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CC Hosts Open Heritage Statement Event in Amsterdam
On Monday 2 March 2026, Creative Commons (CC) and Internet Archive Europe, together with the support of Open Nederland, hosted an event entitled “Ensuring equitable access to heritage in the digital environment: A leading role for the Netherlands on the global stage.” In this blog post, we offer a recap of the dynamic discussions and share why they matter for CC.
Goal of the Event
The goal of the event was to bring together key actors from the Dutch heritage sector to celebrate the Netherlands’ pioneering efforts in opening up access to heritage collections. For over two decades, Dutch cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) have set the standard for equitable access to heritage that fosters imagination, creativity and innovation while deftly navigating the pitfalls that threaten access. With open heritage gaining momentum as a way to help address global challenges, the event was an opportunity to elevate Dutch good practices to the international level.
Panel I: Successes and Challenges of Open Heritage in the Netherlands
The first expert panel, moderated by Beverley Francis (CC), highlighted various experiences with open heritage in the Dutch context.
Amanda van Rij (Coordinating Legal Policy Advisor, Heritage and Arts Directorate, Ministry of Education, Culture and Science) presented the National Strategy on Digital Heritage (in Dutch) whose aim is to make digital heritage more easily accessible to everyone. She also introduced the Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed (Digital Heritage Network or NDE) Manifesto, a document developed with funding from the Ministry, which had already been signed by over 200 institutions across the country. She also emphasized that digitization influences how our heritage is being created, disseminated, and experienced, and pointed out that a careful balance is needed between respecting intellectual property on the one hand and the public interest of access to our collective memory on the other.
Saskia Scheltjens (Head Research Services Department and Chief Librarian Rijksmuseum Research Library, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) gave an account of the museum’s open heritage journey, which started during a “perfect storm,” as she put it, starting with the first digitized collection in 2011 and the creation of Rijkstudio in 2012. Her key takeaway was that, defying expectations, opening access to the digital collection did not drive visitors away (the Rijks, with 2.3 million visitors a year, is the 23rd most visited museum in the world). Quite the opposite, in fact, for with free and unfettered online access (1.8 million people visit the website every year), people could build a relationship with the collection, which then became better known. 2023 saw the completion of the digitization of its entire collection of one million objects, while the last few years underlined the need for a more nuanced approach to access. For example, dealing with restitutions made her realize a collection has more cultural and societal stakeholders than was understood a decade or so ago. She concluded by noting that making information and data available online aligned with the institution’s mission, in accordance with FAIR principles, and that this requires investing in quality, structure, and coherence to ensure a successful digital transformation and to uphold the public values of a fair knowledge ecosystem. She parted on inspiring words: “Innovation requires infrastructure.”
Edwin van Huis (Member of the Supervisory Board of SURF and of the Internet Archive Europe Advisory Board) spoke about his experience working with digital heritage at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and Naturalis Biodiversity Center (today, the latter two are Open Heritage Statement signatories). He said that the Netherlands had always been at the forefront of digital openness, especially open science and gave the example of DiSSCo, a Dutch-led initiative bringing 1.5 billion specimens, 5,000 scientists, 400+ institutions and 23 countries into 1 European collection. As the first Chair of the Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed, he called for bringing the concept to the European level for greater impact.
Marike van Roon (Member of the Wikimedia Nederland Board) talked about Wikimedia projects and the fundamental values of openness, community and collaboration that underpin the widely successful free knowledge movement. She mentioned the many partners from the heritage sector that help make heritage more accessible on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia projects, being grassroots initiatives, tend to work from the bottom up, leveraging the experience and expertise of volunteers who are willing to contribute to open heritage.
Panel II: International Perspectives on Open Heritage
The second expert panel, moderated by Maarten Zeinstra (Chair, Open Nederland), zoomed out from the national context to explore existing international initiatives and future opportunities.
