Joi ito by Dean Ornish / CC BY The MIT Media Lab, known for its innovative, hands-on approaches in design, multimedia, and technology, has named Creative Commons Chairman and former CEO Joi Ito as its new executive director. In its article about the announcement, the New York Times notes Joi’s long-time support of open culture: “Raised…

The basic idea of Creative Commons, offering free copyright tools, is copied from the free software movement. However, CC licenses are not intended to be used to release software, as our FAQ has always said. One important reason why Creative Commons licenses should not be used to release software is that they aren’t compatible with…

Last Friday, we made plaintext versions of our core 3.0 (unported) licenses and CC0 available. This is something that some people have wanted for a long time. For example, Evan Prodromou made a draft of plaintext licenses a few years ago, but these never became official. But now we do have official plaintext versions. Here’s…

Creative Commons is pleased to announce we have been awarded a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide support to successful applicants of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program with our partnering organizations Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community…

Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter. March may be over, but the madness isn't! CC is helping to shape Japan relief efforts, moving offices, and playing an important role in open government. Japan relief efforts use Creative Commons Regardless of CC related efforts, we…

Creative Commons is pleased to present with Hewlett-Packard (HP) Labs the next CC Salon: Open Services Innovation, at the HP campus in Palo Alto on Monday, April 25, from 6-8pm. This CC Salon will feature two speakers from HP Labs as well as author of Open Innovation and Berkeley professor Henry Chesbrough to discuss the…

As of April 1, the CC HQ will be moving into a new office space. We will be located in downtown Mountain View to be closer to all the activity brewing in Silicon Valley. Please be aware that we will be packing on Wednesday, March 30, and moving on Thursday, March 31. It may take…

Paul Stacey by BCcampus / CC BY Paul Stacey is the Director of Communications, Stakeholder and Academic Relations at BCcampus. Headquartered in Vancouver, BCcampus provides services in support of educational technology and online learning to British Columbia’s 25 public colleges and universities, their students, faculty and administrators. The BC Ministry of Advanced Education provides funding…

Cathy Casserly by Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching / CC BY The OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC), a community of over 250 member institutions worldwide committed to sharing their courses online, has voted to present Creative Commons CEO Cathy Casserly with the President’s Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence, a special recognition of her extraordinary contributions to…

Firefox 4 is officially released today by our friends at Mozilla, and it is awesome. Install or upgrade now. In large part due to Mozilla’s leadership over the years, the Open Web is in good health. Open standards and open formats are becoming the norm. This means anyone, anywhere can develop innovative applications that will…