Today, we are announcing a release of 30,000 high quality, free and open digital images from the museum’s collection under CC0 and available via their API.

“Runde mit Flechtwerk und Knoten” by Dürer, Albrecht is licensed under CC0 1.0

CC Search beta has added 470,000 images from the millions of materials contained in Europeana’s collection of Creative Commons images.

Satellites to understand our changing Earth. Image: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Yesterday, the European Space Agency announced an Open Access policy for images and data under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. ESA has made various moves toward making data and images more open in the past, but this announcement is a major milestone for the organization’s commitment to openness. Previously, ESA released individual images under Creative…

Hellas Chaos on Mars / ESA/DLR/FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO As of yesterday, the European Space Agency is now sharing all of its images and videos from the Mars Express mission under CC BY-SA. ESA is using the IGO port of CC BY-SA 3.0. ESA is one of several intergovernmental organizations to use…

Girl in white kimono, George Hendrik Breitner, 1894; CC0 Yesterday Europeana published a great case study documenting the experiences of the Dutch Rijksmuseum in opening up access to their collection of digital public domain images. The case study was written by Joris Pekel, community coordinator for cultural heritage at the Europeana Foundation. Over the last…

Kristina Alexanderson / CC BY-NC-SA Getty Images recently announced that it will allow free noncommercial embedding of 35 million of the images in its stock photography database. This is a good step toward better supporting a variety of users. Getty is clearly seeing its images appear across the web anyway, so it’s decided to go…

Landsat 5, Tiwi Islands, Darwin, AustraliaGeoscience Australia / CC BY Geoscience Australia recently announced that it will license all images from the Landsat 8 satellite under CC BY. (Geoscience Australia is a partner of the United States Geological Survey in the Landsat program.) Creative Commons Australia reports: The new Landsat 8 satellite is scheduled to…

Slightly less than a year ago the count of CC-licensed images at Flickr surpassed 100 million. Over 35 million have been added since then. Now is a good time to look at changes over the last four years (for which we have data), in particular changes in the distribution of licenses used. We’ve heard many…

Museums, archives, and cultural institutions have been forced to re-examine their relationship with the digital presentation of public domain works in their collections. This has brought the issue of “copyfraud” to the forefront. Recently, the UK’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) threatened legal action under UK law against a Wikipedia user for, among other things, copyright…

Robot by genewolf CC BY-ND 2.0 After last week’s exciting announcement that Google Image search is now capable of filtering results by usage rights, we realized there is a lot of interest in how creators can signal their work as being CC-licensed to both humans and robots. Fortunately, CC has a solution for this that…