Beatrice Murch (Program Manager at Internet Archive Europe) presented the Our Future Memory campaign, supported by the Internet Archive Europe and which aims to ensure the basic rights of memory institutions are respected in the digital world. She highlighted the alignment and complementarity between the campaign and the Open Heritage Statement, mapping how the rights outlined in the campaign are reflected in the language of the Statement. With more than 80 institutions worldwide already signatories, she called on more institutions across Europe to add their voice.
Claire McGuire (Policy and Advocacy Manager, International Federation of Library Associations & Institutions (IFLA)) shared insights from her experience as a member of the Open Heritage Coalition’s Statement Workspace (the Statement’s drafting committee). She explained that the Statement addressed issues well beyond copyright to tackle barriers to equitable and meaningful access to heritage, within the wider context of access to information. She recalled that having a global shared framework could be very useful and said that the Statement had a home at UNESCO, since international policy routinely influenced national and institutional policies. Given the very fragmented landscape of open heritage and patterns of regression and backsliding due to the uncertainties brought about by artificial intelligence, the need for global harmonization and cross-border collaboration is all the greater in order to establish a supportive environment for openness. She was convinced that the Open Heritage Statement would make a difference.
Jan Bos (Chair, UNESCO Memory of the World International Advisory Committee) provided a useful overview of the Memory of the World Program, initiated at UNESCO in 1992 to focus on the protection of documentary heritage, as well as of the 2015 Recommendation concerning the Preservation of, and Access to, Documentary Heritage Including in Digital Form. He drew several parallels between the Recommendation and the Open Heritage Statement, starting with the basic principles that form the bedrock of both instruments, including public domain access and open licensing. But while the 2015 Recommendation only deals with documentary heritage, the Statement includes all forms of heritage, and constitutes, therefore, a very valuable complement.
Douglas McCarthy (Senior Open Content Specialist, Open Future Foundation), the architect, together with Dr. Andrea Wallace, of the influential OpenGLAM survey, said that the Open Heritage Statement very clearly expressed the “why” behind the need to ensure access to heritage. He said that online heritage collections are the currency of relevance, engagement and education with global audiences, with a very large majority of people never visiting physical institutions. He acknowledged the positive growth curve in access to heritage online, thanks in part to the greater legal clarity brought about by Article 14 of the 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market in Europe, but reminded the audience that policies and practices were extremely fragmented and confusing because of weak or nonexistent compliance regimes. He shared that about 1700 CHIs around the world had released some data openly,corresponding to roughly 100 million objects, but gave examples of prominent Dutch institutions still erecting barriers to public domain heritage by perpetuating outdated business models. In his view, driving change comes down to individuals with the leadership and vision to experiment.
Closing remarks
Brigitte Vézina and Brewster Kahle (Digital Librarian, Internet Archive) offered concluding remarks to a rich conversation. Together, they reiterated how the Netherlands is poised to help set global standards for access and use of heritage and has a unique opportunity to leave a mark on the international law stage to enable access to heritage for education, to fight climate change, promote access for people with disabilities, and encourage creativity in all its forms.
More about the Open Heritage Statement
The Open Heritage Statement is a global call to action led by Creative Commons and the Open Heritage Coalition advocating for equitable access to public domain heritage in the digital environment and calling on stakeholders to remove unfair, unnecessary barriers to enable everyone to enjoy their fundamental right to participate in cultural life and solve the world’s biggest problems. It aims to stimulate a global conversation about the need to establish international standards for open heritage under the aegis of UNESCO.
What this means for CC
This event marked an important milestone in the advocacy and movement-building efforts of the Open Heritage Coalition, building on years of community work supported by CC, including the development of UNESCO’s 2019 Recommendation on Open Educational Resources and 2021 Recommendation on Open Science. Both rely on CC licenses and public domain tools to make knowledge open.
As an official NGO partner to UNESCO (consultative status), CC works towards UNESCO’s vision where education, culture, and science are equitably shared, based on the shared belief that openness can benefit everyone, everywhere.
