This year, we’re focusing on re-engaging with the CC community and building new relationships, especially as emerging technologies like AI reshape how people create and share. We want to ensure CC’s tools, training, and resources evolve to meet real community needs, and we’re committed to being transparent and realistic about what we can offer in support. This is happening during a period of economic uncertainty for organizations in the open movement, so we are focusing on delivering sustainable pathways for community engagement at CC.

From CC Global Summit to New Ways of Connecting 

One big change you may have noticed is that we haven’t announced the next CC Global Summit. Unfortunately, CC’s budgets over the last two years have not allowed for such a significant expense, and most of the past Global Summits ran at a deficit. Without sufficient funding to support participant attendance, the Global Summits cannot be as inclusive as we aspire for them to be.

But this doesn’t mean we can’t spend time together – quite the opposite! We believe that supporting more regional gatherings for in-person engagement and virtual gatherings for increased inclusion will help to meet these challenges. Interested in exploring collaborating on an event in your region or in your community? Let’s chat. 

The CC Community in 2025

Earlier this year, we shared some of the history of the Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN), and talked about the importance of an expanded view of the CCGN. 

In thinking about the future of our community, the shared sentiment is that the CC community is much more expansive than the formal structures of the CCGN; the CC community is anyone who uses, advocates for, or supports the infrastructure that enables open licensing or who supports and believes in the power of the commons.

To enable this broader community, we are evaluating the existing (though currently inactive) membership process of the CC Global Network and how we support country chapters. Our goal is to strengthen our community engagement spaces and create clearer, more accessible pathways for people to get involved with CC.

Let’s Get to Work!

We are excited to reconnect and hear about your experiences and vision for the future of the CC community. Your input will help shape future decisions around governance, community infrastructure, communication tools, and engagement spaces. Please fill out the CC Community Survey by May 30:

• Creative Commons Community Survey – English
• Creative Commons Community Survey – Español
• Creative Commons Community Survey – Français

Our commitment is to make CC a space where collaboration thrives, knowledge flows freely, and communities feel empowered to shape the future of the commons. Stay tuned for opportunities to share your input, connect with others, and co-create what comes next.

The post The Next Chapter: Strengthening the Creative Commons Community Together appeared first on Creative Commons.

In case you missed it, we recently published our 2025-2028 Strategy which sets the stage for our goals and activities over the next few years. This updated strategy reaffirms our three goals at CC: 

1. Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing
2. Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons
3. Center community

As CC’s Community and Licensing Program Manager, I’m particularly  excited to share more details about Goal 3: Center community. For those of you who attended our strategy consultations in August 2024, you’ll know that reaffirming CC’s commitment to community was a top priority for community members, and we completely agree! In our strategy, community is listed as a goal in and of itself, but it is also recognized that all three of our goals are interconnected and each goal is required to fulfill the other goals. With that in mind, community is also central to strengthening the open infrastructure of sharing and defending and advocating for a thriving creative commons. 

We are excited to find new ways to support a CC community of anyone who uses, advocates for, or supports the infrastructure that enables open licensing or who supports and believes in the power of the commons. 

When we think about centering community now and in the future, it may first be useful for a quick history of the Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN) and past community efforts. If you are well aware of the history of the CCGN, feel free to skip ahead to the next section! 

A Quick History of the CCGN

The Creative Commons Affiliate Network was founded in 2001 alongside the founding of Creative Commons in order to support the global adoption of CC Licenses, and to port (or legally and linguistically adapt) the licenses to different legal jurisdictions. In November 2013, the 4.0 licenses, which no longer required porting, were launched. This presented an opportunity to shift the role of the Network to regional policy work, general awareness raising, and other local priorities. As a result, there was a need to rethink the Network structure to support this shift. A steering committee was launched in 2015 to create a new network strategy starting in 2015. The outcome of this work was the publication of Faces of the Commons, which included  the ultimate recommendation for a revised Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN) to be created by the global network itself. With the goal of meeting this challenge, in 2017, the Global Network Strategy was published. Alongside the 2017 strategy, Network Platforms were introduced (and then reintroduced in 2020) as a means to collaborate across jurisdictions on specific themes. The network strategy states these platforms as the intended primary locale for network collaboration, and today they are the most active spaces of the CC community.

