#FREEBASSEL / Kennisland / CC BY-SA We’re big fans of Disquiet Junto, a group of Creative Commons musicians who create original works and remixes each week around a different theme. This week, Disquiet Junto is honoring Bassel Khartabil, the Syrian CC community leader who’s been in prison in Syria since March 2012, with a music…

A few years ago, a major copyright reform in Brazil seemed imminent. What happened? On the Creative Commons Brazil blog, Mariana Giorgetti Valente and Pedro Nicoletti Mizukami have an excellent post on the complicated history of copyright reform in Brazil: In December 2007, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture — then under Minister Gilberto Gil’s administration…

As of yesterday (January 15, 2014), the Group on Earth Observations approved Creative Commons as now a Participating Organization (PO) at its GEO-X Plenary in Geneva. GEO was launched in response to calls for action by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and by the G8 (Group of Eight) leading industrialized countries to exploit…

The following is a guest post by LIUPing and SUN Beibei, members of the CC China Mainland Affiliate team and the School of Open community. Below, they describe CC China Mainland’s experience with running a two-week open educational resources (OER) summer camp for the children of Luxi Island, a remote island off the coast of…

#FreeBassel / David Kindler / CC BY We’ve written several times on this blog about Bassel Khartabil, the Syrian Creative Commons community leader who’s been imprisoned since March 2012 without having had any charges brought against him. European Parliament members Charles Tannock and Ana Gomes recently submitted an official question to the Parliament leadership concerning…

I promise to keep this short. I wanted to share a note we received from CC donor Dorothea Salo: When I was a librarian hired to run an institutional repository, CC licenses helped me cut through copyright thickets with worried-but-interested faculty. CC’s unwavering support for free culture, and promotion of its benefits, demonstrated every day…

Today is the third day of Copyright Week, and today, we’re focusing on open access. As EFF put it in the Copyright Week principles: The results of publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public online, to be fully used by anyone, anywhere, anytime. This is a principle that Creative Commons has…

If you use Google Image Search to look for CC-licensed photographs, you might have noticed an improvement to the interface this week. Rather than having to hunt for it in the advanced search options, you can now filter by CC license right from the “Search Tools” menu on the search results page. You can also…

The public domain is the DNA of creativity. Whereby current copyright law requires permission in order to use a work, the public domain is a copyright-free zone whereby anyone can use the work for any purpose without restriction under copyright law. One way works rise into the public domain is when the copyright protection term…