The online magazine Slate has a great review article on the Star Wars fan-created movie Revelations. Slate’s Clive Thompson gives the film high marks saying the story and special effects are better than the recent Star Wars prequels and even goes so far as to say: George Lucas has always encouraged Star Wars­-inspired fan movies,…

Online music community sees over 30,000 songs licensed under “some rights reserved” copyright in just one month. San Francisco, CA and New York, NY, USA – Soundclick (http://www.soundclick.com), one of the Internet’s largest music community sites, now offers Creative Commons licenses as an option for all songs uploaded to its website. Soundclick, which sees about…

Musicians Joshua Ellis and Big Friendly Corporation have implemented a new technology called BitPass to sell their Creative Commons-licensed content via micropayment. Joshua has offered his songs under an Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. If you buy a song for 50 cents, or the entire album for $3.50, you’re then free to copy, distribute, and make derivative works…

"The Electric Boots” British Library. Public Domain.

In November 2023, the Court of Appeal in THJ v Sheridan offered an important clarification of the originality requirement under UK copyright law, which clears a path for open culture to flourish in the UK.

“Generative AI & the Creative Cycle Panel” by Jennryn Wetzler for CC BY 4.0.

This week, Creative Commons (CC) convened 100+ participants during two events in New York City to discuss the important issues surrounding generative artificial intelligence (AI), copyright, and creativity. For many years, we at CC have been examining the interplay between copyright and generative AI, exploring ways in which this technology can foster creativity and better…

In honor of the 20th anniversary of Creative Commons licenses, we launched our first ever Open Culture Remix Art Contest #CCSharesCulture in February 2022 to celebrate a better sharing of cultural heritage around the world. Participants were tasked with creating original artworks in line with this year’s theme of “Love Culture? Share Culture!” by remixing…

Our next ‘Meet the CC Summit Presenter’ Q&A features Italian Attorney-at-law and the Lead and Representative of the Italian Chapter of the Creative Commons Global Network, Deborah De Angelis. Deborah is a legal expert in copyright law, entertainment law and new technologies. She also worked as legal advisor on copyright law to the previous Italian…

The CC licenses are designed to make sharing simple and place minimal requirements on reusers who want to be able to use creative works. However, sometimes reusers still misuse CC-licensed works, either intentionally or by mistake, and as a licensor, there are several things you can do about it.  Before you take action: Before you…

Credit: 2010 PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellows by PopTech (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Last month, cOAlition S released its Rights Retention Strategy to safeguard researchers’ intellectual ownership rights and suppress unreasonable embargo periods—Creative Commons (CC) keenly supports this initiative.  Modernizing an outdated academic publishing system  Under a traditional publishing model, researchers who want to publish their articles in a journal typically need to assign or exclusively license their…

5169051592_632fc3cc6b_h Kollage Kid (CC BY-NC-SA)

Over 300 million images are uploaded to Facebook a day. Yes, just Facebook. Once other social media and photo-sharing platforms like Flickr, Unsplash, Instagram, etc. are taken into account, that number quickly grows into the billions.  A lot has changed since the dawn of photography in the 19th century—when Nicéphore Niépce (a.k.a. the “Father of…