If you work with K-12 students in the United States (or if you are one), then you’ll want to know about this video competition. Engage 2012 asks young people to create short videos about political issues impacting their communities. All entries will be uploaded to YouTube under CC BY, meaning lots of great fodder for…

Ten years after the release of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OA advocates last week released updated recommendations in support of open access around the world, touching on areas including policy, licensing, sustainability, and advocacy. Of particular interest are recommendations that urge funders to require open access when they make grants: “When possible, funder policies…

Paul Cutler / CC BY SA. Creative Commons is looking for an experienced, innovative, and technically inclined individual to drive product development at CC. This individual will play a highly influential role in the future of Creative Commons as we look to the next 10 years. For those that have been paying attention, this is…

This week marks a momentous occasion, as Europeana — Europe’s digital library — has released 20 million records into the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. This release is the largest one-time dedication of cultural data to the public domain using CC0. The Europeana dataset consists of descriptive information from a huge trove of digitized…

After more than two years of hard work, the CC China Mainland 3.0 licenses are ready for use. Congratulations to Chunyan Wang and the entire CC China Mainland team. Thank you to everyone who helped create these licenses, including the community members who participated in the public discussion. China / Dainis Matisons / CC BY…

A few days ago the Students for Free Culture (SFC) published a provocative blog post called “Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0.” The article urged Creative Commons to deprecate (meaning “retire” or similar), or otherwise change the way Creative Commons offers licenses containing the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives terms, because they “do…

We’re psyched to be a part of OKFestival: Open Knowledge in Action. The OKFestival takes place September 17-22, 2012 in Helsinki, Finland, and features “a series of hands-on workshops, talks, hackathons, meetings and sprints” exploring a variety of areas including open development, open cultural heritage, and gender and diversity in openness. You can buy tickets…

Last week, Muslims all over the world celebrated Eid al-fitr, a festivity which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan, dedicated to fasting and praying. Since 2010, Arab world–based Creative Commons communities have celebrated Ramadan by organizing “Creative Commons Iftars” (CC Iftar) across the region. CC Iftar Doha / CC Qatar / CC…

Three new employees have joined Creative Commons in the last few weeks. Join us in welcoming Jenny Utke, Paul Stacey, and Puneet Kishor to the team.   Jenny Utke, Senior Accountant Jenny is originally from Michigan but has lived in California for over 10 years. She started her career as an auditor at CPA firms…

catalogue / elise.y / CC BY As reported a few weeks ago, OCLC has recommended that its member libraries adopt the Open Data Commons Attribution license (ODC-BY) when they share their library catalog data online. The recommendation to use an open license like ODC-BY is a positive step forward for OCLC because it helps communicate…