Seal of the United States Office of Scienceand Technology Policy / Public Domain Today, the White House issued a Directive supporting public access to publicly-funded research. John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, “has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published…

A new pilot project between Creative Commons, Creative Commons’ legal affiliate in France, and the French collecting society SACEM allows SACEM members to license their works under one of the three non-commercial CC 3.0 licenses. Previously, authors and composers of musical works represented by SACEM (the biggest French collecting society) were prevented from using any…

Creative Commons Master Terms of Use Effective as of 26 August 2020 1. General Information Regarding These Terms of Use Master terms: Welcome, and thank you for your interest in Creative Commons (“Creative Commons,” “CC,” “we,” “our,” or “us”). Unless otherwise noted on a particular site or service, these master terms of use (“Master Terms”)…

If you are in New York on Thursday this week, you are invited to a panel I’ve helped organize with our friends at Eyebeam on fair use and creators. I’ll also be moderating the panel and giving a brief primer on fair use: This Thursday, July 9, 6–8PM at Eyebeam, there will be a panel…

Attributor launched FairShare today, a CC-aware self service platform for tracking the spread of your works around the web, building on their index of 35 billion web pages. FairShare encourages choosing a CC license to make clear the terms under which you want your works to be spread, then gives you feeds showing exactly where…

You may have heard about Gatehouse Media suing the New York Times Co. over the linking of Creative Commons licensed news stories on the Times’ Boston.com. Zachary Seward over at the Nieman Journalism Lab has been covering the various developments of the case and most interestingly, an e-mail from Howard Owens (whom we highlighted in…

We’re thrilled to announce the third and final matching challenge of the 2008 annual campaign! This round’s matcher is FairShare, a new service from Attributor. FairShare is putting up $3000 in order to match every single donation (up to $3000) between now and the end of the campaign. FairShare was previewed at CC’s 2nd Technology…

CC evangelist Cory Doctorow has a new column up on Locus Online discussing “the fundamentals of using CC licenses for people who are interested in the idea but haven’t tried it yet”. The article outlines the different conditions available in any given CC-license, how the licenses are read (machine/human/lawyer), and takes note of the harmony…

Paul Jacobson writes at iCommons.org on Why bloggers should use Creative Commons licences. Check out Jacobson’s extended argument, the core of which seems to be that unfortunately fair dealing/fair use will sometimes not be enough to avoid legal roadblocks to conversation; out of respect to your readers, bloggers engaged in conversation with you, and the…

Last month Norman Walsh started using a Creative Commons license for his essays (consistently informed and provocative on XML, Semantic Web, and other technical topics) and photographs. Norm does us the favor of explaining his choice: When I started writing this collection of essays, I slapped on a quick copyright statement asserting “All Rights Reserved.”…