CC Licenses make it possible to share content legally and openly. Over the past 20 years, they have unlocked approximately 3 billion articles, books, research, artwork, and music. CC’s Legal Tools are a free and reliable public good. Yet most people are unaware that their infrastructure and stewardship takes a lot of money and work to maintain. That’s why we’re launching the Open Infrastructure Circle (OIC) — an initiative to obtain annual or multi-year support from foundations, corporations, and individuals for Creative Commons’ core operations and license infrastructure.

Each month throughout 2023, we will be spotlighting a different CC-licensed illustration from the collection on our social media headers and the CC blog. For November, we’re excited to showcase “Shared Knowledge, Shared Future” by Colombian illustrator, Luisa Brando.

Creative Commons (CC) has launched the Open Infrastructure Circle (OIC)  to ensure our organization is around for years to come. We’re looking for supporters to commit to a recurring or multi-year gift to Creative Commons. Your contributions will specifically support the technical and legal maintenance of our CC Licenses, which is vastly underfunded yet critical…

  Maarten believes that “Open GLAM is a necessity of a disbalanced copyright framework.” Maarten talks about how open access policies help institutions achieve their public missions. Open access policies in instutions provides good evidence that society and communities need access to cultural heritage to flourish. Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos…

“Sorry! This video does not exist.” by Creative Commons is licensed via CC BY 4.0.

A key video disappeared from the CC home webpage after the video hosting service Vimeo tagged the open work with an invalid automated copyright violation takedown notice. Learn more about what happens when automated copyright filters go wrong.

Marike van Roon shares that “the main benefit of open culture is accessibility” because if you are not fortunate enough to be part of organization that pays for you to have access to collections and you don’t live in city with public collections it’s almost impossible to access a lot of cultural heritage. In this…

"EU Flag Neural Network" by Creative Commons was cropped from an image generated by the DALL-E 2 AI platform with the text prompt "European Union flag neural network." CC dedicates any rights it holds to the image to the public domain via CC0.

The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act will be discussed at a key trilogue meeting on 24 October 2023. CC collaborated with Communia to summarize our views emphasizing the importance of a balanced and tailored approach to regulating foundation models and of transparency in general.

"River Banner" by Impact Media Lab for Creative Commons is licensed via CC BY 4.0.

This month marks the first anniversary of the Open Climate Campaign — a four-year project working to make the open sharing of research the norm in climate science. We celebrate the success of the campaign in this initial year and look forward to the upcoming year.

“For researchers GLAM’s preserve primary sources” which is of great benefit when creating knowledge and research about the present and the past. Pierre talks about how open access policies in GLAM’s make knowledge shared and more widespread instead of just for the elite few with permission from the collecting institution. Open Culture VOICES is a…

A shyrdaq on the floor of a Kyrgyz home in Kyzyl-Jar, Aqsy, Jalalabat”, Kyrgyzstan by Firespeaker, here cropped, is licensed via CC BY-SA 3.0.

CC celebrates the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. CC’s community initiative “Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture” (TAROC) is designed to support the international community in developing a positive, affirmative, and influential recommendation enshrining the values, objectives, and mechanisms for open culture to flourish and, in particular, for open culture to serve as a means to safeguard intangible cultural heritage.