Creative Commons provides critical infrastructure for open sharing, but the values behind our work matter more than the legal and technical details. The Open Heritage Statement is rooted in those values, eloquently describing why equitable access to heritage matters, and then laying out a set of principles and policy actions that put those values into practice. The Statement provides us with a compass in this effort; one shared across countries and communities.
AI’s Infrastructure Era: Reflections from the AI Impact Summit in Delhi
Last month, we published a preview of what we intended to bring to the AI Impact Summit in Delhi: a focus on data governance, shared infrastructure, and democratic approaches to AI that genuinely advance the public interest rather than replicate existing power imbalances. That piece outlined our core interventions and the principles that have guided our thinking as we grapple with how to ensure openness, agency, and equity in the age of AI.
Since then, the Summit—a major global gathering of policymakers, technologists, civil society leaders, and researchers—unfolded against the backdrop of widespread calls for cooperative frameworks and measurable outcomes. For an excellent summary of the highs and lows of the Summit, take a look at this article by CC Board Member Jeni Tennison.
From CC’s perspective, what became clear in Delhi is that AI governance is shifting. The conversation is moving beyond high-level principles and into harder, more structural questions about infrastructure, stewardship, and power.
Photo by Rebecca Ross/Creative Commons, 2026, CC BY 4.0.
Data as a Leverage Point
Concerns about data capture and extraction abounded at the Summit. But alongside those concerns, a persistent theme emerged: data scarcity.
Participants repeatedly pointed to the lack of high-quality, localized, representative datasets as a fundamental constraint on public interest AI. The call for “really good data” came from startups, researchers, governments, and civil society actors alike—many working to build contextually grounded systems. Without accessible datasets, cultural representation is limited, competition falters, open-source development slows, and meaningful innovation remains concentrated in the hands of those with the most resources.
The gaps are especially pronounced across Global South languages and cultural contexts. Researchers are working to supplement large models with local norms and knowledge to address bias and misrepresentation. This is particularly urgent in sectors such as health, agriculture, climate, and development, where high-quality open datasets could unlock substantial public benefit.
There is a real tension here. High-quality open data is required to power public interest AI. At the same time, without guardrails, open data can be exposed to extraction and misuse. Communities are often presented with a false choice: open their data and risk exploitation, or close their data and risk exclusion from shaping AI systems that affect them. Addressing this tension is essential if governance frameworks are to support both individual agency and shared stewardship. In essence, we need to:
Fill existing gaps in shared governance infrastructure through collaborative frameworks and development of globally accessible tools that balance the tension between agency and access;
Uphold an understanding of data governance as something that is deeply participatory and democratic, and an absolute necessity for any AI system that becomes part of the public infrastructure, whether privately held or not;
Rebalance the power inequities in the current landscape overall, with our focus being on the data layer.
We believe that the path forward is not enclosure. It is stewardship. Governance mechanisms, interoperability standards, and access frameworks will determine who participates in the AI ecosystem and who does not. If we want AI systems that reflect diverse knowledge and lived realities, we must build the infrastructure that makes responsible openness durable.
Openness as a Method for Collaboration
At the Summit, openness was not framed as a philosophical preference. It was framed as a structural necessity and a baseline condition for equity, competition, collaboration, and democratic accountability.
But the mental models we use to think about open versus closed must evolve. Openness cannot stop at model weights. It must extend across code, data, infrastructure, tooling, standards, and usability. And, crucially, openness and guardrails are not opposites. Responsible governance is not in tension with open systems; it is what makes them sustainable.
In this sense, openness is no longer the ceiling of ambition. It is the floor.
The Implementation Gap
Despite widespread agreement on concentration risks, data bottlenecks, and the speed of AI development, there was palpable exhaustion with principles that lack implementation pathways. Participants pointed to attempts like the Hiroshima AI Process and statements from past Summits as being great in theory but missing in practice. What’s missing are durable intermediaries capable of stewarding shared resources and translating shared values into operational systems.
This is where the conversation becomes especially consequential for Creative Commons.
