It’s the end of the line for the EU’s proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. The dramatic negative effects of upload filters would be disastrous to the vision Creative Commons cares about as an organisation and global community. The continued inclusion of Article 13 makes the directive impossible to support as-is. Last…

January 14-18, 2019 is #CopyrightWeek, and today’s theme is Public Domain and Creativity, which aims to explore how copyright policy should encourage creativity, not hamper it. Excessive copyright terms inhibit our ability to comment, criticize, and rework our common culture. On January 1, tens of thousands of books, films, visual art, sheet music, plays, and…

  12/6/18 UPDATE: January 2019 courses have only seven tickets left!  Background: The CC Certificate provides an-in depth study of Creative Commons licenses and open practices, developing participants’ open licensing proficiency and understanding of the broader context for open advocacy. The course content targets copyright law, CC legal tools, values and recommended practices of working…

Six years ago we wrote a blog post titled WIPO’s Broadcasting Treaty: Still Harmful, Still Unnecessary. At the time, the proposed treaty — which would grant to broadcasters a separate, exclusive copyright-like right in the signals that they transmit, separate from any copyrights in the content of the transmissions — had already been on WIPO’s docket for…

We’re coming up on a crucial decision on changes to copyright in the European Union that will govern how creativity is accessed and shared for years to come. On 12 September the European Parliament will vote on the draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. If you’re in the EU, go to https://saveyourinternet.eu/…

After two successful years in Toronto, Canada, the 2019 Global Summit will be held in Lisbon, Portugal May 9-11 2019. Please save the date!

Photos of the event are over at Flickr. Videos of the event are over at YouTube. Co-hosted by Creative Commons and the Internet Archive, this celebration featured keynote addresses by Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, lightning talks, demos, multimedia displays and more to mark the “re-opening” of the public domain in the United States. The event took take place…

Thank you to everyone who attended, participated, tuned in, and raised their voices in support of the Commons this April, whether it was in Toronto with 435 other Commoners or online through the stream and social feed.

In December Diego Gómez was finally cleared of the criminal charges levied against him for sharing an academic research paper on the internet. The Tribunal de Bogotá—the Colombian appellate court—affirmed the lower court’s acquittal. Gómez is a scientist from Colombia who had been criminally prosecuted for the last three years for sharing an academic paper…

The Creative Commons Global Summit, the annual event for the promotion of open knowledge, sharing, and the Commons around the globe, kicks off on Friday in Toronto, Canada.