“Irises, 1889” by Vincent van Gogh, The J. Paul Getty Museum is dedicated to the public domain by CC0.

The J. Paul Getty Museum just released more than 88 thousand works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the digital images of items from its impressive collection squarely and unequivocally into the public domain. This is in line with our advocacy efforts at Creative Commons (CC): digital reproductions of public domain material must remain in the public domain. In other words, no new copyright should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.”

"art is the universe creating itself as it goes" by submerged~, here slightly cropped, is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

“art is the universe creating itself as it goes” by submerged~, here slightly cropped, is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0. Looking for that perfect picture to illustrate your post? That catchy tune to jazz up your video? Look no further than Openverse, the huge library of free and open stock photos, images, and audio…

A screenshot of the digital collection from the Alliance for Excellent Education.

The Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed) just released the second edition of their openly licensed digital image collection, “American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action.” This edition features nearly 500 high-quality images of teachers and students licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). Captured by Allison Shelley (photojournalist; co-founder and co-director of…

Astronaut Edwin Aldrin walks on lunar surface near leg of Lunar Module. Credit: Neil Armstrong/NASA, (1969) in the public domain.

It’s July 20, 1969.  Along with 600 million people, nine-year-old Chris Hadfield is glued to his television—watching intently as American astronaut Neil Armstrong glides down the ladder of the Lunar Module, and in one swift pounce, touches the dust of a familiar yet alien world. His words forever immortalized, “That’s one small step for man,…

"Bhavna Ben Ramesh" by Paul Bronstein (2015), CC BY-NC.

Storytelling is a powerful tool because it can change perceptions and inspire action—and images are an essential component. As Depression-era American photojournalist and documentarian Dorothea Lange said, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”  Unfortunately, finding high-quality and diverse openly licensed images, particularly those of women, is a…

The Smithsonian—the world’s largest museum and research institution—announced yesterday  Smithsonian Open Access, an initiative that removes copyright restrictions from 2.8 million digital collection 2D and 3D images and nearly two centuries of data. This major initiative uses CC0—Creative Commons’ public domain dedication tool—to make millions of images and data freely available to the public. “Our…

Today, SELF magazine released a collection of new CC-licensed photos created to increase awareness about vaccines and promote accurate information about immunizations. The project, developed in partnership with the American Academy of Pediatrics, includes several dozen high-quality images made by photographer Heather Hazzan. These photos are available to the public as a free alternative to…

Today CC Search comes out of beta, with over 300 million images indexed from multiple collections, a major redesign, and faster, more relevant search. It’s the result of a huge amount of work from the engineering team at Creative Commons and our community of volunteer developers.

Yesterday, NBC News published a story about IBM’s work on improving diversity in facial recognition technology and the dataset that they gathered to further this work.

I’m happy to share Flickr’s announcement today that all CC-licensed and public domain images on the platform will be protected and exempted from upload limits.