Fashion Plate (1886) published by Abel Goubad et Fils, French via the Smithsonian Design Museum (CC0)

On November 2 and 3, 2020, Creative Commons (CC), the European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) and the Onassis Foundation held the online symposium: Is Sharing Always Caring? Bringing together 250 participants from 38 countries on four continents— from museum professionals to fashion design students all the way to big fashion brands—the event was an opportunity…

Four years ago today, the Marrakesh Treaty entered into force. The Treaty is truly special in the international copyright law universe: it has a clear humanitarian and social development dimension and it’s the first international treaty that focuses on the beneficiaries of limitations and exceptions, rather than on the rights of creators or holders of…

One of our roles at Creative Commons involves influencing policy making at the international level. This is a role we can fulfill notably thanks to our permanent observer status with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the UN agency that shapes international intellectual property (IP) law. However, a few days ago, the Wikimedia Foundation’s application…

Credit: 2010 PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellows by PopTech (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Last month, cOAlition S released its Rights Retention Strategy to safeguard researchers’ intellectual ownership rights and suppress unreasonable embargo periods—Creative Commons (CC) keenly supports this initiative.  Modernizing an outdated academic publishing system  Under a traditional publishing model, researchers who want to publish their articles in a journal typically need to assign or exclusively license their…

In the second part of our series on artificial intelligence (AI) and creativity, we get immersed in the fascinating universe of AI in an attempt to determine whether it is capable of creating works eligible for copyright protection. Below, we present two examples of an AI system generating arguably novel content through two different methods:…

Image: "Love is Art Science 95" by Kollage Kid, licensed CC BY-NC 2.0.

Should novel output (such as music, artworks, poems, etc.) generated by artificial intelligence1 (AI) be protected by copyright? While this question seems straightforward, the answer certainly isn’t. It brings together technical, legal, and philosophical questions regarding “creativity,” and whether machines can be considered “authors” that produce “original” works. In search of an answer, we ran…

15318215771_72c527508c_k Photo of the Ndebele Tribe in South Africa by UN (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)-

This post was co-authored by CC’s Open Policy Manager Brigitte Vézina and Legal and Policy Intern Alexis Muscat. Tomorrow is International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, a day that seeks to raise awareness of and support Indigenous peoples’ rights and aspirations around the world. We at Creative Commons (CC) wish to highlight this important…

Today is International Museum Day and we at Creative Commons (CC) are thrilled to celebrate the institutions that curate, care for, and provide access to the world’s rich diversity of cultures, ideas, and forms of knowledge. This year’s theme, dedicated to the universal values of equality, diversity, and inclusion, is a testament to museums’ ability…

WIPO Main Building (Arpad Bogsch Building, WIPO (CC BY-NC-ND)

New beginnings at WIPO  On March 4, Daren Tang was nominated director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations agency dealing with intellectual property matters. Tang is currently the chief executive of the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) and his six-year term as top WIPO official will start on October…

Over the weekend, news emerged that upset even the most ardent skeptics of open access. Under the headline, “Trump vs Berlin” the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported that President Trump offered $1 billion USD to the German biopharmaceutical company CureVac to secure their COVID-19 vaccine “only for the United States.” In response, Jens Spahn, the…