During 2021–2022, CC has been celebrating the 20th anniversary of our founding in 2001 and the first release of the CC licenses in 2002, successfully concluding an ambitious fundraising campaign to support programs like Open Culture, Open Climate, and Open Education, and to help ensure CC’s ongoing sustainability. In November 2022, CC brought the 20th anniversary celebration to an official…

Today, we are announcing a release of 30,000 high quality, free and open digital images from the museum’s collection under CC0 and available via their API.

Many of you have heard about California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative that launched last spring, which called for submissions of free digital textbooks in math and science for use by the state’s schools. Of the 16 textbooks submitted last year, 15 are openly licensed under one of the Creative Commons licenses—and all 10 that passed…

If I hadn’t interned for Clarity Films one summer, I would never have learned most of what I know now about the apartheid, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu. I spent hours transcribing interviews and condensing documentary footage into some type of digital package that I don’t recall the name of (nor do I remember the…

Besting Creative Commons 1967 by a mere 1099 years is the Diamond Sutra, which according to Wikipedia is the earliest example of block printing that includes a date: The colophon, at the inner end, reads: Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the…

At this weekend’s Singularity Summit in San Francisco, “openness” of all sorts — open source, open access, open content, transparency — seems to be considered an uncontroversial and important part of making “AI and the future of humanity” a good one, for example: If the singularity is in fact near, the fundamental tools of information,…