Today the European Commission released licensing recommendations to support the reuse of public sector information in Europe. In addition to providing guidance on baseline license principles for public sector content and data, the guidelines suggest that Member States should adopt standardized open licenses – such as Creative Commons licenses: Several licences that comply with the…

The Creative Commons blog is a resource for the open community, featuring news and analysis on Creative Commons licenses as well as broader issues like open access, open science, open educational resources, and more. We invite members of our community to write guest blog posts for the CC Blog. What we’re looking for Interesting stories…

Stay up to date with CC by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Twitter. Ryan Merkley / Rannie Turingan / CC0 Why Creative Commons must succeed “Why am I joining CC? Because its success is so vital, and I want to ensure we succeed. Creativity, knowledge, and innovation need a public commons – a…

Ryan Merkley / Rannie Turingan / CC0 I’m honored to be chosen as CEO of Creative Commons. CC is a giant of the open web, and it’s an organization that I have always believed in and truly admire. I appreciate the confidence shown by the board, and support I have already received from staff and…

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…

Ryan Merkley / Rannie Turingan / CC0 Download the press release (67 KB PDF) Mountain View, CA May 14, 2014: The board of directors of Creative Commons is pleased to announce the appointment of Ryan Merkley to the position of chief executive officer. Ryan is an accomplished strategist, campaigner, and communicator in the nonprofit, technology,…

Is copyright a little fuzzy? / Elias Bizannes / CC BY-SA Following on the heels of “Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond,” three more School of Open courses are now open for sign-up. They are: 1. Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) This course will equip Australian educators with the copyright knowledge to confidently use copyright…

We are continuing our practice of providing official plaintext versions of the licenses, as we did with version 3.0. BY 4.0 (plaintext) BY-SA 4.0 (plaintext) BY-NC 4.0 (plaintext) BY-NC-SA 4.0 (plaintext) BY-ND 4.0 (plaintext) BY-NC-ND 4.0 (plaintext) As said in the previous entry: “For most works, plaintext legalcode doesn’t matter as linking directly to the…

GS2013 Final Day in Hall / Ibtihel Zaatouri / CC BY-SA You might remember our announcement a few months ago that Cathy Casserly will be stepping down as CEO of Creative Commons this year. Today, we’re excited to officially open the search for the new CEO. Our friends at m/Oppenheim Associates are helping to coordinate…

In November we released version 4.0 of the Creative Commons license suite, and today the Open Definition Advisory Council approved the CC 4.0 Attribution (BY) and Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) International licenses as conformant with the Open Definition. The Open Definition sets out principles that define “openness” in relation to data and content…It can be summed up…