The following list sets out some basic things that you should think about before you apply a Creative Commons license to your material, or use Creative Commons-licensed material. It is not an exhaustive list. If you have additional questions or concerns, feel free to post to one of our email discussion lists, send us an…

Opensourceway / CC BY-SA United States Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois and Al Franken of Minnesota have introduced legislation called the Affordable College Textbook Act that seeks to make college textbooks affordable and openly available under the Creative Commons Attribution license. According to Durbin’s press release, Bill S.1704 does 5 things: Creates a grant program…

photo by: Jeremy Harris “Could you please print out your website on company letterhead and mail it to me to process your request?” This is the kind of question Anil Prasad received from music industry professionals and publicists when he began Innerviews in 1994—the internet’s first and longest-running music magazine. The internet has evolved since…

I’m thrilled to be speaking at Design Exchange Boston tomorrow along with Ben Einstein, Martha Buskirk, Asya Calixto, and Sofya Polyakov. I always love speaking with designers about Creative Commons because they intuitively understand the benefits of sharing their work openly. When Benjamin Franklin invited others to iterate on the Franklin Stove, he wasn’t just…

Philip Pullman / Adrian Hon / CC BY-SA Catherine Casserly / Joi Ito / CC BY The Index on Censorship just published a dialogue on the future of copyright between Creative Commons CEO Cathy Casserly and British writer and Society of Authors president Philip Pullman. Pullman writes that internet piracy has made it harder for…

Mt. Kenya / Chris 73 / CC BY-SA Guest post by Elizabeth Kiragu Wanjugu and Tobias Schonwetter As we were busy getting ready for our community Global Summit a few weeks ago, we nearly missed the announcement of another very important addition to that community – our new CC Kenya affiliate. Our new Kenyan team…

International arrivals / James Cridland / CC BY We are delighted to finally publish the fourth and final draft of the 4.0 license suite for public comment. We are publishing draft 4 of BY-NC-SA today, and will publish the other five licenses over the course of the next few days. The prior public comment period…

Earlier this year, CC China Mainland volunteers helped organize an educational event to promote open licensing. The CC China Mainland team recaps the event in this guest blog post, which originally appeared on the CC China Mainland blog. CC China Mainland volunteers recently helped organize the Trans-disciplinary System Integration Design Challenge, a program of the…

Last week the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) released a draft plan on how they’d support public access to federally funded research aligned with the February 22 White House public access directive. The SHared Access Research Ecosystem, or SHARE, is a…

#FreeBassel / David Kindler / CC BY If you subscribe to Creative Commons’ newsletter or follow us on Twitter and Facebook, you’re likely familiar with the story of Bassel Khartabil, our friend and longtime CC volunteer who’s been in prison in Syria since March 2012. Today, on the second birthday that Bassel has spent in…