Fair Use Week 2016 is here, and we’re happy to celebrate it alongside many other organizations and individuals who believe in the importance of flexible exceptions to copyright law. There are now over 1 billion CC-licensed works available, and these will always be free for anyone to use and share. CC licenses work because of…

Today marks the launch of #NEWPALMYRA, an online community platform and data repository dedicated to the capture, preservation, sharing, and creative reuse of data about the ancient city of Palmyra. The project features 3-D models of ruins from Palmyra created by Bassel Khartabil, the lead for Creative Commons Syria who has been imprisoned there since March…

The original article was written by Stéphanie Vidal in Slate.fr. It has since been published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Please attribute author Stéphanie Vidal and Slate.fr as the place of first publication by linking to the original article. The following has been translated into English by Philippe Aigrain, Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay,…

Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali, CC BY-NC 2.0 A few months ago the United States Copyright Office issued a request for comments on an extended collective licensing (ECL) pilot program they are considering for mass digitization projects. The Office thinks that such a program would permit greater access to cultural works by allowing…

  There are plenty of examples to depict our broken copyright system, but the “dancing baby” case is one of the most notorious. That’s the one where Universal Music used the DMCA to take down a 29-second YouTube video of an adorable baby dancing to “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince. Putting aside the legal questions,…

Last year several organizations highlighted the situation of Colombian graduate student Diego Gomez, who had a criminal complaint filed against him for sharing a research article online. Gomez is a student in conservation and wildlife management, and for the most part has poor access to many of the resources and databases that would help him…

This story was researched and written in collaboration with Creative Commons staff. You can also read the story on Medium. On February 14, 2015 New York’s Museum of Modern Art welcomed the public to a new exhibit, “This is For Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good.” Inspired by a short tweet made by Tim…

Ross Mounce, a postdoc at the University of Bath, recently wrote about how Elsevier charged him $31.50 for an “open access” research article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (BY-NC-ND) license. Mounce was understandably upset, because the article was originally published by another publisher – John Wiley  – and was made available freely on their…

Creative Commons dedicates the text of our licenses and other legal tools, as well as the text of our Commons deeds, to the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. While that doesn’t mean that anything and everything is allowed by those choosing to reuse these materials (as explained below), we believe that copyright…

We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation. Today’s…