Open as in Books? / Alan Levine / CC BY-SA This week, U.S. News and World Report ran an excellent story about the rise of openly-licensed educational materials. Simon Owens’ article touches on many of the open education landmarks we’ve been celebrating over the past year, including the Department of Labor’s TAA-CCCT grant program and…

This is sound public policy; taxpayers should have free and legal access to publicly funded educational content. This is an excerpt from comments we submitted last week to the U.S. Department of Education on the proposed requirements for the Investing in Innovation Fund (I3 program). Creative Commons, along with the Open CourseWare Consortium, the Institute…

2013 starts off fresh with Dan Mills joining the Creative Commons team as our director of product strategy. We are delighted to have Dan onboard and look forward to engaging his leadership. In his new role, Dan will head the Technology Team in the creation of software products to propel the Creative Commons mission forward…

Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz (2002) / Rich Gibson / CC BY Friends and Commoners, It is with incredible sadness that I write to tell you that yesterday, Aaron Swartz took his life. Aaron was one of the early architects of Creative Commons. As a teenager, he helped design the code layer to our licenses,…

This year Open Education Week takes place on March 11-15 and features a series of events, workshops, project showcases, and webinars from around the world. If you care about sharing knowledge, reducing barriers to educational access, and helping to grow the amount of free and open educational resources (OER) available on the web — join…

Bassel / joi / CC BY Today in the Wall Street Journal, Creative Commons co-founder Lawrence Lessig has a thoughtful piece about Bassel Khartabil, the longtime CC volunteer who has been detained by Syrian authorities since March. In late 2012, Foreign Policy named Mr. Khartabil one of this year’s top 100 thinkers. The magazine singled…

Each year on January 1st, copyright protection expires for millions of creative works, allowing those works to be used by anyone without restriction or need for permission. On this Public Domain Day, we celebrate the rich creative works that have risen into the public domain, and mourn the massive number of works that could have…

As research communities worldwide look for new ways to make the scientific process and its data and results more open and participatory, New Zealand is showing us how it is done. In July 2010, The New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL) approved by the Cabinet provided guidance for agencies to follow when…

In January 2009, Al Jazeera launched a pioneering initiative: the first news repository licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. At the time, restrictions imposed by the Israeli military in Gaza prevented international news outlets from reaching the Strip and reporting from within. Al Jazeera, which had the advantage of being the only news outlet…

In November, representatives from CC projects in Asia Pacific nations came together in Jakarta, Indonesia. Every second year we gather in person to combine powers and plan for the future – and this time affiliates in South Korea, China Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand were hosted by CC…