Today we commemorate Fair Use Week, a week-long celebration of the doctrines of fair use and fair dealing. Creative Commons is proud of how its licenses respect fair use and other exceptions and limitations to copyright. CC licenses end where copyright ends, which means you don’t need to comply with a CC license if you…

Creative Commons dedicates the text of our licenses and other legal tools, as well as the text of our Commons deeds, to the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. While that doesn’t mean that anything and everything is allowed by those choosing to reuse these materials (as explained below), we believe that copyright…

Be a voice for sharing. Support CC. 2014 was a big year in the open movement. Both the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation approved open policies requiring grantees to publish their content under CC BY, the most open Creative Commons license. That means that for any content funded…

All six Creative Commons licenses require licensees to attribute the original creator. Although we provide guidelines for attributing a work, we also recognize that standards for how and where licensees should provide attribution vary a lot from medium to medium. That’s why CC licenses allow licensees to fulfill the attribution requirement “…In any reasonable manner…

Leicester City Council / CC BY 4.0 Leicester City Council is the first local government authority in the United Kingdom (UK) to provide 84 community schools with blanket permission to openly license their educational resources. The council is recommending that school staff use the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to share materials created in…

Bethlehem College Preso / Locus Research / CC BY-SA Last month, I had the honour of providing a keynote address and two workshops at a teacher conference at Northcote College1, on the North Shore of Auckland, New Zealand. Like many schools, Northcote is in the process of developing an overarching digital citizenship policy for staff,…

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…

Ryan Merkley / Rannie Turingan / CC0 Download the press release (67 KB PDF) Mountain View, CA May 14, 2014: The board of directors of Creative Commons is pleased to announce the appointment of Ryan Merkley to the position of chief executive officer. Ryan is an accomplished strategist, campaigner, and communicator in the nonprofit, technology,…

Creative Commons received a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to survey the licensing policies of private foundations, and to work toward increasing the free availability of foundation-supported works. We are still pursuing this objective, but here’s where we are at the moment. Tax-exempt private foundations are non-profit institutions exclusively devoted to benefitting…

As the open educational resources (OER) movement continues to grow, students and educators alike can benefit from openly licensed content. The use of Creative Commons licenses in education has allowed learning resources to travel farther, reach more people, and be repurposed to meet local needs. I recently spoke with Ariel Diaz, CEO of Boundless learning…