Adjustments to the CCGN continued. In 2019, a set of  recommendations was published (though not adopted formally), in 2020, a report on the state of the network was produced, and in 2022, some major needs were identified.  Much of this occurred while the CC team itself was facing a tough budgetary reality and was unable to adequately resource community management of the CCGN and support recommended changes. 

Today, the CCGN is in need of renewed support from CC (the organization) to make sure the wonderful work of the global community can continue to be sustained. Many of the stated goals of the Network Strategy are out of alignment with how the network currently functions. As it stands, the Network Council—the body that governs the CCGN—has not met in over a year, and approved changes to the membership process have not been implemented because of the technical limitations of the current network website. 

We have an engaged and vibrant community of almost 1,000 CCGN members, many of whom participate in local, self-governed CC Chapters, and some of whom do not (or may wish to but don’t know how to get more involved). Many folks have inquired about the ways in which they could join the CCGN but as a result of past governance shifts and untied loose ends, the CCGN is stuck in a bit of governance limbo. That brings us to today and why Goal 3: Centering Community is so important to the success of CC’s vision and mission. 

Creating A Shared Vision of the Next Generation of the CCGN

Over the last year as we consulted on CC’s strategy, we have also been chatting with community members, some who are formally CCGN members and others who are CC advocates within their communities without formal affiliation with the CCGN. We conducted an internal assessment of the CCGN using historical data, community surveys, and interviews with chapter leads. In thinking about the future of our community, the shared sentiment is that the CC community is much more expansive than the formal structures of the CCGN; the CC community is anyone who uses, advocates for, or supports the infrastructure that enables open licensing or who supports and believes in the power of the commons. 

Today, nothing feels more important than both supporting and belonging to a community of values-aligned CC and open advocates who champion access to knowledge, and freedom of information as the foundations of a democratic society. We are excited to adapt the CC global community to the contexts and realities of 2025 so that together we can protect and strengthen the thriving creative commons as a means to solve the world’s greatest challenges. 

Sign up for our new Community newsletter to continue engaging with our work to refresh and center the CC community in our work.

The post Community in 2025 appeared first on Creative Commons.

SVG file Dlloyd based on Monica Helms design, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

At Creative Commons, we vehemently condemn the extensive violations of trans rights that are occurring across the world, and the current climate of fear and violence directed at trans individuals. We stand firmly against any and all forms of transphobia, including but not limited to bigotry, violence or persecution based on gender identity, and we affirm that trans rights are human rights ?‍.

As an international nonprofit organization, with a diverse global community that believes in democratic values and free culture, the protection and affirmation of all human rights — including trans rights — are central to our core value of global inclusivity and our mission of promoting openness and providing access to knowledge and culture. We believe much of the hate and discrimination that trans communities are facing is connected to misinformation and myths, highlighting the need for greater global access to and better sharing of information, culture and knowledge — and there is no better way to achieve this than to open them up: open science, open culture and open education are the keys to unlocking essential information and upholding trans rights.

Recently, we witnessed [1] book bans and educational restrictions on content related to trans rights and experiences, along with other bans of books related to other marginalized identities. These acts of censorship limit public access to important information, perpetuating misinformation, prejudice and discrimination.

As an employer of a small team of diverse individuals, and a steward of a global community of open advocates, CC is committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion. Trans individuals are an important part of our community, and we affirm our commitment to providing a safe, supportive, and welcoming environment for trans people within the workplace and the broader CC community. We also acknowledge the unique challenges that trans individuals may face in areas such as access to health care, housing and employment, and we commit to advocating for policies that address these issues. We recognize that these attacks on human rights also impact or prevent access to open knowledge and open culture. Unjust laws and acts of censorship and bigotry limit peoples’ ability to share knowledge, partake in our shared commons, and learn — these run counter to our mission.

We understand that language and terminology around gender and identity may be complex and constantly evolving. As such, we are committed to educating ourselves and others to ensure we use language that is inclusive and affirming. We also recognize the importance of legal protections for trans people, and support legislation that upholds the rights of trans individuals to live free from discrimination, harassment, and violence.

