Telephone Switchboard Close-up by Jeff Sullivan is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

(updated May 2024 with new link) Come join CC’s legal team for open office hours. Everyone is invited to meet with General Counsel Kat Walsh and Counsel Yuanxiao Xu to discuss legal issues related to CC licenses, CC0, and open sharing in general. We’ll start off with a few minutes talking about CC and some…

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…

Update: On February 7, 2020, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied Great Minds’ petition for rehearing (opinion (PDF)). As a result, the decision (PDF) of the panel in favor of CC’s interpretation of the licenses remains final. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reaffirmed Creative Commons’ interpretation of activities that are permissible under the…

Like the rest of the internet, it seems, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) that comes into effect today has given us a good opportunity to pause and do a comprehensive review of the ways in which Creative Commons collects and uses the personal information of its community.

For more than a decade, Creative Commons has developed and stewarded legal tools that give creators the opportunity to share their work on open terms.

Last year, Festival delle Resistenze 2016 in Trentino-Alto Adige misused a photo of the journalist Niccolò Rampini that had been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under a CC-by-SA-4.0 license by a professional photographer named Federico Caranti.

Universal Thank You Note / woodleywonderworks / CC BY This week is Pro Bono Week in the United States. We wish to take this opportunity to thank the many talented legal professionals on whom we count for impeccable, cutting-edge advice around the world on an array of issues, all on a volunteer basis. CC leverages…

Yelabuga Medieval Tower / Ерней / Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons Every day, millions of people rely on CC licenses for all manner of sharing, from merely redistributing recordings or using images found on Flickr in presentations, to leveraging massive collaborative works developed on wikis in educational settings. All of this normally happens very quietly…

The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (BY-SA) has been enforced by a judicial injunction in Germany. Legal analysis will be added to our case law database in the coming days. Till Jaeger reported the case (in German; English machine translation) at ifrOSS (Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software), where one may…

Last week, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) sent a fundraising letter to its members calling on them to fight “opponents” such as Creative Commons, falsely claiming that we work to undermine copyright.* Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses – plain and simple. Period. CC licenses are legal tools that creators can…