In July the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote about the predicament that Colombian student Diego Gomez found himself in after he shared a research article online. Gomez is a graduate student in conservation and wildlife management at a small university. He has generally poor access to many of the resources and databases that would help him…

Eager Street / Seth Sawyers / CC BY This week, Creative Commons US lead and CC board member Michael Carroll addressed the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet. In his address, he emphasized that the success of Creative Commons tools doesn’t eliminate the need for copyright reform; it underscores…

Ryan Merkley / Rannie Turingan / CC0 After an extensive search, the Creative Commons board of directors is pleased to announce that Ryan Merkley will be our new CEO. He’ll start work on June 1, and we’re all looking forward to working with him. Ryan joins us after a career working to advance social causes…

CC in the box of letters / Kristina Alexanderson / CC BY-SA For how popular they are worldwide, it’s striking how rarely CC licenses’ validity has been questioned in court. We consider that a testament to the care with which we craft the licenses: we try to find every possible area of contention or ambiguity…

This post originally appears on the Communia Association blog. Creative Commons is a founding member and active participant in Communia. Last week Thursday the European Commission launched its much anticipated public consultation on the review of the EU copyright rules. This consultation is the first visible sign of the second track of the Commission’s attempt…

Kansas City Postal Band / Unidentified photographer(courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution) / Public Domain Our friends at SoundCloud just told us about a contest they’re running with the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian publishes audio from its archives on SoundCloud under CC BY-NC. Now, it wants to show off all the possibilities for remixing open content…

Mt. Kenya / Chris 73 / CC BY-SA Guest post by Elizabeth Kiragu Wanjugu and Tobias Schonwetter As we were busy getting ready for our community Global Summit a few weeks ago, we nearly missed the announcement of another very important addition to that community – our new CC Kenya affiliate. Our new Kenyan team…

Earlier this year, CC China Mainland volunteers helped organize an educational event to promote open licensing. The CC China Mainland team recaps the event in this guest blog post, which originally appeared on the CC China Mainland blog. CC China Mainland volunteers recently helped organize the Trans-disciplinary System Integration Design Challenge, a program of the…

I met Peter Sand a few months ago at a #Sensored meetup in SoMa. The setting was exactly like the hardware labs from my undergraduate engineering days, and Peter was there exactly like one of my buddies showing kits and circuits cobbled together to do science (except, Peter is quieter and more polite than most…

What do you get when you write software that becomes the basis of just about every geospatial application out there? You get perspective. Frank Warmerdam has been authoring, improving, supporting, and shepherding Shapelib, libtiff, GDAL and OGR for the past 15 years. Frank believes that by sharing effort, by adopting open, cooperatively developed standards, and…