Sarah Hinchliff Pearson
Sarah has been writing, lawyering, and strategizing about creativity and collaboration in the digital age for more than 15 years. Over the span of 10 years at Creative Commons, she has functioned as in-house legal counsel, project manager, book author, fundraiser, event organizer, curriculum developer, team leader, and organizational strategist — often at the same time.
As General Counsel, she oversees the legal services necessary to support the globally distributed operations of Creative Commons, and provides strategic legal and business counsel on all facets of nonprofit operations. She also plays a key role in CC’s programmatic work, leading the stewardship of CC’s legal tools and advising the organization on new programmatic initiatives.
Before joining CC, she did a fellowship at Stanford’s Center for Internet & Society and worked as an IP associate at Fried Frank in New York City. She has a journalism degree from Northwestern University, a law degree from the University of Michigan, and an Executive MBA from the University of Iowa.
Photo credit: Amber Kaiser, CC BY
Sarah's News
In this 20th anniversary year of the CC license suite, we are pleased to be renewing our commitment to license stewardship. Creative Commons has always taken its stewardship responsibilities seriously, engaging in multi-year consultation processes for versioning the tools, publishing official translations of the licenses into dozens of languages, and working to educate people about … Read More “What’s Next for CC Licenses”
The CC license suite was foundational to the creation of Creative Commons. To this day, the stewardship of CC licenses and public domain tools remains one of the core functions of the organization. At this milestone of the 20th anniversary of Creative Commons, we are embarking on a public consultation around CC’s stewardship. Specifically, we … Read More “License Stewardship consultation”
For several years, Creative Commons has been monitoring an alarming increase in enforcement actions relating to CC licenses. Today, we are announcing the next phase of our evolving response to this complex issue, and we would like your input. There are several elements to our plans, but the centerpiece today is a draft Statement of … Read More “New License Enforcement Principles for Public Comment”
Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) raise several questions when it comes to the use of copyright material and Creative Commons-licensed content in particular.1 One of them is whether CC-licensed content (e.g. photographs, artworks, text, music, etc.) should be used as input to train AI. To get a sense of the various views on this question, … Read More “Should CC-Licensed Content be Used to Train AI? It Depends.”
We are very excited to announce the publication of the official translations of the CC License Suite 4.0 and CC0 into Slovenian. These legal code translations are the products of years of painstaking work by a team of volunteers at the Intellectual Property Institute in Slovenia, led by Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič. The first drafts … Read More “The CC License Suite 4.0 and CC0 Are Now Available in Slovenian!”
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”
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 … Read More “Thank You for Translating “Made with Creative Commons””
The version 4.0 license suite and CC0 are now available in Korean as a result of the collaborative work of CC Korea volunteers. The 4.0 licenses are also now available in Czech, thanks to the work and leadership of CC community members from the Czech Republic. For the Korean translations, the process was initiated by … Read More “New official translations of CC legal tools published for Korean and Czech”
Guest post by Ioanna Tzagaraki from the University of Cyprus. All six of the Creative Commons licenses v4.0 are now available in Greek as a result of the joint and volunteer effort of the University of Cyprus, the Pedagogical Institute of Cyprus, and the legal firm Ioannides Demetriou LLC. The multi-year process began when the first draft … Read More “CC’s 4.0 license suite now in Greek”
Creative Commons is proud to announce the release of the official translations of the Latvian 4.0 licenses and Basque 4.0 licenses, as well as the Basque CC0 translation.