There is a quiet, familiar beauty found in still life, a type of art that depicts primarily inanimate objects, like animals, food, or flowers. These comforting images offer a sense of certainty and simplicity in uncertain and complex times. This could explain why over six million Instagram users have fallen in love with still life…
"St. Valentine's Day - The Old Story in All Lands (1868)" by Harper & Bros. Cooper Hewitt (CC0)
February is the time to share virtual hugs, chocolates, and witty cards with family and friends for Valentine’s Day ♥️ (or “Friend’s Day” in Finland!) This Valentine’s Day, we want you to share something a little different: your creative work. In our Open Sharing is Caring challenge, we’re asking you to openly share an image, song, artwork, research paper, poem, GIF…whatever it…
Illustration from the book "Songs, naval and national" by Thomas Dibdin, published in London, England in 1841.
Until recently, I had never heard of the sea shanty “The Wellerman”. My sea shanty repertoire consisted of “What can you do with a drunken sailor” to sea-songs on the soundtrack of Master and Commander. However, Nathan Evans, a fellow Scot who hails, like me, from North Lanarkshire, has changed all of this. His rendition…
Back in 2010, we had the great pleasure of working with world famous artist/graphic designer Shepard Fairey on a project to re-envision the Creative Commons logo in his signature style. At the time, we released a t-shirt with Fairey’s remix as part of a fundraising campaign and later put it on a CC tote bag…
The wrap-up party for the annual CC Global Summit is always incredible, featuring local artists and musicians who send us off in style. Of course, things are a little different this year as we’ve transformed our in-person event to an entirely virtual one—but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a way to party together like…
5169051592_632fc3cc6b_h Kollage Kid (CC BY-NC-SA)
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…
La Donna Della Finestra, 1881 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti via Birmingham Museums Trust (CC0)
The following is a summary of “GLAM Collections on Social Media: Navigating Copyright Questions—a conversation with Aleksandra Strzelichowska, Mikka Gee Conway and Anne Young” published on 31 May 2020 by Scann (licensed CC BY). How often do you debate whether to share an openly licensed work on social media? If you do share a work,…
"Sultan Ahmed Mosque" by Konevi (CC0) via Pexels
On the occasion of both Earth Day and World Intellectual Property Day, which this year centers on the theme of Innovation for a Green Future, we’d like to underline the importance of cultural heritage preservation as a response to the threats posed by climate change. In this post, we’ll also share some insights on how…
The Smithsonian—the world’s largest museum and research institution—announced yesterday Smithsonian Open Access, an initiative that removes copyright restrictions from 2.8 million digital collection 2D and 3D images and nearly two centuries of data. This major initiative uses CC0—Creative Commons’ public domain dedication tool—to make millions of images and data freely available to the public. “Our…
Public domain advocates celebrated on January 1 because, for the second year in a row, published works newly entered the public domain in the United States due to copyright expiration. To mark the occasion, Creative Commons (CC) collaborated with the Internet Archive, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Creative Commons USA, the Institute…