October 02, 2026 at 15:49
Five months after Creative Commons hosted an Exploratory Dialogue at UNESCO House that brought the international community together to consider the promise of equitable access to heritage, we returned to Paris with a smaller group of UNESCO Member State representatives and open heritage champions. This time, the conversation had a different purpose: moving from exploring why open heritage matters to underscoring the urgency of taking action to establish international standards.
October 01, 2026 at 16:41
What does it mean to be part of the CC community today? It’s a question we ask ourselves regularly at CC—and one we recently brought directly to our community through our annual Community Survey. This year, 62 community members from 23 countries shared their experiences, priorities, ideas, and hopes for the future of the Commons.
September 30, 2026 at 16:15
On September 21st, Creative Commons convened leading experts, practitioners, and builders for a day of conversation about the collaborative underpinnings of openness, investigating all the layers of the stack for a better, shared understanding of what openness can—and cannot—do to help communities and nations drive towards digital sovereignty.
September 21, 2026 at 15:49
Creative Commons has been exploring questions around artificial intelligence for a long time: how this profound technological shift might affect people’s motivations to share, whether the intentions behind sharing work before AI became mainstream still hold when we consider how those works are being used now, and how we sustain a thriving commons when the fundamental bargain of the open web has shifted.
September 04, 2026 at 15:38
Creative Commons (CC) is happy to announce the launch of a new publication entitled Guidance for Indigenous Collections and Indigenous Data: Recommendations from Creative Commons and Local Contexts. This publication is the result of a collaboration with Local Contexts, as both organizations share commitments to equitable knowledge sharing, proper attribution, and respect for diverse cultural and community protocols. It aims to support cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) in navigating the complex legal, ethical, and cultural issues regarding open access to Indigenous heritage and associated data.
September 03, 2026 at 16:39
Since 2002, Creative Commons (CC) licenses have served as legally enforceable tools for digital sharing. Beyond their functionality, they also signal a commitment to open sharing in the public interest. CC’s general guidance has been to acknowledge and support all valid uses for each of our current six licenses and two public domain tools.
August 19, 2026 at 17:53
The recent emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has had a phenomenal impact on CHIs, especially as the content they steward is accessed and used for AI development. One key question centers on the conditions, norms, and expectations governing the use of openly licensed and public domain cultural heritage materials as data for AI development.
August 17, 2026 at 20:29
As the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) convenes its 81st session in New York in September, Creative Commons is bringing together leading civil society and digital rights organizations for “A Conversation on Collaboration,” a day-long symposium examining how to balance digital sovereignty with open collaboration.
August 12, 2026 at 20:38
We are excited to announce that we will be supporting four regional events for CC’s 25th Anniversary—representing regions around the world with groups who are working to advance open knowledge. We’re delighted to be working with a variety of trusted partners and look forward to sharing more about their plans and reporting back on how these events went.
August 10, 2026 at 18:06
With both Wikipedia and Creative Commons turning 25 this year, our participation in Wikimania 2026 felt especially meaningful. A quarter-century in, both organizations have evolved from scrappy experiments to global infrastructure. Our community has grown through a shared commitment to openness, access, and knowledge. The weeklong conference reaffirmed that commitment as AI is reshaping how we access knowledge and share online.
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…