As part of this commitment, CC is working to update the codes of conduct to help shape experiences in our community and our team, so they explicitly cover trans rights, are consistent across and surfaced in all CC contexts, are clear in their language and processes, and are adopted by all community and team members.

By reflecting on our actions and prioritizing a culture of understanding and empathy, collectively we have the power to create a world where everyone is treated with dignity, respect, and equity no matter their gender identity or expression.

[1] “Book Bans LGBTQ+ Reading.” The 19th, 2023, https://19thnews.org/2023/02/book-bans-lgbtq-reading/

The post CC Supports Trans Rights appeared first on Creative Commons.

“Better Sharing With AI” by Creative Commons was generated by the DALL-E 2 AI platform with the text prompt “A surrealist painting in the style of Salvador Dali of a robot giving a gift to a person playing a cello.” CC dedicates any rights it holds to the image to the public domain via CC0.

Over the last year, innovation and use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded, providing new ways for people to create content of all sorts. For example, it’s been used to help create award winning art, develop educational materials, expedite software development, and craft business materials. Recently, three artists filed a class action lawsuit in the USA against StabilityAI and Midjourney, two companies that use the Stable Diffusion tool to enable people to generate images using simple text prompts. It follows on the heels of litigation brought by the same attorneys and other plaintiffs against GitHub and OpenAI for their Copilot and Codex tools for generating software code.

AI is an area that Creative Commons has long focused on, including most recently in a webinar series we held last fall. We are going to expand on our views in future posts, including exploring why we think the legal arguments in the US court case against StabilityAI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt are ill-founded. (Getty Images also subsequently filed a similar suit against StabilityAI in the US, as well as apparently commencing litigation in the UK, but we have yet to see that complaint.)

But before digging into all of the legal issues, we wanted to take a step back and restate our general approach to generative AI.

CC on Generative AI

Creative Commons has always sought out ways to harness new technology to serve the public interest and to support better sharing of creative content — sharing that is inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal and sustainable. We support creators to share their works as broadly and openly as they want, so that people can enjoy them globally without unnecessary barriers. We also advocate for policies that ensure new and existing creators are able to build on a shared commons, while respecting creators’ legitimate interests in control and compensation for their creative expressions.

A founding insight of Creative Commons is that all creativity builds on the past. When people learn to play the cello or paint a picture, for instance, they necessarily learn from and train their own skills by engaging pre-existing works and artists — for instance, noticing the style in which cellists like Yo-Yo Ma arrange notes, or building on surrealist styles initiated by artists like Dali. Similarly, while Star Wars invented the character of Luke Skywalker, it built on the idea of the hero’s journey, among many other elements from past works. People observe the ideas, styles, genres, and other tropes of past creativity, and use what they learn to create anew. No creativity happens in a vacuum, purely original and separate from what’s come before.

Generative AI can function in a similar way. Just as people learn from past works, generative AI is trained on previous works, analyzing past materials in order to extract underlying ideas and other information in order to build new works. Image generation tools like Stable Diffusion develop representations of what images are supposed to look like by examining pre-existing works, associating terms like “dog” or “table” with shapes and colors such that a text prompt of those terms can then output images.

Given how digital technologies function, training AI in this way necessarily involves making an initial copy of images in order to analyze them. As we’ve explored in the past and will discuss in future posts about these recent lawsuits, we think this sort of copying can and should be permissible under copyright law. There are certainly nuances when it comes to copyright’s interaction with these tools — for instance, what if the tools are later used by someone to generate an output that does copy from a specific creative expression? But treating copying to train AI as per se infringing copyright would in effect shrink the commons and impede others’ creativity in an over-broad way. It would expand copyright to give certain creators a monopoly over ideas, genres, and other concepts not limited to a specific creative expression, as well as over new tools for creativity.

Copyright, and intellectual property law in general, are only one lens to think about AI: It’s still important to grapple with legitimate concerns about this technology and consider what responsible development and use should be. For instance, what impact will these tools have on artists and creators’ jobs and compensation? How can we ensure that AI that is trained on the commons contributes back to the commons as well, supporting all types of creators? What about the use of these tools to develop harmful misinformation, to exploit people’s privacy (eg, their biometric data), or in ways that perpetuate biases? More generally, how can we ensure human oversight and responsibilities to ensure that these tools work well for society?

