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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Creative Commons Legal Database is a collection of case law and legal scholarship to help our users learn more about legal issues surrounding Creative Commons (CC) licenses and legal tools. This information has been contributed by many dedicated members of the CC Global Network and the CC Legal Team. It was shared in a…
Creative Commons is excited to announce the publication of the Romanian language translations of version 4.0 of the CC License Suite and of the CC0 public domain dedication. These translations will enable approximately 30 million people to understand our licenses in their first or second language! We could not be more pleased to see this…
Over 300 million images are uploaded to Facebook a day. Yes, just Facebook. Once other social media and photo-sharing platforms like Flickr, Unsplash, Instagram, etc. are taken into account, that number quickly grows into the billions. A lot has changed since the dawn of photography in the 19th century—when Nicéphore Niépce (a.k.a. the “Father of…
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…