Ryan Merkley / Rannie Turingan / CC0 After an extensive search, the Creative Commons board of directors is pleased to announce that Ryan Merkley will be our new CEO. He’ll start work on June 1, and we’re all looking forward to working with him. Ryan joins us after a career working to advance social causes…

Ryan Merkley / Rannie Turingan / CC0 Download the press release (67 KB PDF) Mountain View, CA May 14, 2014: The board of directors of Creative Commons is pleased to announce the appointment of Ryan Merkley to the position of chief executive officer. Ryan is an accomplished strategist, campaigner, and communicator in the nonprofit, technology,…

Today the White House released the U.S. Open Data Action Plan, reaffirming their belief that “freely available data from the U.S. Government is an important national resource… [and] making information about government operations more readily available and useful is also core to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government.” The report (PDF) outlines…

Naeema Zarif, CC BY 4.0 In February we said goodbye to Donatella Della Ratta, CC’s longtime coordinator for the Arab world. Today we’re pleased to announce that Naeema Zarif and Sami Ben Gharbia have joined Creative Commons as the regional coordinators for the region. Naeema and Sami join CC’s other regional team leaders, who are…

Lawrence Lessig / Joi Ito / CC BY The Webby Awards just announced that Lawrence Lessig will receive a Lifetime Achievement award for his work as cofounder of Creative Commons. From the announcement: The Webby Awards is proud to honor Lawrence Lessig with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014 for his groundbreaking work as cofounder…

Photo: Golan Levin, CC-BY 2.0 We are now opening the discussion for our compatibility process and criteria for the ShareAlike licenses. As established in the drafting process, 4.0 includes a compatibility mechanism that allows for other licenses to be compatible with the ShareAlike licenses, allowing for greater interoperability of freely-licensed content, but no other licenses…

Release of DVD containing Odia font, open source tools and Offline Odia WikipediaAhemadullah Shaikh / CC BY-SA This guest blog post was written by Subhashish Panigrahi of The Center for Internet and Society, a Creative Commons affiliate in India. My name is Subhashish Panigrahi. I am an educator currently working in the community and communication…

Here at CC, we’re big fans of the Blender Foundation, which supports the open-source Blender 3D animation suite and produces beautiful animated films. The films are built entirely with open technologies and are licensed under CC BY. Big Buck Bunny, one of the early Blender films, raised a lot of awareness about Creative Commons licenses…

  Creative Commons actively works to support foundations, governments, IGOs and other funders who create, adopt and implement open policies. We believe publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources. To support these and other emerging open policy efforts, CC is about to launch, with multiple global open organizations, an Open Policy Network and Institute…

Creative Commons received a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to survey the licensing policies of private foundations, and to work toward increasing the free availability of foundation-supported works. We are still pursuing this objective, but here’s where we are at the moment. Tax-exempt private foundations are non-profit institutions exclusively devoted to benefitting…