Bassel Khartabil by Joi Ito, CC BY 2.0. Bassel Khartabil is the lead of Creative Commons Syria. He’s been has been imprisoned in Syria since March 15, 2012. Bassel has been a key contributor to projects that digitize, preserve, and share cultural heritage works. The #NEWPALMYRA project was launched last month, which is an online community…

Guest post by Fátima São Simão, CC Portugal Public Lead; Teresa Nobre, CC Portugal Legal Lead CC Toolkit for Business Handouts CC Toolkit for Business Posters CC Open Business Model Canvas At the 2013 CC Global Summit in Buenos Aires, Creative Commons launched the CC Toolkits Project, an initiative aimed at developing, collecting, and organizing…

    Yesterday, Creative Commons joined the U.S. Department of Education (ED) for a series of important announcements that will advance OER in grades PreK-12 across the United States. ED announced the launch of its #GoOpen campaign to encourage states, school districts and educators to use Open Educational Resources (OER). OER, made “open” by CC…

Yesterday the Obama administration released an updated version of its Open Government National Action Plan. Ever since the launch of the global Open Government Partnership in 2011, participating nations have made commitments to work on initiatives “to promote transparency, increase civic participation, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to make government more open, effective, and accountable.”…

Today marks the launch of #NEWPALMYRA, an online community platform and data repository dedicated to the capture, preservation, sharing, and creative reuse of data about the ancient city of Palmyra. The project features 3-D models of ruins from Palmyra created by Bassel Khartabil, the lead for Creative Commons Syria who has been imprisoned there since March…

The original article was written by Stéphanie Vidal in Slate.fr. It has since been published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Please attribute author Stéphanie Vidal and Slate.fr as the place of first publication by linking to the original article. The following has been translated into English by Philippe Aigrain, Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay,…

At its meeting on October 16, 2015, the Creative Commons Board of Directors unanimously approved the following motion: Consensus Resolution re: Bassel Safadi  WHEREAS: Creative Commons is hosting its bi-annual Global Summit in Seoul, South Korea from Oct 15-17, 2015, an event that has previously been attended by Bassel Khartabil, where he was an active…

As the Creative Commons Global Summit kicks off this week in Seoul, we are acutely aware of the absence of Bassel Khartabil, the Palestinian-Syrian open source software engineer and activist who led the CC Syria affiliate team. He has been imprisoned in Syria since March 2012. It is an incredibly dangerous time for Bassel. Earlier this month we heard…

Government funders are increasingly adopting open licensing policies for copyrightable works and data they create or commission. Over the last few years we’ve been excited to work with philanthropic foundations to implement similar open licensing policies for their grant-funded and in-house created works. Because there is a limit to the funds available to even the largest foundations, most…

Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali, CC BY-NC 2.0 A few months ago the United States Copyright Office issued a request for comments on an extended collective licensing (ECL) pilot program they are considering for mass digitization projects. The Office thinks that such a program would permit greater access to cultural works by allowing…