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Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

Sarah has been writing, lawyering, and strategizing about creativity and collaboration in the digital age for more than 15 years. Over the span of 10 years at Creative Commons, she has functioned as in-house legal counsel, project manager, book author, fundraiser, event organizer, curriculum developer, team leader, and organizational strategist — often at the same time. 

As General Counsel, she oversees the legal services necessary to support the globally distributed operations of Creative Commons, and provides strategic legal and business counsel on all facets of nonprofit operations. She also plays a key role in CC’s programmatic work, leading the stewardship of CC’s legal tools and advising the organization on new programmatic initiatives.

Before joining CC, she did a fellowship at Stanford’s Center for Internet & Society and worked as an IP associate at Fried Frank in New York City. She has a journalism degree from Northwestern University, a law degree from the University of Michigan, and an Executive MBA from the University of Iowa. 

Photo credit: Amber Kaiser, CC BY

Posts by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson

What’s Next for CC Licenses

Licenses & Tools

In this 20th anniversary year of the CC license suite, we are pleased to be renewing our commitment to license stewardship. Creative Commons has always taken its stewardship responsibilities seriously, engaging in multi-year consultation processes for versioning the tools, publishing official translations of the licenses into dozens of languages, and working to educate people about…

License Stewardship consultation

Licenses & Tools

The CC license suite was foundational to the creation of Creative Commons. To this day, the stewardship of CC licenses and public domain tools remains one of the core functions of the organization. At this milestone of the 20th anniversary of Creative Commons, we are embarking on a public consultation around CC’s stewardship. Specifically, we…