These are just some of the tricky issues that will need to be worked out to ensure people can harness AI tools in ways that support creativity and the public interest. Along with other policy and legal approaches to governing AI, it’s important to look to community-driven solutions that support responsible development and use. Already, StabilityAI will let artists opt-out of its training data set, as well as opt in to provide greater information about their works. While this precise approach raises a variety of views, indexing of the web has functioned well using a similar sort of opt-out approach — set through global technical standards and norms, rather than law. Creators of some generative AI tools are using licenses that constrain how they are deployed, which also carries various trade-offs.

What’s Next? Community Input

Supporting community-driven solutions has also always been at the heart of Creative Commons’ approach to creativity. If you’re interested in this subject, we are going to be holding meetings with the Creative Commons community, and we also plan to continue meeting with diverse stakeholders to explore what sorts of solutions may be helpful in this area. As we go along we’ll continue to report on what we’ve learned and seek out more community feedback.

Join the CC team at a community discussion about generative AI: How can we make it work better for everyone and support better sharing in the commons?

To enable participation around the world, we’ve scheduled three times for this conversation. Come to the one that works best for your schedule, or join as many as you like. We’ll be focused on the same questions and issues at each meeting, but different participants will bring different perspectives, reshaping each conversation. To enable participants to speak freely, these meetings will not be recorded, but the CC team will be taking notes to share outcomes from the conversations.

Community Meetings: Wednesday 22 February 2023

Register for 2:00–3:00 UTC

(check the schedule in your local timezone)

Register for 14:00–15:00 UTC

(check the schedule in your local timezone)

Register for 18:00–19:00 UTC

(check the schedule in your local timezone)

Stay in touch with CC: subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & Twitter), or join CC on Slack.

The post Better Sharing for Generative AI appeared first on Creative Commons.

In November 2022, CC brought the 20th anniversary celebration to an official close with both online and in-person activities. Highlights from these events were a collection of new open works showcasing the creativity and power of the open community. Take a tour down the page to explore video, digital experiences, music, and visual arts, all made to mark 20 years of Creative Commons, and now part of the open commons for everyone to share and remix.

Twenty Years of Creative Commons (in Sixty Seconds)

To mark CC’s 20th anniversary, we collaborated with Ryan Junell — the artist who designed the CC logo — and CC board member Glenn O. Brown to produce a new video showcasing the journey CC has taken over two decades to transform a messy, all-rights-reserved world into a thriving open commons. The video debuted on the big screen at the #20CC event to thunderous applause.

“Twenty Years of Creative Commons (in Sixty Seconds)” by Ryan Junell and Glenn Otis Brown for Creative Commons is licensed via CC BY 4.0 and includes adaptations of the multiple open and public domain works. View full licensing and attribution information about all works included in the video on Flickr.

Ain’t Nobody’s Business

Special musical guest Ouida performed a three-song set at the #20CC event, including two of her own original songs and her reinterpretation of a classic jazz standard, now in the public domain. Listen to Ouida’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” recorded live on 17 November 2022 in San Francisco.

“Ain’t Nobody’s Business” by Ouida licensed via CC BY-NC 4.0 adapted from “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins in the public domain.

A history of CC

Slides from the new dynamic CC Timeline looped on the big screen during the #20CC event, showcasing key moments in CC’s dynamic history, from our founding in 2001 and the release of our first open licenses in 2002, all the way to our most recent milestones. CC grew up online, so we’ve also included landmarks from web history in the timeline to show the close connections between the spread of digital networks and key events in our global community project to open knowledge and culture for everyone.

Is something missing from this CC history? You can contribute key events to help build the timeline.

#BetterSharing illustrations

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Creative Commons and our licenses, we partnered with Fine Acts to commission the #BetterSharing collection of illustrations to be enjoyed, used and adapted, and then shared again, by anyone, forever.

In developing this collection of artworks, we posed this question to 12 prominent global open advocates:

What does better sharing for a brighter future look like to you? 

Fine Acts selected 12 well-known international artists who have embraced openness to create a series of visual pieces under an open license, which are inspired by the theme and responses from the advocates and shared in The Greats, an open repository of free illustrations from great artists
to change the world.

