Duria Antiquior by Henry De la Beche, National Museum Cardiff, Public Domain

Today we in the Open Culture Program are releasing a new publication: Don’t be a Dinosaur; or, The Benefits of Open Culture.

“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.”

CC’s new guidelines aim to encourage users to refer to host cultural heritage institutions when using public domain materials. Rooted in the Behavioural Insights Team’s EAST Model, they offer institutions practical design ideas to nudge users into referring back to them.

“Original art by illustrator Freya C. Morgan”. Internet Archive.

Join Creative Commons, Internet Archive, and many other leaders from the open world to celebrate Public Domain Day 2024. The mouse that became Mickey will finally be free of his corporate captivity as the copyright term of the 1928 animated Disney film, Steamboat Willie, expires along with that of thousands of other cultural works on…

Modern recut copy of The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖波裏), from 36 Views of Mount Fuji, Color woodcut. Circa 1930 (original created 1829-1832). Public domain.

The Open Climate Campaign is pleased to see the recent wave of announcements requiring open access to knowledge that support our goal to make the open sharing of research outputs the norm in climate science. The Campaign recognizes that in order to generate solutions and mitigations to climate change, the knowledge (i.e. research papers, data,…

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…

In 2022, five working groups of the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform collaborated on a diverse range of topics related to better sharing of cultural heritage. In this blog post, we highlight their incredible contribution to the open culture community. Digital Community Heritage Led by Bettina Fabos and Mariana Ziku, the Digital Community Heritage Working…

Today Creative Commons is proud to release our report on the Needs Assessment entitled Are the Creative Commons Public Domain Tools Fit-For-Purpose in the Cultural Heritage Sector?. From 1 January (Public Domain Day) to 15 February 2022, we ran a multilingual online survey using Google Forms to share a 50-question questionnaire in English, French and…

A cropped version of "'Espejo exterior o espía'." by Biblioteca Rector Machado y Nuñez is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0. with a white CC open culture logo

2022 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In this blog post, we take a look back at some of the year’s highlights in our program’s four components: Policy,…

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…