The Smithsonian has joined the Library of Congress, the Powerhouse Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum in releasing numerous (over 850 from the Smithsonian alone) photos from their archives online – free of copyright restrictions – to The Commons on Flickr. There are some absolutely stunning photographs available in high-resolution, ranging from portraits of artists, scientists,…

From the Science Commons blog … “The National Cancer Institute will soon be using Tranche to store and share mouse proteomic data from its Mouse Proteomic Technologies Initiative (MPTI). Tranche, a free and open source file sharing tool for scientific data, was one of the earliest testers of CC0. Many thanks to Tranche for providing…

After lots of positive feedback, today we’re removing the “draft” notice from our Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses. Not much has changed since the draft announcement, so most of the explanation below is cribbed from that. Of course just because this statement is no longer a draft does not mean CC could not improve…

Next in a series addressing a suggested Wikipedia CC BY-SA migration checklist, today I’m publishing a DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses. This draft statement attempts describe 1) what CC does as a license developer and steward, 2) why CC Attribution-ShareAlike licenses play a special role in the movement for free cultural…

      We’re always trying to make Creative Commons licenses easier to understand and use. From the get-go, human-readable copyright licenses have been a CC mainstay. Creative Commons is excited to announce the expansion of a documentation project that explains various facets of Creative Commons licensing. From the press release: The initiative includes links and PDF…

San Francisco, CA, USA — March 24, 2008 Creative Commons today announced the expansion of a documentation project to explain various facets of Creative Commons licensing. The initiative includes links and PDF downloads to information on critical CC specifications, recommendations, research studies and tutorials. Some of the topics covered include the CC+ and CC0 projects,…

Paul Keller from CC Netherlands on a tremendously informative new report: As part of the activities of Creative Commons Netherlands the Institute for information Law has been undertaking research into an number of issues connected to the use of the Creative Commons Licenses. In 2007 much of this research has focused on the use of…

January 1st is Public Domain Day, as noted by copyrightwatch.ca: Welcome to 2008, and let’s welcome into the Public Domain thousands, indeed millions, of creative works from the collective cultural past of our little planet and its many countries. Yes, it’s January 1st, Public Domain Day in most countries of the world, where copyright runs…

The following are a list of licenses which Creative Commons at one time offered, but which CC no longer offers or recommends. We have withdrawn these licenses either because they were not sufficiently demanded, or because we believe they conflict with values we consider important. While the URLs for these licenses remain, so any existing…

Creative Commons maintains and publishes policies that apply to the use of our legal tools, our websites, content and software that we publish, our trademarks, and to those participating in the Creative Commons Global Network. Note that some of these policies are maintained on other website pages but can be viewed by clicking on the…