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Wikimedia Commons Pictures of the Year

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The awesome Wikimedia Commons community just finished selecting its 2007 picture of the year: Newton2 / CC BY We neglected to mention last years’ winner: United States Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang / public domain All content on Wikimedia Commons is free to use and remix, including commercially, often under liberal CC…

PictureSandbox

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April’s most sophisticated Flickr/CC mashup yet has relaunched with angel funding as PictureSandbox.com with cool tools to find and reuse CC licensed photos in lightboxes, cards, and more.

Learn computers with pictures

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In Pictures has published 22 computer books under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. These books cover computer basics with several operating systems, productivity applications and basic web design and programming. These books make maximum use of images. A quote published at DesktopLinux and elsewhere explains: Most computer books contain 50,000 to 100,000 words, but…

Prix Ars Electronica Pictures 2004

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Last year, Creative Commons was awarded the Golden Nica by the organizers of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Some great pictures conveying a sense of the award ceremony’s atmosphere have been put online and can be found here. There are also some webcasts of CC contributions to the Austrian launch conference (by Joi…

What did Creative Commons do for Open Culture in 2023?

Open Culture post
Laterna magica picture painted in color on glass plate. Pictures from the solar system. Laterna magica bild målad i färg på glasskiva. Bilder ur solsystemet. from Tekniska Museet Svenska, Public Domain Mark. https://digitaltmuseum.se/021016341596/laterna-magica-bild-malad-i-farg-pa-glasskiva-bilder-ur-solsystemet

2023 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin. In this blog post we look back on some of the year’s key achievements.

Exploring Preference Signals for AI Training

Better Internet, Open Culture, Technology post
Close up photo of three round metal signs lying haphazardly on a stony path, each with a big white arrow pointing in a different direction, embossed on a greenish-blue background. "Choices" by Derek Bruff, here cropped, licensed via CC BY-NC 2.0.

One of the motivations for founding Creative Commons (CC) was offering more choices for people who wish to share their works openly. Through engagement with a wide variety of stakeholders, we heard frustrations with the “all or nothing” choices they seemed to face with copyright. Instead they wanted to let the public share and reuse…

CC Open Education Platform Activities 2023

Open Education post
A vibrant, colorful abstract image, including color splashes, ink drawings, goldfish and flowers. "Abstract Backgrounds" by NichoDesign is licensed via CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

This post was prepared collaboratively by Jennryn Wetzler, Werner Westermann, Lisa Di Valentino, Dr. Suma Parahakaran, Tetiana Kolesnykova, Paola Corti, Dan McGuire, and Fernando Daguanno. In February and March, the CC Open Education Platform community voted on five winning ideas to advance open education globally. Five project teams, spanning Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Italy, Malaysia,…

The Complex World of Style, Copyright, and Generative AI

Better Internet, Licenses & Tools, Open Creativity, Technology post
Illustration of four superheroes, wearing masks and punk outfits and two holding guitars, standing in a washed out cityscape. “Grunge Heroes” by Stephen Wolfson for Creative Commons was generated by the Midjourney AI platform with the text prompt “a grunge band from the 1990s made up of superheroes.” CC dedicates any rights it holds to the image to the public domain via CC0.

In my previous posts on generative AI, I discussed fair use and AI training data, copyright over AI outputs, and a recent U.S. Copyright Office decision on registration for a work produced by generative AI. In the next posts in our series, I will look at claims (exemplified in a recent case against Stable Diffusion…