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. 

Posted 18 February 2026