Ryan Merkley / Rannie Turingan / CC0 I’m honored to be chosen as CEO of Creative Commons. CC is a giant of the open web, and it’s an organization that I have always believed in and truly admire. I appreciate the confidence shown by the board, and support I have already received from staff and…

This is part four of a five week series on the Affiliate Team project grants. So far, you’ve heard from our affiliates in Africa, Arab World, and Asia-Pacific. Today, we’re featuring our Europe projects, including a revived CC WordPress plugin from Finland, an awareness raising event in Dublin, Ireland, and a course for librarians and…

Is copyright a little fuzzy? / Elias Bizannes / CC BY-SA Following on the heels of “Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond,” three more School of Open courses are now open for sign-up. They are: 1. Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) This course will equip Australian educators with the copyright knowledge to confidently use copyright…

Adventures in copyright / opensourceway / CC BY-SA It has come to our attention that the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and top internet service providers are drafting curriculum to teach kids in California elementary schools that copying is wrong, or as Wired.com puts it, “Downloading is Mean!” This…

GS2013 Final Day in Hall (Ibtihel Zaatouri /

By U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Dennis Cantrell [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. We’re happy to welcome the CC United States (CC US) affiliate to the Creative Commons family. The hub for CC US will be located at the American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property…

Today’s latte, HTML5Yuko Honda / CC BY-SA Creative Commons strongly believes in the respect of copyright and the wishes of content creators. That’s why CC has created a range of legal tools that rely in part on copyright to enable our vision of a shared commons of creative and intellectual works. But when creators’ rights…

For people wanting to learn about CC and its application in different sectors, there is a sea of materials available online. In particular, CC’s international affiliates create a huge number of educational resources that cross language and cultural boundaries. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my work sorting through some of these…

Today is Day Against DRM. If you don’t already, you should know that DRM stands for Digital Rights Management (or probably more accurately, Digital Restrictions Management), and that we have blogged about this day before for good reasons, including, DRM causes problems regarding fair use, lack of competition, privacy and security breaches, forced obsolescence, and…

Freesound is a collaborative database of nearly 120,000 sounds. We first posted about the project in 2005. Freesound specializes in sounds, not songs, and those sounds have been used thousands of times from ccMixter remixes to a major motion picture. The project has just launched a complete rewrite of its site, with a new, modern…