At its meeting on October 16, 2015, the Creative Commons Board of Directors unanimously approved the following motion: Consensus Resolution re: Bassel Safadi  WHEREAS: Creative Commons is hosting its bi-annual Global Summit in Seoul, South Korea from Oct 15-17, 2015, an event that has previously been attended by Bassel Khartabil, where he was an active…

As the Creative Commons Global Summit kicks off this week in Seoul, we are acutely aware of the absence of Bassel Khartabil, the Palestinian-Syrian open source software engineer and activist who led the CC Syria affiliate team. He has been imprisoned in Syria since March 2012. It is an incredibly dangerous time for Bassel. Earlier this month we heard…

Government funders are increasingly adopting open licensing policies for copyrightable works and data they create or commission. Over the last few years we’ve been excited to work with philanthropic foundations to implement similar open licensing policies for their grant-funded and in-house created works. Because there is a limit to the funds available to even the largest foundations, most…

Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali, CC BY-NC 2.0 A few months ago the United States Copyright Office issued a request for comments on an extended collective licensing (ECL) pilot program they are considering for mass digitization projects. The Office thinks that such a program would permit greater access to cultural works by allowing…

Post written by John Weitzmann Creative Commons and the European group of CC Affiliates are proud and happy to announce the launch of the official Polish translation of CC0 version 1.0. Translation is an essential part of our efforts to be a truly global project, offering legal tools that work for everyone regardless of language…

The declaration increases interoperability of the commons for games, hardware designs, and more In January we officially opened a public consultation (blog post) on CC BY-SA 4.0 unilateral compatibility with GPLv3, in accordance with our ShareAlike compatibility process and criteria. Following additional months of detailed analysis, discussion and deliberation with the Free Software Foundation and…

Cape Town by Kemal Kestelli on Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0. Earlier this year, Creative Commons and the Open Policy Network hosted the first Institute for Open Leadership (IOL). The IOL is a training and support program to empower new leaders interested in crafting and implementing an open licensing policy within their discipline. We had a…

Creative Commons is pleased to announce a grant award in the amount of $450,000 over 3 years from the Arcadia Fund, the charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Since its inception in 2001, Arcadia has awarded grants in excess of $331 million. Arcadia works to protect endangered culture and nature. Creative Commons will…

This is a guest post by Jan Gondol. Pencil by Mari Pi, Public Domain. In the midst of the European migrant crisis, the Czech Republic is showing the power of open educational resources (OER). EDUin, a non-profit organization based in Prague worked with the Czech organization of civic education teachers to address the current migrant…

  There are plenty of examples to depict our broken copyright system, but the “dancing baby” case is one of the most notorious. That’s the one where Universal Music used the DMCA to take down a 29-second YouTube video of an adorable baby dancing to “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince. Putting aside the legal questions,…