At the recent Founders Fireside Chat, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig referred to himself as “hopelessly naive.” It struck me that this sort of naivete—the kind that is about believing in the potential for good when sharing knowledge with other humans—is the glue that holds the entire Creative Commons movement together, across borders and belief systems.

Over the past 25 years, Creative Commons has helped transform openness from an aspiration into a global practice. Through open licensing, communities around the world have built new models for sharing. The Legacy Of series reflects on four interconnected movements—Open Access, Open Education, Open Science, and Open Culture—and the people who helped shape them.

Twenty-five years ago, a small group of people made a bet. They believed that if you gave creators a simple set of tools and licenses in language that a lawyer, a machine, and a human could all read, millions of people might choose to share their work with the world instead of locking it down.
“We said, oh gosh, if a million people use these licenses, that would be amazing,” Hal Abelson recalled, laughing at how small that ambition sounds now. Today the number “starts with a B.” Hal’s quote was one of many memorable moments during Creative Commons’ Founders Fireside Chat, a special benefit event for CC’s 25th anniversary.

Watch the event recording Join us for a rare and intimate conversation with some of the voices who helped build the commons. To mark 25 years of Creative Commons, this special founders fireside chat brings together Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Molly Van Houweling, in conversation with moderator Glenn O. Brown Together, they’ll go beyond…

Giovanna Fontenelle is a journalist, historian, and master’s in Social History. She works as a Program Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, in the Content Enablement team, previously called Culture and Heritage. She’s a member of the Creative Commons Global Network, ICOM Brasil, co-founded WikiMulheres+, and was the general coordinator of Creative Commons Brasil. She works…

Merete Sanderhoff is an art historian working as curator and senior advisor of digital museum practice at SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark. She is part of the team that is responsible for all strategic development and uses of digital technologies across the museum’s operations, keeping a strong focus on opening up cultural heritage to…

Medhavi Gandhi is a cultural practitioner and creator of The Heritage Lab, a platform that engages audiences with archival material in ways that foreground interpretation, context, and close observation. Her work spans writing, research, participatory campaigns, and collaborations with museums, libraries, technology platforms, and cultural organisations across India, Europe, the UK, and the US. She…

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.

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 repository serving worldwide researchers for…

Watch the event recording 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…