The German UNESCO Commission has released the publication, “Open Content Lizenzen – Ein Leitfaden für die Praxis” (pdf) aka “Open Content Licenses – A Practical Guideline.” The publication is authored by Dr. Till Kreutzer, a member of the Commission’s legal expert committee and a founder of iRights.info, a legal information website for consumers. The publication…

Portugal x Holland by pedroffmarques / CC BYCongratulations to CC Portugal for launching localized versions of the CC 3.0 licenses! These are Portugal’s second localized CC licenses. Although CC’s international license suite is appropriate and intended for use around the globe, CC has historically permitted affiliates to port (linguistically translate and then adapt) the licenses…

Freesound is a collaborative database of nearly 120,000 sounds. We first posted about the project in 2005. Freesound specializes in sounds, not songs, and those sounds have been used thousands of times from ccMixter remixes to a major motion picture. The project has just launched a complete rewrite of its site, with a new, modern…

The Open Society Foundations (OSF) have adopted a new copyright policy that encourages its grantees to release their outputs under CC licenses. The OSF have long been releasing their own work products under a CC BY-NC-ND license, but now they have introduced a new clause to encourage OSF grantees to do the same: “We believe…

Last Friday, we made plaintext versions of our core 3.0 (unported) licenses and CC0 available. This is something that some people have wanted for a long time. For example, Evan Prodromou made a draft of plaintext licenses a few years ago, but these never became official. But now we do have official plaintext versions. Here’s…

Together with our international community, we’re always trying to make our legal tools more accessible to people around the globe. That includes offering translations in as many languages as possible, an effort in which CC Spain, led by Ignasi Labastida i Juan, excels. Their ported 3.0 licenses are not only available in Catalán, Castellano, Euskera…

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…

Made of glass from Vendel parish Up (SHM Invnr 7250) | Photo: Christer Åhlin SHMM | CC BY-NC-ND Earlier this week Swedish museum Historiska Museet announced the adoption of CC licenses for their digital catalog (Google translation here). Roughly 63,500 item photographs, 1200 illustrations, and 264,500 scanned catalog cards are now released, depending upon the…

Late last month we looked at how our licenses were being used by both Google and Architecture for Humanity to keep content open, free, and fluid in their Haiti Relief efforts. As these efforts continue to grow more groups have turned to CC licenses to assist their goals, with three projects in particular catching our…

In the immediate aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake a number of efforts were put in place to connect survivors with their family and loved ones. In all its good intention, this lead to numerous websites that, in the words of Marc Fest of the Knight Foundation, became “silos” of information with no ability to…