Wellcome Trust by HowardLake / CC BY-SA Creative Commons plays an instrumental role in the Open Access movement, which is making scholarly research and journals more widely available on the Web. Last month, Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, spoke at Oxford University on the role of open access in maximising the impact…

In the world of music, Creative Commons licenses continue to be used by upcoming and established musicians for everything from remix contests to album-a-month projects. And since CC-licensed music may be blaring from outerspace for the first time in history on NASA’s Endeavour mission, we thought it would be a good time to do a…

Cable Green and family / CC BY Creative Commons is pleased to welcome Dr. Cable Green as Director of Global Learning. Most recently, Green was the Director of eLearning & Open Education for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, where he provided leadership on strategic technology planning, openly licensing and sharing digital…

Downtown Warsaw Skyline by DocentX / CC BY-SA Since the last global meeting of the Creative Commons community in Sapporo, we’ve seen the launch of CC0 and the Public Domain Mark, and a half-dozen more CC affiliate jurisdictions with many more in the works. To celebrate this and many other CC milestones, we are announcing…

Joi ito by Dean Ornish / CC BY The MIT Media Lab, known for its innovative, hands-on approaches in design, multimedia, and technology, has named Creative Commons Chairman and former CEO Joi Ito as its new executive director. In its article about the announcement, the New York Times notes Joi’s long-time support of open culture: “Raised…

The basic idea of Creative Commons, offering free copyright tools, is copied from the free software movement. However, CC licenses are not intended to be used to release software, as our FAQ has always said. One important reason why Creative Commons licenses should not be used to release software is that they aren’t compatible with…

Last Friday, we made plaintext versions of our core 3.0 (unported) licenses and CC0 available. This is something that some people have wanted for a long time. For example, Evan Prodromou made a draft of plaintext licenses a few years ago, but these never became official. But now we do have official plaintext versions. Here’s…

Creative Commons is pleased to announce we have been awarded a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide support to successful applicants of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program with our partnering organizations Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative, CAST, and the Washington State Board for Community…

Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our weblog and following us on Twitter. March may be over, but the madness isn't! CC is helping to shape Japan relief efforts, moving offices, and playing an important role in open government. Japan relief efforts use Creative Commons Regardless of CC related efforts, we…

Creative Commons is pleased to present with Hewlett-Packard (HP) Labs the next CC Salon: Open Services Innovation, at the HP campus in Palo Alto on Monday, April 25, from 6-8pm. This CC Salon will feature two speakers from HP Labs as well as author of Open Innovation and Berkeley professor Henry Chesbrough to discuss the…