As General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for CC, Diane directs the organization’s legal strategy and projects. She coordinates legal programs and activities that harness CC’s diverse and complex global network. She also leads development of CC’s licenses and legal tools, including the CC0 public domain dedication (2009), the Public Domain Mark (2010), Version 3.0 ports and, most recently, Version 4.0 of the CC license suite (2013).
Diane is a founder and Co-Chair of the Advisory Council of the Open COVID Coalition, an international effort led by Creative Commons to remove obstacles to intellectual property during the COVID-19 pandemic and effect longer-term change in the public interest. She also serves on the board of directors of Creative Commons as well as the Software Freedom Law Center.
Prior to joining CC, she served as general counsel for Open Source Development Labs (now, the Linux Foundation), and as legal counsel to Mozilla. In 2014, the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California awarded her its Intellectual Property Vanguard Award for public policy. She is based in Portland, Oregon.
Photo credit: Kelley Dulcich, CC BY
“United Nations Headquarters” by United Nations Photo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 As an important part of our stewardship of the Open COVID Pledge, we are pleased to announce that the Pledge is now available in all six of the official languages of the United Nations: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. This … Read More “Internationalizing the Open COVID Pledge: Translations and Outreach”
We’re pleased to announce today that Creative Commons is taking on leadership and stewardship of the Open COVID Pledge. Earlier this year, CC joined forces with an international group of researchers, scientists, academics, and lawyers seeking to accelerate the development of diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics, medical equipment, and software solutions that might be used to assist … Read More “Creative Commons Is Now Leading the Open COVID Pledge—Here’s What That Means”
Momentum continues to swell in support of the Open COVID Pledge, with the announcement today by Amazon, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Microsoft, and Sandia National Laboratories, that they are pledging their patents to the public to freely use in support of solving the COVID-19 pandemic. Following in the footsteps of Intel, Fabricatorz Foundation, and … Read More “Tech Giants Join the CC-Supported Open COVID Pledge”
Creative Commons is changing its legal code correction policy for official translations of the Version 4.0 licenses and the CC0 public domain dedication. In order to maintain the integrity of our firm commitment to honor official translations as legal equivalents of the original English 4.0 version and the original English CC0 1.0, CC will correct … Read More “Update to CC’s Policy on Legal Code Corrections”
Creative Commons has joined forces with other legal experts and leading scientists to offer a simple way for universities, companies, and other holders of intellectual property rights to support the development of medicines, test kits, vaccines, and other scientific discoveries related to COVID-19 for the duration of the pandemic. The Open COVID Pledge grants the … Read More “Open COVID Pledge: Removing Obstacles to Sharing IP in the Fight Against COVID-19”
On 14 February 2020, Creative Commons (CC) submitted its comments on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)’s Issues Paper* as part of WIPO’s consultation process on artificial intelligence (AI) and intellectual property (IP) policy. In this post, we briefly present our main arguments for a cautious approach to regulating AI through copyright or any new … Read More “Why We’re Advocating for a Cautious Approach to Copyright and Artificial Intelligence”
Broken Hill Wall Mural-07= by Sheba_Also 43,000 photos is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 This post was co-authored by Diane Peters (CC’s General Counsel) and Alexis Muscat (CC’s 2019 legal intern) For the past year or so, CC has been tracking and thinking about strict, less than-amicable enforcement activities involving CC licenses. These activities present … Read More “Thoughts on “Non-Amicable” Enforcement of CC Licenses”
Update: On February 7, 2020, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied Great Minds’ petition for rehearing (opinion (PDF)). As a result, the decision (PDF) of the panel in favor of CC’s interpretation of the licenses remains final. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reaffirmed Creative Commons’ interpretation of activities that are permissible under the … Read More “U.S. Appellate Court Enforces CC’s Interpretation of NonCommercial”
Creative Commons is doubly excited to announce the publication of two official Chinese language translations of version 4.0 of our license suite: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. These translations will enable approximately 1.2 billion persons (more than 15% of the world’s population) to understand our licenses in their first language. We could not be more … Read More “Our 4.0 License Suite Is Now Available in Simplified and Traditional Chinese”
Creative Commons welcomes progress on official language translations of both 4.0 and CC0 due to our dedicated network of volunteers and a commitment by the European Commission (EC) to ensure the legal code for each is available in all official languages of the European Union.
