing for search, and inference/retrieval). Systems should not affect direct human browsing and use of content, including by restricting translation or accessibility services.
3. Pay-to-crawl systems should allow for throttling, not just blocking.
   Pay-to-crawl systems should enable websites to manage hosting costs and other impacts of heavy machine traffic without walling off content entirely. For instance, systems could allow websites to throttle traffic driven by ‘agentic browsing’ or ‘inference’ undertaken by large AI models, while permitting other forms of machine access that involve far lower traffic, such as for research or archival.
4. Pay-to-crawl systems should preserve public interest access and legal rights.
   Pay-to-crawl systems should not obstruct access to content for researchers, nonprofits, cultural heritage institutions, educators and other actors working in the public interest. Nor should these systems block lawful uses of content protected by copyright exceptions and limitations, and other legal rights afforded in the public interest. The act of deciding not to abide by a pay-per-crawl system should not, by itself, convert an otherwise lawful use into an illegal act.
5. Pay-to-crawl systems should use open, interoperable, and standardized components.
   Pay-to-crawl systems should not become proprietary chokepoints or gatekeepers. We urge particular caution in the use of proprietary components for authentication and payment that might result in websites getting locked into a particular pay-to-crawl system.
6. Pay-to-crawl systems should enable collective contributions to the commons.
   Pay-to-crawl systems that only enable financial transactions between singular websites and content users risk creating a highly transactional future, where the value of content is atomized. Pay-to-crawl systems should support collective forms of payment, such as to coalitions of creators and publishers, and wider conceptions of what it means to contribute to the digital commons.
7. Pay-to-crawl systems should avoid surveillance and DRM-like architectures.
   Pay-to-crawl systems must not introduce excessive logging, fingerprinting, or behavioral tracking related to the use of content. Systems should minimize data collection to only what is needed to authenticate users and settle payments, rather than seek to follow content downstream or dictate how it can be used.

The Path Forward: Showing Up Where the Future Is Being Decided

We believe now is the moment to engage, to influence, and to infuse pay-to-crawl systems with values that prioritize reciprocity, openness, and the commons.

We welcome feedback and dialogue on the principles outlined here. Your input will help guide our engagement with pay-to-crawl systems and related initiatives moving forward, as well as inform the wider CC community’s understanding of them.

Thank you to Jack Hardinges for his contributions to this post.

At Creative Commons, we’ve long believed that binary systems rarely reflect the complexity of the real world—nor do they serve the commons very well. The internet, like the communities that built it, thrives on nuance, experimentation, and shared stewardship. That’s why we’re continuously working to introduce choice where there has been little, and to advocate for systems that acknowledge the diversity of values and needs across the web. CC signals is one expression of that thinking, and lately we’ve been exploring how those ideas can travel into other emerging standards that are shaping the future of the web.

Strange Bedfellows

That brings us to Really Simple Licensing (RSL). Publicly launched in September 2025, today the RSL Collective releases the RSL 1.0 standard. RSL is an open standard that lets publishers define machine-readable licensing terms for their content, including attribution, pay per crawl, and pay per inference compensation. This is an example of emerging technical systems used by websites to automate compensation for when their digital content—such as text, images, and structured data—is accessed by machines. We’ve been referring to these systems as pay-to-crawl. Think of it as the web’s attempt to answer the question: what tools are needed when bots become the biggest readers? If you are new to the concept, we recently published an issue brief that breaks it down in plain language.

On the surface, Creative Commons and pay-to-crawl systems are strange bedfellows. We have always been a champion of the open web and are concerned about a world where knowledge is harder to access. But we also recognize that responsible, interoperable systems can create leverage where none previously existed. Thoughtfully designed, pay-to-crawl systems may help curb extractive behavior by powerful actors while keeping the web open for everyone else.

Attribution + Compensation

In its early version 1.0 draft, RSL included attribution as one condition for machine access and reuse. From the standard: 

Attribution-Only License 

The publisher permits free reuse of the content on its site, provided that visible credit and a functional link to the original source are included. 

This is important as one example of more choices given to web publishers beyond the binary no access or all access. The inclusion of attribution also mirrors some elements of the proposed CC signal Credit. 

You must give appropriate credit based on the method, means, and context of your use.

Attribution + Reciprocity

But as the CC signals framework recognizes, attribution alone is not enough to address the very present power imbalances between AI developers and the commons. We need new tools that ensure the commons thrives and is sustained. 

We believe now is the time to act to infuse concepts of reciprocity in standards that are ready for adoption. That’s why we worked with the RSL Collective ahead of the release of version 1.0 to integrate a contribution component to the standard, which is described as:

A good faith monetary or in-kind contribution that supports the development or maintenance of the assets, or the broader content ecosystem. 

This is not about turning access into a tollbooth. It’s about acknowledging that extraction without reinvestment leads to collapse. There is a meaningful difference between paying a fee and giving back. One is transactional. The other is about responsibility.

When AI systems derive immense value from the digital commons, contribution isn’t compensation. It’s participation in the social contract that made that value possible in the first place.

Contribution could be in the form of:

• A donation back to a non-profit that stewards the dataset; 
• Support for the broader ecosystem that sustains the work;
• Openly licensing the model, or sharing a modified dataset back to the original steward;
• Or other models we haven’t yet imagined.

A Big Step: Many More to Come

The future of the web is being negotiated right now, in standards documents, in product decisions, and in design choices that shape how power flows online. Collaboration is vital if we’re going to achieve a systems-level response to rebalance power in the digital commons. 

There’s much more work to be done, particularly in developing what adherence to contribution means in different contexts. But we’re excited about where this is going. 

Our door is open. We welcome ideas, critiques, and collaboration. If you have ideas, consider engaging with us on LinkedIn or joining CC’s community platform on Zulip. 

Our year-end fundraising campaign is happening right now. While you are here, please consider making a donation to support this work.