It is with our deepest gratitude that all of us at Creative Commons offer a bittersweet sendoff to Board members Hal Abelson, Michael W. Carroll, Laurie Racine, Eric F. Saltzman, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Esther Wojcicki whose Board terms will come to a close at the end of this year. It is impossible to…

I’m proud to share with you Creative Commons’ 2015 State of the Commons report, our best effort to measure the immeasurable scope of the commons by looking at the CC licensed content, along with content marked as public domain, that comprise the slice of the commons powered by CC tools. Creative Commoners have known all…

Annual State of the Commons Report highlights global cultural and policy impact of free and open content Creative Commons, the global nonprofit that makes it easier for creators to share their work under simple copyright terms, announced a major milestone in the release of its 2015 State of the Commons Report today: over 1 billion…

In October we wrote that the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is considering an open licensing requirement for direct competitive grant programs. If adopted, educational resources created with ED grant funds will be openly licensed for the public to freely use, share, and build upon. The Department of Education has been running a comment period in which interested parties can provide…

cape point (panorama) by André van Rooyen, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 In September we announced that Creative Commons and the Open Policy Network are hosting a second Institute for Open Leadership. We’ve seen a significant increase in the number and diversity of policies that require that publicly funded resources should be widely shared under liberal open licenses…

  The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published its latest Open Educational Resources (OER) report yesterday: Open Educational Resources: A Catalyst for Innovation, Educational Research and Innovation. (PDF) The report covers the following topics: OER in educational policy and practice OER as a catalyst for innovation Fostering new forms of learning for the…

The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) is a UK-based charity that “seeks to transform the lives of poor and vulnerable children in developing countries.” Yesterday the foundation announced its first Transparency Policy, which requires its grantees and consultants to widely disseminate resources they create under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY). We…

Game Plan. By Rob Armes, CC BY 3.0 Today, the OER community releases the Foundations for OER Strategy Development. This document provides a concise analysis of where the global OER movement currently stands: what the common threads are, where the greatest opportunities and challenges lie, and how we can more effectively work together as a…

The Free Music Archive, a long-running Creative Commons music platform, is running its first-ever fundraising drive. It will run from mid-November until mid-December 2015, and is offering donors shirts and stickers at various pledge levels. The Free Music Archive has existed for many years and has provided millions of users with curated, ‘some rights reserved’…

The final text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was released earlier this month. The gigantic agreement contains sweeping provisions regarding environmental regulation, pharmaceutical procurement, intellectual property, labor standards, food safety, and many other things. If adopted, it would be the most significant expansion of international restrictions on copyright in over two decades. Over the last five years, the TPP…