What role do books play in training AI models, and how might digitized books be made widely accessible for the purposes of training AI? What dataset of books could be constructed and under what circumstances? A new paper investigates the concept of a responsibly designed, broadly accessible dataset of digitized books to be used in training AI models.

“CC Icon Statue” by Creative Commons, generated in part by the DALL-E 2 AI platform. CC dedicates any rights it holds to this image to the public domain via CC0.

Many wonder what role CC licenses, and CC as an organization, can and should play in the future of generative AI. The legal and ethical uncertainty over using copyrighted inputs for training, the uncertainty over the legal status and best practices around works produced by generative AI, and the implications for this technology on the…

Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei). Katsushika Hokusai ca. 1830–32. Metropolitan Museum. Public Domain.

On 27 July 2023 we hosted the first webinar in our new Open Culture Live series. In this session about the basics of Open Culture, we led a presentation that answers some of the key questions for beginners hoping to understand more about Creative Commons, and how we work closely with the cultural heritage sector…

We are thrilled to announce that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have now adopted version 4.0 of the Creative Commons BY-SA license! The project first began using version 3.0 of the CC licenses in 2009 following a community process, having previously used the GNU Free Documentation License. This decision, made as part of a Terms…

As we gear up for Open Education Week 2023 (6 – 10 March), Creative Commons wants to recognize the contributions of our open education and related open communities. In the past several months, our community members have shared their knowledge and inquiry through lightning talks, panel discussions, presentations, and working groups. The list below offers…

Since its creation in 2001, Creative Commons (CC) has helped release nearly 5 million digital open images of cultural heritage held in cultural heritage institutions using CC tools. We have also been promoting open culture to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world, and it is based on this rich experience that our Open…

Hi Creative Commoners! We are back with a new episode of CC’s Open Minds … from Creative Commons podcast. On this episode, CC’s Chief Operating Officer, Anna Tumadóttir, sits down for an interesting conversation with Sam Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Arweave, the company that created the Arweave protocol, a permanent archive of human…

Sharing matters. Thanks to the digital revolution, we share things like never before, from scientific research to family photos, from day-to-day life to college courses — and all instantaneously. The variety and volume of sharing today was unimaginable even just a decade ago. Now social media and publishing platforms, smartphones, cheap data, and expanded internet…

The Creative Commons Legal Database is a collection of case law and legal scholarship to help our users learn more about legal issues surrounding Creative Commons (CC) licenses and legal tools. This information has been contributed by many dedicated members of the CC Global Network and the CC Legal Team. It was shared in a…

The new design

Last week, we launched a redesign of Creative Commons’ various license (aka “legal code”) pages. See one for yourself. In this post, I’ll spell out what the changes are and why we made them. The most obvious change we made is updating the overall look of the pages so that they resemble the rest of…