mlinksva / CC BY It’s a new year, which means it’s also the perfect time to re-start our search for Chief Technology Officer at Creative Commons! Mike Linksvayer, Vice President and former CTO, says, “This is a fun job (I was Nathan’s predecessor, from 2003-2007) that offers technical, management, and communications challenges and opportunities for…

In November we wrote that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was soliciting comments on two related Requests for Information (RFI). One asked for feedback on how the federal government should manage public access to scholarly publications resulting from federal investments, and the other wanted input on public access to the…

In the next two weeks, the U.S. Congress will take up deliberations on SOPA/PIPA, the Internet censorship bills. We’ve written about it here and here, and we’re writing again to help stop U.S. American Censorship of the Internet. On a related note, Vice.com notes that the website of the author of SOPA, U.S. Representative Lamar…

We have done a lot of thinking about data in the past year. As a result, we have recently published a set of detailed FAQs designed to help explain how CC licenses work with data and databases. These FAQs are intended to: (1) alert CC licensors that some uses of their data and databases may…

A new pilot project between Creative Commons, Creative Commons’ legal affiliate in France, and the French collecting society SACEM allows SACEM members to license their works under one of the three non-commercial CC 3.0 licenses. Previously, authors and composers of musical works represented by SACEM (the biggest French collecting society) were prevented from using any…

Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter. Happy New Year! We head into 2012 with exciting new CC developments from all over the world. CC Kazakhstan and CC Rwanda At the end of 2011, we announced two new CC Affiliates from Kazakhstan and Rwanda. Led…

In December 2011 the U.S. House of Representatives introduced The Research Works Act (H.R.3699), a bill that will ban public access to publicly funded research. SPARC says, “Essentially, the bill seeks to prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grants to require that articles reporting on publicly funded research be made accessible to the public online.”…

Many who follow Creative Commons and its work already know that we have begun working on the next version of licenses, the 4.0 suite. Even while this process has begun, we are finishing a few remaining, important 3.0 ports. One of these is the Uganda 3.0 license suite, which we are pleased to announce is…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP0rD0dG5oA Time-Lapse of a RepRap Printing Interlocking Rings by Jonathan Palecek / CC BY. With the exception of CC0, the Creative Commons licenses are only for granting permissions to use non-software works. The worlds of software and engineering have additional concerns outside of the scope of what is addressed by the CC licenses. 3D printing…

Congratulations to Mozilla on the release of the Mozilla Public License 2.0 after a two year versioning process. As Mozilla chair Mitchell Baker writes “Version 2.0 is similar in spirit to the previous versions, but shorter, better, and more compatible with other Free Software and Open Source Licenses.” MPL 1.1 is one of the more…