Creative Commons is pleased to be a part of the second annual Public Domain Day celebration held in Washington D.C. on January 30, 2020!  In collaboration with the Internet Archive, the Institute for Intellectual Property & Social Justice, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, and SPARC, this event will “bring together a diverse group…

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…

Creative Commons regularly works with governments, foundations, and other institutions worldwide to help them create, adopt, and implement open licensing policies. These policies typically require grant recipients to openly license and freely share the work they create with grant funds. We do this to ensure publicly (and privately) funded works are openly licensed and freely…

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…

This is part of a series of posts introducing the projects built by open source contributors mentored by Creative Commons during Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019. Mayank Nader was one of those contributors and we are grateful for his work on this project. Creative Commons (CC) is working towards providing easy access to CC-licensed…

A screenshot of the CC BY traditional and simplified Chinese translation. Licensed CC BY

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…

At Creative Commons, sharing and gratitude go hand in hand. We empower the sharing of knowledge and creativity, as well as celebrate the collaborative creativity and gratitude that sharing engenders. As Chair of the Creative Commons Board of Directors, I am ending 2019 with a special sense of gratitude for the CC community. This has…

Above is a screenshot of the students’ proposed prototype for an improved CC Search. (CC BY)

Since its launch, CC Search has become more than just a search tool for CC-licensed content; it has come to exemplify the virtuous cycle of knowledge creation—where we create, collaborate, and learn from one another.  Our recent collaboration with a group of students from UC Berkeley was a true exercise in this cycle of creation…

In 2017, CC published Made with Creative Commons, a book examining 24 different business models built around CC licenses and CC-licensed content. Financially supported by more than 1600 backers on Kickstarter, the project itself is an example of how openly licensed work can be funded and how CC-licensed content can evolve over time.  After publishing…

The following is a guest post by Creative Commons community member Sebastiaan ter Burg. In January 2020 there will be events all over the world to celebrate the fact that new works have entered the public domain. The country where a work is published determines when copyright expires. For example, where I’m from in the…