Attribution has always been a cornerstone of working with other people’s creativity and knowledge. As Creative Commons reminds us, practicing attribution serves many important functions, from providing verifiable evidence of a claim, to paying respect to the work of others, and creating pathways for traffic and financial value to flow. Despite the importance of attribution, many of today’s AI systems fail to acknowledge the sources of knowledge and creativity that make them possible.

Looking for great images, videos, music, or educational resources that you can actually use? Our next webinar as part of CC’s 25th anniversary will show you how to find CC-licensed content, properly attribute the work, and reuse materials with confidence. We’ll explore some of the best places to discover openly licensed content, decode the different…

The Creative Commons Open Heritage Companion is a practitioner’s guide developed to help cultural heritage institutions navigate the journey from closed to open collections. Grounded in the legal, policy, and ethical questions institutions face along the way, the Companion brings together resources, tools, and examples that guide practitioners from their first questions about openness to leading the field.

At the recent Founders Fireside Chat, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig referred to himself as “hopelessly naive.” It struck me that this sort of naivete—the kind that is about believing in the potential for good when sharing knowledge with other humans—is the glue that holds the entire Creative Commons movement together, across borders and belief systems.

Over the past 25 years, Creative Commons has helped transform openness from an aspiration into a global practice. Through open licensing, communities around the world have built new models for sharing. The Legacy Of series reflects on four interconnected movements—Open Access, Open Education, Open Science, and Open Culture—and the people who helped shape them.

Twenty-five years ago, a small group of people made a bet. They believed that if you gave creators a simple set of tools and licenses in language that a lawyer, a machine, and a human could all read, millions of people might choose to share their work with the world instead of locking it down.
“We said, oh gosh, if a million people use these licenses, that would be amazing,” Hal Abelson recalled, laughing at how small that ambition sounds now. Today the number “starts with a B.” Hal’s quote was one of many memorable moments during Creative Commons’ Founders Fireside Chat, a special benefit event for CC’s 25th anniversary.

Watch the event recording Join us for a rare and intimate conversation with some of the voices who helped build the commons. To mark 25 years of Creative Commons, this special founders fireside chat brings together Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Molly Van Houweling, in conversation with moderator Glenn O. Brown Together, they’ll go beyond…

Giovanna Fontenelle is a journalist, historian, and master’s in Social History. She works as a Program Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, in the Content Enablement team, previously called Culture and Heritage. She’s a member of the Creative Commons Global Network, ICOM Brasil, co-founded WikiMulheres+, and was the general coordinator of Creative Commons Brasil. She works…

Merete Sanderhoff is an art historian working as curator and senior advisor of digital museum practice at SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark. She is part of the team that is responsible for all strategic development and uses of digital technologies across the museum’s operations, keeping a strong focus on opening up cultural heritage to…