July 24, 2026 at 16:39
Attribution has always been a cornerstone of working with other people’s creativity and knowledge. As Creative Commons reminds us, practicing attribution serves many important functions, from providing verifiable evidence of a claim, to paying respect to the work of others, and creating pathways for traffic and financial value to flow. Despite the importance of attribution, many of today’s AI systems fail to acknowledge the sources of knowledge and creativity that make them possible.
July 16, 2026 at 15:56
The Creative Commons Open Heritage Companion is a practitioner’s guide developed to help cultural heritage institutions navigate the journey from closed to open collections. Grounded in the legal, policy, and ethical questions institutions face along the way, the Companion brings together resources, tools, and examples that guide practitioners from their first questions about openness to leading the field.
July 06, 2026 at 16:37
At the recent Founders Fireside Chat, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig referred to himself as “hopelessly naive.” It struck me that this sort of naivete—the kind that is about believing in the potential for good when sharing knowledge with other humans—is the glue that holds the entire Creative Commons movement together, across borders and belief systems.
July 02, 2026 at 21:01
Over the past 25 years, Creative Commons has helped transform openness from an aspiration into a global practice. Through open licensing, communities around the world have built new models for sharing. The Legacy Of series reflects on four interconnected movements—Open Access, Open Education, Open Science, and Open Culture—and the people who helped shape them.
June 30, 2026 at 17:19
Twenty-five years ago, a small group of people made a bet. They believed that if you gave creators a simple set of tools and licenses in language that a lawyer, a machine, and a human could all read, millions of people might choose to share their work with the world instead of locking it down.
“We said, oh gosh, if a million people use these licenses, that would be amazing,” Hal Abelson recalled, laughing at how small that ambition sounds now. Today the number “starts with a B.” Hal’s quote was one of many memorable moments during Creative Commons’ Founders Fireside Chat, a special benefit event for CC’s 25th anniversary.
May 13, 2026 at 08:00
In this post, we outline our plans to build upon and strengthen CC signals in order to support our goal of sustained access to human knowledge. We do not have all the answers yet. What we do have is a framework for how we will work toward them.
May 06, 2026 at 17:25
How can equitable access to heritage help solve global challenges? That is the question we addressed during our Exploratory Dialogue, a major event we hosted on 29 April, 2026, at UNESCO House in Paris, France, to celebrate the Open Heritage Statement and explore its synergies with UNESCO’s priorities in tackling the most urgent problems facing the world today.
April 23, 2026 at 15:52
It’s been a while since we last shared an update on CC signals and our work around AI and the commons. Over the past several months, we’ve been deep in research, in conversation, and in active collaboration with communities, policymakers, and practitioners. We took the time to understand where power is consolidating, where harms are emerging, and where meaningful intervention is actually possible. We are now at a point where we believe we can act in ways that will have real impact.
April 20, 2026 at 14:53
Today, we are sharing our newest report, Licensing Best Practices for Sharing Scientific Data. This report builds on our 2023 report Recommended Best Practices for the Better Sharing of Climate Data with the goal of extending the open data practices originally designed for climate data to other disciplines.
April 16, 2026 at 18:55
Gathering is a vital part of relationship building among and across movements, and we know we have supporters around the globe excited to get more involved in our work. Creative Commons has chapters around the world—communities of practice in a wide variety of topics from science and culture to open source—who are best suited to…
April 14, 2026 at 08:00
Today, we kick off celebrations for CC’s 25th anniversary. Please join us throughout the rest of 2026 as we commemorate a quarter century of sharing.
March 06, 2026 at 16:54
On Monday 2 March 2026, Creative Commons (CC) and Internet Archive Europe, together with the support of Open Nederland, hosted an event entitled “Ensuring equitable access to heritage in the digital environment: A leading role for the Netherlands on the global stage.” In this blog post, we offer a recap of the dynamic discussions and share why they matter for CC.
March 04, 2026 at 17:24
Last month, we published a preview of what we intended to bring to the AI Impact Summit in Delhi: a focus on data governance, shared infrastructure, and democratic approaches to AI that genuinely advance the public interest rather than replicate existing power imbalances. That piece outlined our core interventions and the principles that have guided our thinking as we grapple with how to ensure openness, agency, and equity in the age of AI.
February 18, 2026 at 19:41
Over the past year, we’ve been engaged in a series of conversations with a small group of researchers specializing in IP, AI policy, and data governance about what CC licensing means—and does—in African contexts today. What started as an organic exchange in various spaces has revealed something larger: a strong appetite to move these conversations into the open. At stake are not only questions about CC licenses but deeper issues of data sovereignty, equity, governance, and power in global knowledge systems.
February 17, 2026 at 19:48
Over the past year, Creative Commons communities around the world have continued to show what’s possible when people come together around shared values of openness, collaboration, and care. In 2025 we were focused on gathering feedback on our ongoing preference signals explorations, creating and gathering feedback on new governance frameworks for future implementation, streamlining community communication channels, and transitioning to an open source chat platform for community collaboration.
February 12, 2026 at 19:16
I like to say I am a “writer who lawyers”. I begin here because I want to name my biases up front. I am a lawyer, but I come to this work first and foremost as a writer thinking about the conditions that will allow us to continue to share knowledge publicly. And in spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that I am a lawyer, I have a healthy skepticism about the power of legal terms and conditions. The law will play a role, but the challenge of keeping the internet human will ultimately be navigated by the stories we imagine and tell. We need new stories.
February 10, 2026 at 21:47
In November 2025, we had the privilege of supporting and participating in Semana de la Cultura Libre (Open Culture Week) in Montevideo, Uruguay: a week-long celebration of open culture organized by CC Uruguay. Through panels, workshops, concerts, and conversations, the week offered a powerful reminder that free culture is not an abstract idea but a living practice shaped by local communities, histories, and needs.
February 06, 2026 at 17:18
This month, CC will be represented at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, an international gathering shaping the future of AI policy and practice. The 2026 Summit follows the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, where CC underscored a simple but essential truth: without civil society, there can be no public interest.
January 08, 2026 at 16:47
In 2026, Creative Commons will continue to ensure that technological change strengthens, not erodes, the commons and improves the acts of sharing and access that are part of our everyday lives. We do this by applying first principles, practical strategies, and lessons learned from decades of advancing the commons. Sharing of research, educational materials, heritage, and creative works are acts of generosity—these are the gifts people give to the commons. Access to these same shared resources enables collaboration, innovation, and understanding. Together, this is how we improve access to knowledge and build a more equitable future.
December 19, 2025 at 17:28
This year marked the first year of a new strategic cycle for Creative Commons, and it began amid profound change. The ground beneath the open internet continues to shift. Powerful technologies, driven largely by multibillion-dollar companies, are reshaping how knowledge and creativity are shared online, concentrating power in the hands of a few and testing long-standing assumptions about openness and access.