#FreeBassel / David Kindler / CC BY If you subscribe to Creative Commons’ newsletter or follow us on Twitter and Facebook, you’re likely familiar with the story of Bassel Khartabil, our friend and longtime CC volunteer who’s been in prison in Syria since March 2012. Today, on the second birthday that Bassel has spent in…

Two weeks ago we wrote about the U.S. Executive Order and announcement of Project Open Data, an open source project (managed on Github) that lays out the implementation details behind behind the President’s Executive Order and memo. The project offers more information on open licenses, and gives examples of acceptable licenses for U.S. federal data.…

Today’s latte, HTML5Yuko Honda / CC BY-SA Creative Commons strongly believes in the respect of copyright and the wishes of content creators. That’s why CC has created a range of legal tools that rely in part on copyright to enable our vision of a shared commons of creative and intellectual works. But when creators’ rights…

Bassel / Joi Ito / CC BY Download press release (36 KB PDF) Palestinian-born Syrian software engineer Bassel Khartabil is the winner of this year’s Index on Censorship Digital Freedom Award, sponsored by Google. Khartabil is a free internet pioneer who has spent his career advancing open source technologies. On March 15, 2012, he was…

This is a guest post by Kasyoka Mutunga, Precious Blood Secondary School Alumna and Executive Director of Jamlab, a community of former high school students providing peer mentorship, learning through the use of open educational resources, and using the Internet to objectively achieve their goals and actualize their ideas — while actively solving issues in…

Happy Open Education Week! We are happy to announce that the School of Open community has launched its first set of courses… The Library of Congress / No known copyright restrictions Sign up for these facilitated courses this week (sign-up will remain open through Sunday, March 17). These courses will start the week of March…

Today marks an historic step forward for public access to publicly funded research in the United States. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) was introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. FASTR requires federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the…

A few days ago, Ryan Singel wrote a thought-provoking piece for Wired, suggesting that users pressure Facebook — and, by extension, its recent acquisition Instagram — to adopt Creative Commons licensing options. #electricity / mkorbit / CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons embodied an ethos of sharing that went beyond just show-and-tell. It’s been a vital part of sharing…

Pierre Gérard / Joi Ito / CC BY Throughout CC’s tenth anniversary celebrations, we’re highlighting various media platforms with CC implementation. For today, we spoke with Jamendo cofounder and managing director Pierre Gérard. If you’re not familiar with Jamendo, it’s a community of musicians and tool for discovering new music. Unlike most other CC-enabled platforms,…

Guest blog post by Teresa Nobre, Legal Project Lead at Creative Commons Portugal One of the opportunities for Creative Commons to continue its rapid evolution is more collaboration between the various affiliates. In September, representatives of CC’s affiliates in 17 different European countries attended a regional meeting and discussed, among other things, Creative Commons’ 10th…