Attendees at the live #20CC event bid on framed prints of the #BetterSharing illustrations, raising funds to sustain CC’s work. Explore the full collection, and feel free to print and frame your own copies of these open works.

CC 20th Anniversary Open Mix

If you paused to listen at the #20CC event, you heard tracks from a special playlist of open music, curated by Marko Roca, Head of Music at the Free Music Archive. Tracks came from a wide range of genres, from afrobeat, to balkan, bluegrass, electronica, jazz, folk, funk, hiphop, pop, salsa, triphop and everything in between. Our thanks to Marko and all the artists in the mix — CC is contributing to support these artists on FMA, and we encourage you to listen and contribute to support open music artists!

Open Infrastructure Circle

Huge thanks to the organizations who joined our Open Infrastructure Circle to show their support for the work CC does to steward and develop the open licensing and legal tools that are essential to support a global, interoperable public commons: BCCampus, Hypothesis, Michelson 20MM Foundation, MIT OpenCourseWare, Pressbooks, and Saylor Academy.

Does your organization rely on CC licenses and legal tools to participate in the open commons? Join the Open Infrastructure Circle to help CC develop and steward essential open infrastructure to continue to grow the open commons and ensure emerging technologies support better sharing.

Make a contribution to support CC

Creative Commons empowers people, institutions, and governments to share content openly to advance knowledge, equity, and creativity for everyone, everywhere. As we look ahead to the next 20 years, our focus is on better sharing, sharing that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable. As a nonprofit, we rely on contributions from people like you. Make a contribution of any size >

The post 20CC: Open Works from CC’s 20th Anniversary appeared first on Creative Commons.

During 2021–2022, CC has been celebrating the 20th anniversary of our founding in 2001 and the first release of the CC licenses in 2002, successfully concluding an ambitious fundraising campaign to support programs like Open Culture, Open Climate, and Open Education, and to help ensure CC’s ongoing sustainability.

In November 2022, CC will bring the 20th anniversary celebration to an official close with both online and in-person activities. The CC Global Network and our broader community are at the heart of CC’s work to support better sharing for an open commons, so we are inviting you to be a part of marking this milestone. There are several ways you can join the celebration — pick one or all!

Attend a global CC 20th Anniversary event

San Francisco

Creative Commons invites you to a 20th Anniversary Celebration on Thursday 17 November 2022 at 7pm PST at Terra Gallery, San Francisco*. Join us for an evening of entertainment as we toast to the past and mobilize support for the future! Save your seat >

Virtual

Can’t come to San Francisco? Join a virtual 20th Anniversary Celebration on Wednesday 30 November 2022. Register for 3:00–5:00 UTC and/or 15:00–17:00 UTC >

Make a contribution to support CC

Creative Commons empowers people, institutions, and governments to share content openly to advance knowledge, equity, and creativity for everyone, everywhere. As we look ahead to the next 20 years, our focus is on better sharing, sharing that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable. As a nonprofit, we rely on contributions from people like you. Make a contribution of any size >

Share a digital artifact showcasing your community’s open contributions

Share a digital artifact that showcases your local community’s past or future work to build the open commons. CC will share accepted artifacts with the world to illustrate the variety of activities and points of view that represent the Creative Commons Global Network and CC community.

Requirements: All artifacts must be shared with CC licenses or CC0 public domain dedications, and demonstrate CC’s better sharing values. Describe your artifact >

CC chapters: Grants to mark CC’s 20th Anniversary locally 

CC chapters worldwide will be marking the anniversary locally with events, activities, and projects supported by #20CC Anniversary grants to celebrate CC’s past 20 years and our shared future. Stay tuned to the #20CCAnniversary hashtag on social media to hear more about what the grantees and their work.

Requirements: The grant program closed on 10 Oct 2022. If you missed it, you are still welcome to contribute a digital artifact as above to include your community’s work in the #20CC celebration.

Celebrate on social media

Help get the word out about CC’s 20th Anniversary celebration: Share this post with the #20CCAnniversary hashtag and what CC, better sharing, and the open commons mean to you.

Do you like what other people are sharing? Favorite and reshare #20CCAnniversary posts from other CC community members.

Questions?

Reach out to communications@creativecommons.org, or start a conversation in the #cc-community channel in the CC community slack. 

