[This email is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig and others about the history and future of Creative Commons. If you would like to be removed from this list, please click here: https://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter#unsubscribe Alternatively, if you know others who might find these interesting, please recommend they sign up at https://creativecommons.org/about/lessigletter ] From…
So today, Creative Commons launches its first fund raising campaign. Until now, we’ve lived on very generous grants from some very wise foundations. But the IRS doesn’t allow nonprofits to live such favored lives for long. To maintain our nonprofit status, the IRS says we must meet a “public support test” — which means we…
by Ethan Smith, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal For some people, the future of copyright law is here, and it looks a lot like Gilberto Gil. The Brazilian singer-songwriter plans to release a groundbreaking CD this winter, which will include three of his biggest hits from the 1970s. It isn’t the content of…
So a new license draft has been posted here. The changes relate to our standard attribution language and the plan is that they take effect across all of our core licenses. The new version will be 2.5 because it is a minor change. We are in the process of working through other revisions to the…
The online magazine Slate has a great review article on the Star Wars fan-created movie Revelations. Slate’s Clive Thompson gives the film high marks saying the story and special effects are better than the recent Star Wars prequels and even goes so far as to say: George Lucas has always encouraged Star Wars-inspired fan movies,…
Online music community sees over 30,000 songs licensed under “some rights reserved” copyright in just one month. San Francisco, CA and New York, NY, USA – Soundclick (http://www.soundclick.com), one of the Internet’s largest music community sites, now offers Creative Commons licenses as an option for all songs uploaded to its website. Soundclick, which sees about…
Musicians Joshua Ellis and Big Friendly Corporation have implemented a new technology called BitPass to sell their Creative Commons-licensed content via micropayment. Joshua has offered his songs under an Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. If you buy a song for 50 cents, or the entire album for $3.50, you’re then free to copy, distribute, and make derivative works…
Today, we kick off celebrations for CC’s 25th anniversary. Please join us throughout the rest of 2026 as we commemorate a quarter century of sharing.
Before you decide that you want to apply a Creative Commons license or CC0 to your creative work, there are some important things to consider: The licenses and CC0 are irrevocable. Irrevocable means a legal agreement that cannot be canceled. That means once you apply a CC license to a work, the CC license applies…
AI is being built on the largest unregulated extraction of knowledge in history. The datasets powering today’s AI systems are drawn largely from publicly available information: research papers, educational resources, cultural works, images, and data shared by millions of people and institutions around the world. A significant portion of this knowledge exists because of CC…