San Francisco — December 17, 2007 Today, Creative Commons announced the launch of CC0 (aka CC Zero) and CC+ (aka CC Plus). These programs are major additions to CC’s array of free legal tools. CC+ CC+ is a protocol to enable a simple way for users to get rights beyond the rights granted by a…

Sarah Davies acknowledged her appreciation of our fundraising approach on her blog today, and I would like to take this opportunity to build upon what she said and to also say thank you. In order to sustain Creative Commons, fundraising is vital – but raising awareness and educating the larger community is more so. We…

Five years ago this December, we launched Creative Commons. At a party with music by DJ Spooky, and video endorsements by John Perry Barlow and (the late) Jack Valenti, we began to implement a gaggle of legal hacks to let the copyright system better reflect the views of many artists, authors, educators, and scientists. Some…

At this weekend’s Singularity Summit in San Francisco, “openness” of all sorts — open source, open access, open content, transparency — seems to be considered an uncontroversial and important part of making “AI and the future of humanity” a good one, for example: If the singularity is in fact near, the fundamental tools of information,…

Four articles turned up yesterday all advocating use of different Creative Commons licenses in different contexts, nicely demonstrating the not-really-niche-anymore scope covered by Creative Commons. Newspapers: In GateHouse’s case, they’ve reserved the right to commercialize, the right to preserve the content’s integrity, and the right of attribution. [Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs] It’s all “part of being a good…

San Francisco, USA – June 20, 2006 Creative Commons and the Fedora Project are pleased to announce the Open Video Contest taking place now. The contest promotes flexible copyright, open media formats and the Fedora Project. Entries must be 30 seconds or less, in OGG Theora format, promote freedom and openness, and be released under…

[This email is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig and others about the history and future of Creative Commons. If you would like to be removed from this list, please click here: https://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter#unsubscribe Alternatively, if you know others who might find these interesting, please recommend they sign up at https://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter ] From…

So today, Creative Commons launches its first fund raising campaign. Until now, we’ve lived on very generous grants from some very wise foundations. But the IRS doesn’t allow nonprofits to live such favored lives for long. To maintain our nonprofit status, the IRS says we must meet a “public support test” — which means we…

by Ethan Smith, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal For some people, the future of copyright law is here, and it looks a lot like Gilberto Gil. The Brazilian singer-songwriter plans to release a groundbreaking CD this winter, which will include three of his biggest hits from the 1970s. It isn’t the content of…

So a new license draft has been posted here. The changes relate to our standard attribution language and the plan is that they take effect across all of our core licenses. The new version will be 2.5 because it is a minor change. We are in the process of working through other revisions to the…