The Legacy & History of Copyright and Open Licensing

Event Details

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Creative Commons invites you to explore the legacy and history of copyright and open licensing—examining how new legal and cultural frameworks for sharing creativity helped expand public access to knowledge, culture, and collaboration around the world. This panel will reflect on the origins of open licensing, the development of the Creative Commons licenses, and the communities, legal experts, and advocates who helped build a global commons grounded in sharing and reuse.

Together, we’ll explore how open licensing reshaped the relationship between creators, the public, and the internet, enabling new models for collaboration across education, culture, technology, and the arts. Panelists will reflect on key milestones in the evolution of copyright reform and open licensing, the regional and legal contexts that shaped adoption around the world, and the ongoing challenges of maintaining an open and accessible commons in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

Meet the speakers

  • Tyng-Ruey Chuang

    Tyng-Ruey Chuang is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He collaborates with researchers diverse in discipline to work on programming language and systems, digital archives, copyrights and public licenses, and research data management, among others. His lab at Academia Sinica operates a public…

  • Diyana Noory

    Copyright & AI Counsel

    Diyana is the Copyright & AI Counsel at Creative Commons, where she serves as a subject matter expert leading internal research, analysis, and strategy development, as well as public-facing communications and education. She is dedicated to serving the good of humanity by combining her background in law, journalism, the arts,…

  • Kat Walsh

    Kat Walsh was the Copyright and Licensing Counsel at Creative Commons. She was on the CC legal team 2012-2015 during the drafting and initial publication process of version 4.0 of the license suite and returned as Deputy General Counsel in 2021. She has a nearly 20-year history in the free…

  • Tomoaki Watanabe

    Tomoaki Watanabe is a professor, Executive Research Fellow and General Manager for Research Division, GLOCOM (Center for Global Communication), at the International University of Japan.

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