January 14-18, 2019 is #CopyrightWeek, and today’s theme is Public Domain and Creativity, which aims to explore how copyright policy should encourage creativity, not hamper it. Excessive copyright terms inhibit our ability to comment, criticize, and rework our common culture. On January 1, tens of thousands of books, films, visual art, sheet music, plays, and…

Majd Al-shihabi, the inaugural Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellow, is a Palestinian-Syrian systems design engineer focusing on the role of technology in urban systems and policy design. He is passionate about development, access to knowledge, user centered design, and the internet, and experiments with implementing tools and infrastructures that catalyze social change. He studied engineering at…

Vincent Moon’s Hibridos project melds text, music, and ritual through a breathtaking series of films produced in collaboration with his partner Priscilla Telmon.

Watch or listen to the recording on Vimeo, YouTube, or Soundcloud. On February 15, Creative Commons hosted an evening of demos, discussion, and drinks in Los Angeles called, “CC as a Vehicle for Social Change in Emerging & Immersive Media.” With 200 guests registered, the evening featured demos of three virtual reality social impact projects. They were:…

Over the next few months, we will be talking to users and creators of CC images, text, and data as part of updating the usability of CC tools in 2018. For our purposes, we are defining CC usability as both enhancing the experience of sharing and collaborating with CC’s current toolset, and conceiving of new…

Beeple, AKA Mike Winkelmann, is a graphic designer, artist, and videographer whose popular video art and design work has largely been released free under CC.

We’ve been thinking about the role of Creative Commons in 2017, an era where much of digital sharing culture exists within walled garden platforms, with liking and commenting on insta-photos and sharing playlists that can only be streamed. In other words, the web has changed since CC initially launched in 2001, and we are grappling…

Meticulously researched and incredibly entertaining, Theft explores 2,000 years of musical history, from Plato’s admonition that “musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state” to the recent “Blurred Lines” case – and everything in between.

We need your help! Over the next year, we will be investigating and reporting on 2-3 of the most compelling stories about collaboration in the commons. We want to tell the story of when and why a creator first decides to use CC, the kinds of connections they make online, how they invite and encourage…

OpenScore is a new crowdsourcing initiative that aims to digitize classical sheet music by composers whose works are in the public domain, like Mozart and Beethoven.