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Diane Peters

As General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for CC, Diane directs the organization’s legal strategy and projects. She coordinates legal programs and activities that harness CC’s diverse and complex global network. She also leads development of CC’s licenses and legal tools, including the CC0 public domain dedication (2009), the Public Domain Mark (2010), Version 3.0 ports and, most recently, Version 4.0 of the CC license suite (2013).

Diane is a founder and Co-Chair of the Advisory Council of the Open COVID Coalition, an international effort led by Creative Commons to remove obstacles to intellectual property during the COVID-19 pandemic and effect longer-term change in the public interest. She also serves on the board of directors of Creative Commons as well as the Software Freedom Law Center.

Prior to joining CC, she served as general counsel for Open Source Development Labs (now, the Linux Foundation), and as legal counsel to Mozilla. In 2014, the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California awarded her its Intellectual Property Vanguard Award for public policy. She is based in Portland, Oregon.

Photo credit: Kelley Dulcich, CC BY

Posts by Diane Peters

Improving Access to the Public Domain: the Public Domain Mark

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Today, Creative Commons announces the release of its Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that allows them to be easily discovered over the Internet. The Public Domain Mark, to be used for marking works already free of copyright, complements Creative Commons’ CC0…

Marking and Tagging the Public Domain: An Invitation to Comment

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Almost 1½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others…

Public Domain Day 2010 and Beyond

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Creative Commons has been celebrating Public Domain Day – January 1st – for several years, alongside many others who are similarly passionate about the value of the public domain and the need to prevent its demise. Each year on this day, copyright protection expires for millions of creative works, allowing those works to be used, repurposed…

Expanding the Public Domain: Part Zero

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Creative Commons has spent a lot of time over the past year or so strategizing, and worrying, about the current state of the public domain and its future. In particular, we’ve been thinking about ways to help cultivate a vibrant and rich pool of freely available resources accessible to anyone to use for any purpose,…