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Category: Licenses & Tools

Revisiting the Openverse: Finding Open Images and Audio

Better Internet, Licenses & Tools, Technology
Blurry bluish-black image of stars or lights at night seen through a transparent screen marked with smeared human handprints.

“art is the universe creating itself as it goes” by submerged~, here slightly cropped, is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0. Looking for that perfect picture to illustrate your post? That catchy tune to jazz up your video? Look no further than Openverse, the huge library of free and open stock photos, images, and audio…

Better Sharing for Generative AI

Better Internet, Licenses & Tools, Open Creativity, Technology
A bluish surrealist painting generated by the DALL-E 2 AI platform showing a small grayish human figure holding a gift out to a larger robot that has its arms extended and a head like a cello. Better Sharing With AI” by Creative Commons was generated by the DALL-E 2 AI platform with the text prompt “A surrealist painting in the style of Salvador Dali of a robot giving a gift to a person playing a cello.” CC dedicates any rights it holds to the image to the public domain via CC0.

Over the last year, innovation and use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded, providing new ways for people to create content of all sorts. For example, it’s been used to help create award winning art, develop educational materials, expedite software development, and craft business materials. Recently, three artists filed a class action lawsuit in…

Training: Open Licenses for Artists, Musicians and Creators

Licenses & Tools
The tip of a ballpoint pen with a smear of bluish ink and a water drop reflecting/containing a pink flower blossom perched on the tip, highly magnified on a glowing pink background. Macrofotografia Drops & Flowers by Mario Jr. Nicorelli, slightly cropped, is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Curious about Creative Commons licenses? Join Creative Commons staff for an overview of the six CC licenses and two public domain tools. We will describe the CC license and tool elements, their legal, machine-readable, and human-readable layers, as well as show practical use cases for each of the licenses and tools. Participants will engage in…

New FAQ on NFTs and CC0

Licenses & Tools
Black CC and CC0 logos side by side.

Unless you’ve been avoiding the internet entirely, you’ve probably heard about people buying and selling non-fungible tokens — or NFTs — unique data tokens that link to digital files, including artworks and other types of copyrightable works. CC has been following how people are creating and trading NFTs, and how the marketplace of creative works is…

What’s Next for CC Licenses

Licenses & Tools

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…

Do not feed the trolls

Licenses & Tools

Recently, there has been an increase in threatened and actual lawsuits involving CC licensed works, and in some cases, license enforcement has even become a business model. We have now learned that even long-time friend and contributor to Creative Commons, Cory Doctorow, has been targeted. Put simply, “license-enforcement-as-business model” is a perversion of the founding…

Principles for License Enforcement Published

Licenses & Tools

The principles for license enforcement are now published. The consultation period has ended, and we’re grateful to everyone who contributed their many thoughtful comments! These principles will be useful for: Platforms that host CC-licensed materials and want to incorporate them into site policy to guide user expectations Creators who want to enforce rights under a…

License Stewardship consultation

Licenses & Tools

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…