The post Join Us to Celebrate 20 Years of Creative Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

Sharing matters. Thanks to the digital revolution, we share things like never before, from scientific research to family photos, from day-to-day life to college courses — and all instantaneously. The variety and volume of sharing today was unimaginable even just a decade ago. Now social media and publishing platforms, smartphones, cheap data, and expanded internet access have enabled more sharing, both in forms that bring us joy and connection, and in the spread of lies, hate and misinformation. Our digital life reflects human nature in all its complexity, highlighting both the good and the bad.

All this sharing has created a flood of new copyrighted works — practically everyone is now a published author, many times over, when we think of all our social media postings — but is the current copyright paradigm working in our interest?

Copyright law is a strand of intellectual property law that affects us all, helping decide what we can read, listen to, watch and share online. It impacts creators, innovators and users of content. We all agree that creators should be fairly rewarded for their works. The economic argument that stronger protection for authors’ rights will inevitably lead to more gains for individual creators may appear convincing in the abstract. However, in practice, the economic argument does not turn out to be persuasive, because extending copyright terms from a few decades to life plus 70 years has not materially increased earnings for the majority of individual creators. Instead, it has generated greater monopolies, benefiting select corporations whose profit motives lift only a few star players. The vast majority of creators do not experience the benefits of the current copyright system first hand. When culture is paywalled, rented and held for profit, when knowledge is locked away, when our libraries are threatened and educators diminished, there’s a chill cast on how our society interoperates, and ultimately on the health of our democracy.

Onerous copyright rules, benefiting the few and not the many, obstruct our access to culture, the knowledge we share, and the society we care about. In order to empower individual creators and safeguard our democracy, Creative Commons (CC) has developed an alternative system to the onerous all rights reserved copyright rules, enabling a commons of knowledge and culture which is freely accessible to everyone, everywhere. We offer a set of open licenses and public domain tools free for anyone to use — a new system where creators get to make their own choices about which rights they want to keep and which rights they want to share. By making their own choices for sharing, creators can reach new and expanded audiences, and people across the planet can access works and ideas to build new creations. Our licenses are now the global standard for sharing content, for creators, researchers, educators, librarians, archivists and governments.

As CC celebrates 20 years of facilitating the sharing of content across the planet, it is important to reflect on what we have learned.

Firstly, our strategic shift away from sharing just for sharing’s sake to working for better sharing, helps us address the careful balance between sharing that is in the public interest, and sharing which is not. This is important at a time when all the benefits that the internet has brought to us seem to be so quickly forgotten, and the predominant narrative is around “harm” rather than public interest. At CC, we want to shift this narrative back to the importance of why sharing matters and how we can do it better. This is why we are an organizing partner in the nascent Better Internet movement, and are actively advocating around the world to ensure that human values and public interest are front and center in our online world.

Secondly, time and time again, we see digital public infrastructure and goods taken for granted. At a time when the public interest often stands in direct contrast to the commercial interest of the creative industries and large tech firms, we need public investment in the structures that underpin the open commons. If we are not careful, the internet will be just a collection of those company towns, where you get paid in company scrip, can only buy from the company store, and only hear the company line and see the company viewpoint. With democracy already in a fragile state and open societies threatened, we need investment in the infrastructure that protects the public interest. Creative Commons is part of this public infrastructure. Without it, we will be poorer, less open and less democratic.

Thirdly, CC needs to be better at publicizing and promoting our work, to reach more people, so that our tools and services can be used to help expand the open commons of knowledge and culture even further. Our impact dwarfs our resources. Even though people use the open commons daily, the vast majority of the public have never heard of CC, or if they have, they are either surprised there is an organization behind the licenses at all, or they think that we are the size of Wikimedia — when in reality CC has a staff of 20, and Wikimedia over 550. We at CC recognize this challenge, and this is why we are already working with our existing network to build a new community of young and emerging leaders who can carry the torch of open knowledge and culture forward into the future.

