thank you note for every language / woodleywonderworks / CC BY As we take stock of our achievements in 2013 and plan our legal work for the year ahead, we would be remiss not to pause and express our deepest gratitude to the many individuals and organizations whose contributions made one of CC’s most significant…

Here’s another end of year list: all the awesome things the School of Open community accomplished in 2013. Last year, we highlighted the work we put into materializing School of Open as a concrete entity with goals and people involved. This year, we actually launched the School with a full set of online courses and…

Invest in a more creative world.Support Creative Commons. Sudanese political cartoonist Khalid Albaih pushes boundaries with his art to reach new viewers and ignite change. “People should support Creative Commons if they care about what they’re doing, and they want to get their work to as many people as possible; if they care about collaborating…

In November we released version 4.0 of the Creative Commons license suite, and today the Open Definition Advisory Council approved the CC 4.0 Attribution (BY) and Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) International licenses as conformant with the Open Definition. The Open Definition sets out principles that define “openness” in relation to data and content…It can be summed up…

Last month, Creative Commons and several other groups responded to the European Commission’s consultation on licensing, datasets and charging for the re-use of public sector information (PSI). See our response here. There were 355 submissions to the questionnaire (spreadsheet download), apparently from all EU Member States except Cyprus. The Commission hosted a hearing (PDF of…

[written in collaboration with Shanan Peters, Professor, Department of GeoScience, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Principal Investigator of the Paleodb Project] now available under After a year of community feedback and discussion, the Paleobiology Database has taken the decision that “All records are made available to the public based on a Creative Commons license that…

at BioMed Central (BMC) is one of the largest open access (OA) publishers in the world with 250 peer-reviewed OA journals, and more than 100,000 OA articles published yearly. BMC is also long-time user of CC licenses to accomplish its mission of husbanding and promoting open science. BMC has been publishing articles under a CC…

Pick Team Open.Support Creative Commons. On this date in 2002, we launched the first Creative Commons license suite. But it’s what happened next that matters. Thousands of creators started using CC licenses to share their works, everything from film to educational resources to science research. And sometime between then and now, the world changed a…

If you’re not familiar with ccMixter, you should be. It’s an amazing community for downloading and sharing CC-licensed, remixable music and samples. ccMixter has released two albums of holiday music this year; you can buy them or receive them for free for becoming a ccMixter supporter. From the press release: Season of Gratitude was first…

CC in the box of letters / Kristina Alexanderson / CC BY-SA For how popular they are worldwide, it’s striking how rarely CC licenses’ validity has been questioned in court. We consider that a testament to the care with which we craft the licenses: we try to find every possible area of contention or ambiguity…