Creative Commons is proud to announce the launch of our new license chooser tool. The license chooser has been completely redesigned for greater clarity and ease of use. While the original license chooser was successful at simplifying the act of selecting a license and applying it to one’s work, its linear workflow resembled a registration…

Creative Commons just reached an exciting milestone. As of this week, there are four million Creative Commons–licensed videos on YouTube. That’s over forty years’ worth of footage to remix and reuse, all licensed under CC BY, the most permissive CC license. One thing that makes this mass of CC-licensed content really exciting is that all…

The first School of Open Virtual Sprint is set to take place next Tuesday, 24 July from 2:00-5:00pm Berlin time (UTC/GMT+2). Learn how you can participate below. LSE Sports Day, Malden Sports Ground, c1920s / LSE Library / No known copyright restrictions Before the Sprint Join the School of Open discussion list at https://groups.google.com/group/school-of-open. This…

It has been a little over a month since I joined Creative Commons as Community Support Intern, and now that I’m in the thick of things, I wanted to share with you what I’m working on this summer. Allow me to introduce myself. I am currently a Master’s student at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of…

Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Foundations are pleased to announce the winners of the Why Open Education Matters video competition. The competition was launched in March 2012 to solicit creative videos that clearly communicate the use and potential of free, high-quality Open Educational Resources — or “OER” — and describe the…

Last week, open access journal First Monday published an excellent research article (licensed CC BY-NC-ND) by Patryk Galuszka called Netlabels and Democratization of the Music Industry. If you’re not familiar with the term, a netlabel is a sort of lighter-weight record label. Netlabels distribute music recordings primarily over the Internet, many of them for free…

Creative Commons Africa Convening 2012 / Ibtihel Zaatouri / CC BY On June 26-27, Creative Commons hosted a historic event — the very first meeting of its community held on the African continent, the CC Africa Regional Convening 2012. Held in Entebbe, Uganda, on the shores of Lake Victoria, the meeting brought together nearly 50…

Recently, three awesome people joined the CC team, including Kat Walsh (new CC Counsel), Elliot Harmon, (new CC Communications Manager), and Sara Crouse (new CC Director of Strategic Partnerships). You’ll be seeing their names pop up often in email exchanges, at events, and on this blog. Kat joins us with an extensive background in the…

PeerJ Founders Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt / Duncan Hull / CC BY In their excellent Washington Post opinion piece, Matt Cooper and Elizabeth Wiley suggest that federally funded research should be freely accessible over the Internet. They argue that when students lose their access to academic databases after graduation, society doesn’t get the same…

Bassel / joi / CC BY On March 15, 2012, Bassel Khartabil was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus. Since then, his family has received no official explanation for his detention or information regarding his whereabouts. However, his family has recently learned from previous detainees at the security branch…