“Violette Heymann, 1910” by Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection ,CC0. Creative Commons’ Open Culture Platform is supporting 25 institutions in opening up access to their collections by the end of 2025. Members of the Platform community will be working together to create a policy template, conduct outreach,…

One year after Creative Commons (CC) hosted an exploratory Open Culture Roundtable, in Lisbon, Portugal, which initiated the Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture (TAROC) global initiative, nearly 50 stakeholders from all continents gathered again for a strategic workshop, in Lisbon in May 2024. In this blog post, we share a snapshot of key highlights.

In May, CC’s Open Culture Program hosted a new webinar in our Open Culture Live series titled “Open Culture in the Age of AI: Concerns, Hopes and Opportunities.” In this blog post we share key takeaways and a link to the recording.

As part of the Open Culture Platform’s 2024 work plan, we at Creative Commons are offering funding for community activities. We called for proposals and invited the community to vote on the activities. The projects needed to have a focus on building community through outreach and helping institutions move toward open. Here are the four…

On Wednesday, 8 May 2024, at 2:00 pm UTC, CC’s Open Culture Program will be hosting a new webinar in our Open Culture Live series titled “Open Culture in the Age of AI: Concerns, Hopes and Opportunities.”

Today we in the Open Culture Program are releasing a new publication: Don’t be a Dinosaur; or, The Benefits of Open Culture.

Last week, Creative Commons (CC) participated in the 45th session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR). In this post, we report on the session discussions on exceptions and limitations for cultural heritage institutions (CHIs), a topic of utmost relevance to our Open Culture Program.

Last week, Creative Commons took part in the International Public Domain Day celebration at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels. Two engaging roundtables were hosted, delving into copyright issues concerning the public domain and its future. The event united advocates for open access to cultural heritage, featuring presentations on topics like the monetization and decolonization of the public domain, as well as updates on the Europeana Public Domain Charter. Creative Commons introduced new guidelines published in February aimed at encouraging users to reference institutions when utilizing public domain cultural heritage materials.

The J. Paul Getty Museum just released more than 88 thousand works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the digital images of items from its impressive collection squarely and unequivocally into the public domain. This is in line with our advocacy efforts at Creative Commons (CC): digital reproductions of public domain material must remain in the public domain. In other words, no new copyright should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.”

CC’s new guidelines aim to encourage users to refer to host cultural heritage institutions when using public domain materials. Rooted in the Behavioural Insights Team’s EAST Model, they offer institutions practical design ideas to nudge users into referring back to them.