As part of our #20CC anniversary, last year we joined forces with Fine Acts to spark a global dialogue on what better sharing looks like in action. Our #BetterSharing collection of illustrations was the result — we gathered insights from 12 prominent open advocates around the world and tasked 12 renowned artists who embrace…

“Orange Prince” by Andy Warhol.

The United States Supreme Court released its opinion today in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith. While it’s hard to predict the full ramifications of this decision at this point, our initial opinion is that this decision is not ideal, but also not the death knell for transformative fair use that many feared it could have…

As part of the Open Culture Platform’s work this year, we accepted proposals and invited the community to vote on community funded activities. Here are the six proposals that have been funded. We look forward to sharing more about the projects when they are complete.  Archiving History of Ghana: Case Study of Forts and Castles…

“CC State of the Commons 2022 Cover Detail” © 2023 by Creative Commons is licensed via CC BY 4.0.

We are pleased to present the 2022 Creative Commons State of the Commons annual report. This report highlights key innovations, achievements, collaborations, conversations, and partnerships from CC and our global community over the past year. In 2022 we were incredibly proud to mark twenty years of CC licensing and all the groundbreaking collaboration it has…

“CC State of the Commons 2022 Cover Detail” © 2023 by Creative Commons is licensed via CC BY 4.0.

Our Mission Creative Commons is an international nonprofit organization that empowers people to grow and sustain the thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture that we need to address the world’s most pressing challenges and create a brighter future for all. Together with our global community and multiple partners, we build capacity and infrastructure, we…

From 13 to 17 March 2023, Creative Commons (CC) participated in the 43rd session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) in Geneva, Switzerland. In this blog post, we look back on the highlights of the SCCR/43 week. Excited to be @WIPO in Geneva to attend the…

In my last blog post, I looked at whether copyright protects artistic style, particularly in the context of generative AI (GAI) art tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. However, in the class action litigation against Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, the plaintiffs are not only concerned that people can use the GAI tools to produce works…

“Grunge Heroes” by Stephen Wolfson for Creative Commons was generated by the Midjourney AI platform with the text prompt “a grunge band from the 1990s made up of superheroes.” CC dedicates any rights it holds to the image to the public domain via CC0.

In my previous posts on generative AI, I discussed fair use and AI training data, copyright over AI outputs, and a recent U.S. Copyright Office decision on registration for a work produced by generative AI. In the next posts in our series, I will look at claims (exemplified in a recent case against Stable Diffusion…

“Zarya of the Dawn”: detail of an image generated by Midjourney AI from the full graphic novel by Kristina Kashtanova.

In a recent post, we explained why, absent significant and direct human creative input, generative AI outputs should not qualify for copyright protection. We noted that exactly what constitutes enough human input is not entirely clear; while a simple text prompt shouldn’t be enough, other areas will present more complex questions. Just this week, the…

“Bicycle”, here slightly cropped, by Stephen Wolfson for Creative Commons was generated by the DALL-E 2 AI platform with the text prompt “bicycle.” CC dedicates any rights it holds to the image to the public domain via CC0.

“Generative AI” has been the subject of much online conversation over the past few months. “Generative AI” refers to artificial intelligence (AI) models that can create different kinds of content by following user input and instructions. These models are trained on massive datasets of content — images, audio, text — that is harvested from the…