For more than two decades, CC has built legal and social interoperability at global scale. We have designed data governance frameworks that allow sharing of knowledge to function across jurisdictions and sectors. We have stewarded a commons model that balances openness with structure, enabling participation and mutual benefit through principles like attribution.
While debates about the limits of copyright were not central to most discussions in Delhi, there was significant interest in expanding high-quality open data, strengthening digital public infrastructure, and supporting community-led AI development—all areas deeply aligned with our expertise.
AI governance must move from principles to infrastructure. Shared, open digital infrastructure that works across borders is what Creative Commons is known for building. We believe that building the next generation of infrastructure for sharing—which would support the data layer of public interest AI—is not a departure from our mission. It is a timely extension of it and builds on the groundwork we have been laying for the past few years.
An infrastructure like this could include identifying high-impact open dataset initiatives in sectors such as health, agriculture, climate, and education to be opened up and prepared for machine reuse. It would require developing safe and trusted data-sharing models, with nuanced approaches depending on what data are being shared. This isn’t just about legal tools absent the context in which they are used; it is about comprehensive data governance mechanisms that balance openness with accountability and ensure interoperability across jurisdictions.
Collaborative Construction
As we’ve talked about before, a central challenge in AI governance is avoiding false choices. Overly restrictive guardrails risk enclosing the commons, limiting access to knowledge, and stifling innovation and scientific discovery. Yet the absence of guardrails undermines trust, enables exploitation, and erodes the foundations of openness itself. Creative Commons operates in this critical middle space.
Our interventions at the Summit focused on advancing governance frameworks that protect human agency, cultural context, and trust in information while preserving openness, access, and reuse. An AI ecosystem that serves the public interest must be standardized where possible and contextual where required, especially across diverse linguistic, cultural, and regional settings.
If the Summit made one thing evident, it is that there is readiness for partnership. Policymakers, funders, technologists, and civil society leaders are looking for institutions capable of translating shared values into durable systems.
If We Do Not Intervene
It is worth being explicit about the alternative trajectory.
If sharing of data is only driven by commercial markets and not the public interest, and if data infrastructure consolidates in the hands of a few actors, “sovereignty” risks becoming a commercial product rather than a public capacity. Cultural representation will become extractive rather than participatory. Open models may technically exist, but without access to high-quality datasets, they will struggle to compete. The language of openness could persist while the data infrastructure beneath it quietly closes. What is the value of open weights and open code when the very essence of our cultures and languages isn’t carefully and deliberately shared, through robust open datasets?
The infrastructure phase of AI governance has begun. Creative Commons intends to help build what comes next—in partnership with those who share a commitment to an AI ecosystem that is open, inclusive, and grounded in the public interest.
A huge thank you to our partners, event organizers, and co-panelists who helped to shape a meaningful engagement for CC during the Summit. We are particularly grateful for the thoughtful welcome provided by CivicDataLab, who ensured balanced dialogue and representation between those attending from elsewhere and those actively engaged on the ground in India. If we chatted during the Summit, we look forward to ongoing discussions. If we didn’t have a chance to connect, our doors are always open—send us a note!
CC Licenses, Data Governance, and the African Context: Conversations and Perspectives
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:
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.
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.
Building What Comes Next: Community Engagement at Creative Commons
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.
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 unifiedCommunity 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.
Sign up and stay tuned for more details if you’d like to chat!
How to Keep the Internet Human
Based on a keynote presentation at the Wikimedia Futures Lab in Frankfurt, Germany, on 31 January 2026.
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.
1While 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.
Semana de la Cultura Libre with CC Uruguay
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.
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!
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.
Photo by Jocelyn Miyara, 2025, licensed with CC BY 4.0.
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.
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.
CC at the AI Impact Summit: Core Interventions for the 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:
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.
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 knowwhere 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.
What We Built Together in 2025
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.
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.
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.
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.
CC Signals: What We’ve Been Working On
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.
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 reportFrom 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.