Catherine Stihler” by Martin Shields is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Finally, the world we live in today is different from the one when CC was first created. Looking forward, as I mark my 2nd anniversary at CC, I see our challenges and opportunities are to recognize and consolidate the impact we’ve made in supporting the growth of the commons, but also to continue that impact in this emerging era of AI, big data, and web3 to effect positive change in our world. We have reshaped the copyright regime in 20 years, becoming the global standard for open content sharing. Now we stand at the cusp of the next 20 years, encountering new places and spaces for dialogue, and championing a new generation of practitioners and advocates, but most importantly, continuing to build a commons of knowledge and culture that is accessible to everyone, everywhere. I look forward to working with you all to make this vision a reality.

Will you join us? Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed about the commons, make a donation to support CC’s work, join our global network to get more involved, or get certified to deepen your open practices.

The post Sharing Matters: What We’ve Learned at Creative Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

To better integrate our community and communications, we are now bringing them together into one common practice. I’m excited to announce that our next move in this direction is to welcome Nate Angell as our new Director of Communications and Community.

Nate joins Creative Commons as a long-time community member, where he has worked to help educators and institutions adopt and adapt open educational resources (OER) and to spread the use of common tools and infrastructure that support open knowledge practices. You may already know Nate for his contribution of the “TV dinner vs smoothie” analogy that tries to help people understand the difference between loose collections and deep remixes of openly-licensed works.

Nate’s long experience cultivating open practices and tools with people working in schools, cultural institutions, libraries and archives, science and research, and journalism will enable him to help us all share the common purpose that unites all our wide-ranging collaborations and creations.

As he’s just getting started, I asked Nate to sum up how he’s feeling about his new role:

“I’m so excited to join Creative Commons and be able to engage full time with this truly global community that I’ve long seen is working to make the world better. When I look at everything happening around the world right now — both the wonderful and the troubling — I know the best thing I can be doing is to help as many people as possible share their creativity and their knowledge. We couldn’t do that without the fundamental infrastructure that Creative Commons provides, and I’ll be doing my best to spread it far and wide.”

Do you have thoughts about communications and community at Creative Commons? Nate wants to hear from you! Reach Nate and the whole Creative Commons team and community by joining our mailing list or Slack, and engaging us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. You can also reach Nate directly at nate@creativecommons.org, or as @xolotl on Twitter or Mastodon.

The post CC welcomes Nate Angell appeared first on Creative Commons.

“Catherine Stihler” by Martin Shields is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Dear CC Community,

It’s a very special day — today marks the 20th Anniversary of Creative Commons’ founding!

Twenty years ago, Creative Commons started with a simple, radical idea: to save the internet from “failed sharing” and create a world where everyone has access to knowledge and creativity.

What began as a simple idea and dream is today a reality worldwide. Over the past 20 years, Creative Commons has powered a global movement spanning 86 countries, developed and stewarded legal tools and licenses, and unlocked over two billion works that can be openly and freely shared.

But we didn’t get here on our own — as we’ve grown and evolved over the last two decades, we’ve built a vibrant global CC Community of advocates, activists, scholars, artists, and users working to strengthen the Commons worldwide. In 2017, we established the CC Global Network to help coordinate and provide leadership in the global Creative Commons movement. And today there are 48 CC Chapters around the world!

While we stay grounded in the vision of our founding, we also look toward the future. And for us, and many others, the future includes Better Sharing – the type of sharing that serves the public interest, creates the world the internet promised, and one where everyone has access to culture, science, and knowledge. We invite you to support our Better Sharing campaign below.

And the good news is that the celebration isn’t over yet! The 20th Anniversary of CC licenses is December 16, 2022. So throughout the year, we will continue conversations with influencers who are adding to the open movement, share insights and innovations from CC staff and partners, and host special events of celebration for our global community. Keep an eye on the CC Blog, our monthly newsletters, and on social for exciting announcements and new content.

To the entire CC Community, CC staff and board members (past and present), our 20th Anniversary Committee, CC friends, partners and donors — I thank you for your continued commitment to Creative Commons and our mission. Simply put, we wouldn’t be celebrating 20 years of CC without you.

Here’s to another 20 fantastic years! 

Sincerely,

Catherine Stihler,
CEO of Creative Commons
On behalf of the CC Team

Check out our special 20th Anniversary episode of CC’s Open Minds podcast, featuring Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig! Lessig reflects on how CC began, what it has accomplished, and what he hopes to see in the next twenty years and beyond. 

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