Today Creative Commons is excited to announce that blogging and storytelling platform Medium now offers the entire suite of Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools. You can read more about this great news over at Medium, naturally, in stories by both Creative Commons and Medium. In just a few years Medium has grown a…

The keys to an elegant set of open licenses are simplicity and interoperability. CC licenses are widely recognized as the standard in the open access publishing community, but a major trade association recently published a new set of licenses and is urging its members to adopt it. We believe that the new licenses could introduce…

Fiction-writing community Wattpad has upgraded to the Creative Commons Version 4.0 licenses and unveiled several improvements to its CC implementation. As of today, there are 300,000 CC-licensed stories on Wattpad, making this one of the largest adoptions of Version 4.0 to date. From the press release: (72 KB PDF) “The biggest question facing new writers…

Today the European Commission released licensing recommendations to support the reuse of public sector information in Europe. In addition to providing guidance on baseline license principles for public sector content and data, the guidelines suggest that Member States should adopt standardized open licenses – such as Creative Commons licenses: Several licences that comply with the…

Aurélie Filippetti – Salon du Livre 2014 / ActuaLitté / CC BY-SA In late 2013, we blogged about a set of initiatives that French minister of culture and communications Aurélie Filippetti had unveiled. Together, the initiatives represented a commitment to a more creative, more open France. And they also represented a strong commitment to helping…

We are continuing our practice of providing official plaintext versions of the licenses, as we did with version 3.0. BY 4.0 (plaintext) BY-SA 4.0 (plaintext) BY-NC 4.0 (plaintext) BY-NC-SA 4.0 (plaintext) BY-ND 4.0 (plaintext) BY-NC-ND 4.0 (plaintext) As said in the previous entry: “For most works, plaintext legalcode doesn’t matter as linking directly to the…

In November we released version 4.0 of the Creative Commons license suite, and today the Open Definition Advisory Council approved the CC 4.0 Attribution (BY) and Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) International licenses as conformant with the Open Definition. The Open Definition sets out principles that define “openness” in relation to data and content…It can be summed up…

CC in the box of letters / Kristina Alexanderson / CC BY-SA For how popular they are worldwide, it’s striking how rarely CC licenses’ validity has been questioned in court. We consider that a testament to the care with which we craft the licenses: we try to find every possible area of contention or ambiguity…

Today the JURI (legal affairs) committee of the European Parliament approved the compromise text of the proposed directive on collective rights management in the EU (478 KB PDF, passages in bold are changes from the original proposal). The main objective of the directive is to facilitate the licensing of music throughout Europe (which is currently…

We proudly introduce our 4.0 licenses, now available for adoption worldwide. The 4.0 licenses — more than two years in the making — are the most global, legally robust licenses produced by CC to date. We have incorporated dozens of improvements that make sharing and reusing CC-licensed materials easier and more dependable than ever before.…