The Smithsonian—the world’s largest museum and research institution—announced yesterday  Smithsonian Open Access, an initiative that removes copyright restrictions from 2.8 million digital collection 2D and 3D images and nearly two centuries of data. This major initiative uses CC0—Creative Commons’ public domain dedication tool—to make millions of images and data freely available to the public. “Our…

Public domain advocates celebrated on January 1 because, for the second year in a row, published works newly entered the public domain in the United States due to copyright expiration. To mark the occasion, Creative Commons (CC) collaborated with the Internet Archive, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Creative Commons USA, the Institute…

I’m delighted to announce, on behalf of the Creative Commons (CC) Board of Directors, the formal launch of the global search for the next Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CC. The timing could not be more exciting for CC. We will welcome our next CEO as we prepare to enter our third decade as the…

A screenshot of the revamped CC License Chooser.

This is part of a series of posts introducing the projects built by open source contributors mentored by Creative Commons during Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019. Ari Madian was one of those contributors and we are grateful for his work on this project. The Creative Commons (CC) License Chooser was made nearly 15 years ago and…

Educational community, including libraries and universities.

This is part of a series of posts introducing the projects built by open source contributors mentored by Creative Commons during Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019. Maria Belen Guaranda was one of those contributors and we are grateful for her work on this project. “By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore…

Design by Victoria Heath; Image by Sebastiaan ter Bur, CC BY

We’re excited to announce that the Call for Proposals and Scholarship Applications for the 2020 CC Global Summit is now open!  The 2020 CC Global Summit, held May 14-16 in Lisbon, Portugal, gathers those in the open community under the umbrella of learning, sharing, and creating; united by a passion for growing a vibrant, usable commons…

Creative Commons is pleased to be a part of the second annual Public Domain Day celebration held in Washington D.C. on January 30, 2020!  In collaboration with the Internet Archive, the Institute for Intellectual Property & Social Justice, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, and SPARC, this event will “bring together a diverse group…

Broken Hill Wall Mural-07= by Sheba_Also 43,000 photos is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 This post was co-authored by Diane Peters (CC’s General Counsel) and Alexis Muscat (CC’s 2019 legal intern) For the past year or so, CC has been tracking and thinking about strict, less than-amicable enforcement activities involving CC licenses. These activities present…

Despite our best efforts, occasionally there are issues and/or errors in the published legal code for CC legal tools. CC is committed to maintaining static, canonical versions of its legal tools, so we do not make changes to the legal code after it is published. Therefore, when issues or errors are identified, they are documented…

Every Creative Commons license has three layers: the lawyer-readable legal code, the human-readable deed, and the machine-readable code. As the only legally-operative layer, the legal code is the primary layer of the CC licenses. It consists of the text of the licenses, as well as any meaningful formatting and other inseparable elements listed below. The…