Illustration from the book "Songs, naval and national" by Thomas Dibdin, published in London, England in 1841.

Until recently, I had never heard of the sea shanty “The Wellerman”. My sea shanty repertoire consisted of “What can you do with a drunken sailor” to sea-songs on the soundtrack of Master and Commander. However, Nathan Evans, a fellow Scot who hails, like me, from North Lanarkshire, has changed all of this. His rendition…

In the second part of our series on artificial intelligence (AI) and creativity, we get immersed in the fascinating universe of AI in an attempt to determine whether it is capable of creating works eligible for copyright protection. Below, we present two examples of an AI system generating arguably novel content through two different methods:…

Image: "Love is Art Science 95" by Kollage Kid, licensed CC BY-NC 2.0.

Should novel output (such as music, artworks, poems, etc.) generated by artificial intelligence1 (AI) be protected by copyright? While this question seems straightforward, the answer certainly isn’t. It brings together technical, legal, and philosophical questions regarding “creativity,” and whether machines can be considered “authors” that produce “original” works. In search of an answer, we ran…

15318215771_72c527508c_k Photo of the Ndebele Tribe in South Africa by UN (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)-

This post was co-authored by CC’s Open Policy Manager Brigitte Vézina and Legal and Policy Intern Alexis Muscat. Tomorrow is International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, a day that seeks to raise awareness of and support Indigenous peoples’ rights and aspirations around the world. We at Creative Commons (CC) wish to highlight this important…

Astronaut Edwin Aldrin walks on lunar surface near leg of Lunar Module. Credit: Neil Armstrong/NASA, (1969) in the public domain.

It’s July 20, 1969.  Along with 600 million people, nine-year-old Chris Hadfield is glued to his television—watching intently as American astronaut Neil Armstrong glides down the ladder of the Lunar Module, and in one swift pounce, touches the dust of a familiar yet alien world. His words forever immortalized, “That’s one small step for man,…

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…

Public domain advocates celebrated on January 1 because, for the second year in a row, published works newly entered the public domain in the United States due to copyright expiration. To mark the occasion, Creative Commons (CC) collaborated with the Internet Archive, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Creative Commons USA, the Institute…

Creative Commons is pleased to be a part of the second annual Public Domain Day (PDD) celebration held in Washington D.C. on January 30, in collaboration with the Internet Archive, the Institute for Intellectual Property & Social Justice, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, and SPARC. In order to celebrate the public domain…

Creative Commons is pleased to be a part of the second annual Public Domain Day celebration held in Washington D.C. on January 30, 2020!  In collaboration with the Internet Archive, the Institute for Intellectual Property & Social Justice, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, and SPARC, this event will “bring together a diverse group…

A portrait of Caroline Rémy (1855-1929), a French feminist journalist. Photo by Paul Cardon.

The Paris Musées’ recently released more than 100,000 works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the works into the public domain. They also released their collections’ Application Programming Interface (API), allowing users to “recover, in high definition, several royalty-free images and their records from cross-searches on the works.” Users can scroll through the collection via…