“Irises, 1889” by Vincent van Gogh, The J. Paul Getty Museum is dedicated to the public domain by CC0.

The J. Paul Getty Museum just released more than 88 thousand works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the digital images of items from its impressive collection squarely and unequivocally into the public domain. This is in line with our advocacy efforts at Creative Commons (CC): digital reproductions of public domain material must remain in the public domain. In other words, no new copyright should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.”

We are thrilled to announce that the Creative Commons 4.0 License Suite and deeds have been officially translated into two new languages: Danish and Frisian, bringing the total number of official translations of the legal codes to 30! This achievement wouldn’t have been possible without the dedication and hard work of our community volunteers. We…

Join Creative Commons, Internet Archive, and many other leaders from the open world to celebrate Public Domain Day 2023. As of January 2023, a treasure trove of new cultural works has become as free as the moon and the stars — at least in the USA and many other countries. And what better way to…

Hello Creative Commoners! We are back with a brand new episode of CC’s Open Minds … from Creative Commons podcast. In this episode, we sat down with programmer, musician, and copyright attorney, Damien Riehl, and fellow musician and programmer, Noah Rubin—the creators of the All The Music project. Frustrated by accidental copyright infringement lawsuits stifling…

Since June 2021, thanks to a grant by the Arcadia Fund, Creative Commons has been developing our Open Culture / Open GLAM program to help transform institutions and support them as they embrace open culture and all the benefits it creates for themselves and their communities. Our core task is to enable galleries, libraries, archives…

On January 1, 2022, and throughout the month of January, Creative Commons (CC) is celebrating Public Domain Day, welcoming copyright works into the public domain, where they become freely available for the public to use, reuse and modify.  As part of our Open Culture / GLAM program’s celebration of Public Domain Day, we are reaching…

Every year, on 1 January, advocates of free and open content celebrate the works of art that have entered the public domain around the world. Why New Year’s Day? Copyrighted works such as books, artworks or music are only protected for a certain number of years, and this protection ends on 1 January. On 20…

If you’re a videogame designer and you have nothing to do over the next week (or if making cool games is more fun than your day job), why not spend the week developing a public domain game? The idea of The Public Domain Jam is to encourage developers to create games based on public domain…

Last week, indie videogame designer Nick Liow launched the Open Game Art Bundle. It’s a simple idea: independent videogame designers contribute game assets – animations, soundtracks, character designs – and customers can pay any price they want to access them. Nick describes it as a sort of cross between Kickstarter and Humble Bundle, and like…

This week marks a momentous occasion, as Europeana — Europe’s digital library — has released 20 million records into the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. This release is the largest one-time dedication of cultural data to the public domain using CC0. The Europeana dataset consists of descriptive information from a huge trove of digitized…