The Smithsonian—the world’s largest museum and research institution—announced yesterday  Smithsonian Open Access, an initiative that removes copyright restrictions from 2.8 million digital collection 2D and 3D images and nearly two centuries of data. This major initiative uses CC0—Creative Commons’ public domain dedication tool—to make millions of images and data freely available to the public. “Our…

Creative Commons is proud to announce the release of the official translations of the Latvian 4.0 licenses and Basque 4.0 licenses, as well as the Basque CC0 translation.

We are pleased to announce publication of the official translation of the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication into Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.

This week a coalition of scholarly publishers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations launched the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a project to promote the unrestricted open access to scholarly citation data. From the website: Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an…

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…

“We need to talk,” begins the first letter from the organizers of “Letters for Black Lives,” a new writing project aimed at opening up intercultural and inter-generational dialogue about the Black Lives Matter movement.

Photo by Tirza van Dijk, CC0. A few weeks ago we submitted comments to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) draft federal source code policy. The purpose of the policy is to improve access to custom software code developed for the federal government, and would require that: (1) New custom code whose development is…

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. Every…

Hubble Space Telescope and Earth Limb / NASA on The Commons / No known copyright restrictions If you could send a folder with 50 MB of content to every human on Earth, what would you include? This weekend Creative Commons volunteers and Outernet are hosting a CC Content Edit-a-thon to populate the first Outernet library…

Less than one month ago, Creative Commons began a project designed to explore and develop business models built on CC licensing. Starting from the methods in the best-selling Business Model Generation handbook, Creative Commons is developing new tools specifically tailored for ventures that utilize CC-licensed or public domain content as a central component of their…