After Steam released its new Steam Controller on May 4, it immediately sold out. Valve then released the CAD files for the Steam Controller and its Puck under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, which means you can print and share your own creations as long as you do so under the same license. What do you think about this?
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Creative Commons
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mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Creative Commons helps you legally share your knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world. https://creativecommons.start.page
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Join us for our next webinar on August 13 at 10 am EDT to learn how to find CC-licensed content, properly attribute the work, and reuse materials with confidence.
We’ll explore some of the best places to discover openly licensed content, decode the different CC licenses, and walk through the ins and outs of proper attribution.
https://pro.gofundme.com/event/cc-201-finding-and-reusing-cc-licensed-works/e823630
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 to determine where we can act in ways that will have real impact. And through that work, CC signals has evolved.
Read our new blog post to learn more about this journey.
https://creativecommons.org/2026/04/23/update-on-cc-signals-what-changed-and-why/
@pluralistic@mamot.fr 's new art book, Canny Valley, perfectly encapsulates the beauty and importance of sharing human creativity online. Canny Vally is a collection of 80 of his best collages, and donors who contribute $125 or more to Creative Commons' Keep the Internet Human campaign will receive a signed copy of the book while supplies last!
Give a gift and get yours today! https://lnkd.in/ghwTmn5m
We recently shared an update on the evolution of CC signals. In our newest blog post, we share several high-impact interventions we are advancing as part of the CC signals framework to restore trust, strengthen participation, and embed public interest values into the AI knowledge ecosystem.
We do not have all the answers yet. What we do have is a framework for how we will work toward them.
We call this the "I Love Sharing" starter pack. For our anniversary, we've relaunched our merch store with all new designs and ways to wear your love for sharing on your sleeve.
https://creative-commons-shop.fourthwall.com
Background photo: "Looking west - East Room replica - Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum" by Tim Evanson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
We are extending the deadline for submissions to the 25th anniversary zine to August 15! Send us your remixes, your poems, your photography, links to your songs. We want to highlight the messy, creative, playful, political live experiences of our community!
Don't forget to register for CC101: Intro to the CC Licenses, which is tomorrow, June 17 at 10-11:30 am EDT!
https://pro.gofundme.com/event/creative-commons-101-an-intro-to-the-cc-licenses/e793406
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The third design is by JUM. This work explores the sharing of human knowledge and creativity by using nature as a reference to the creative human process. The work showcases a seed (idea), which is nurtured through the artistic process into constant growth and evolution.
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The second design is by Amogh Bhatnagar, titled "Need a Hand?" This work looks at how Creative Commons can help you out in numerous ways, while referencing a collective body of artworks that transcends time and geography. The collection of hands represents a collective human spirit, referencing the human hand from across chronological periods and geographies. The slightly tongue-in-cheek caption asks if you ‘Need a Hand?’ and reassures that the commons will always have your back.
CC merch is more than just t-shirts and hoodies—it can mean real connections with other community members in your everyday life! Hear from Molly Van Houweling on why she loves wearing her CC hoodie, and then snag your own at store.creativecommons.org!
Thank you to everyone who joined us yesterday for CC 101: A Brief History, the first event in celebration of our 25th anniversary! If you missed it, or just want to relive the experience, you can watch the recording of the event.
If you feel inspired after watching, share your own CC origin story! We'll be compiling some highlights as part of our anniversary celebrations. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSflE__R7DkiWICn6FJHNIjicQjXdU-bz3Vq_ofF7EWWBfDl5Q/viewform
Open preprint practices are crucial for immediate sharing of scientific research, and our preprint policy framework is a model for promoting preprints.
A growing community of research funders and organizations agree, including the Gates Foundation, ASAP Research, and @HHMI@mastodon.online.
Learn more on the @ASAPbio@mas.to preprint policy framework website: https://asapbio.org/preprint-policy-framework/
Photo credit: HHMI/Toby Hayman. Source: https://www.hhmi.org/research/open-science
We’re going to RightCon! Would you like to come chat with us while we’re there? Please let us know! We are available to chat about our work while we’re in town and may gather a small CC community group for a meal if there’s interest.
You can also attend our session: “Collective action for the commons: safeguarding open knowledge in AI” on Thursday, May 7 at 3:15pm.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScOJhC99S1JYV2KJ33KgRy6zpHgjIwIZgywmxmn3TIno2eUSQ/viewform
Today, we are sharing our newest report, "Licensing Best Practices for Sharing Scientific Data", which extends the open data practices originally designed for climate data in our 2023 report "Recommended Best Practices for the Better Sharing of Climate Data" to other disciplines.
Access the full report: https://zenodo.org/records/18867142
Read the summary version: https://zenodo.org/records/18866613
https://creativecommons.org/2026/04/20/licensing-best-practices-for-the-sharing-of-scientific-data/
Thank you to the McGovern Foundation who supported our Open Climate Data project!
Creative Commons invites you to explore the legacy and history of Open Education through a virtual panel on May 15. Panelists include Kathryn Kure, Cable Green, and Angela DeBarger, who will reflect on the origins of the open education movement, the milestones that defined its evolution, and the communities that carried it forward across regions and generations.
https://creativecommons.org/event/the-legacy-history-of-open-education/
Thank you to everyone who joined this fantastic panel event on the legacy and history of the Open Culture movement. If you weren't able to make it, check out the event recording!
https://youtu.be/FvNTXZKqkAg
📣 Librarians, open culture practitioners, and educators 📣
There are still spots left in our CC Certificate courses that run June 1-August 9, 2026. Learn about CC licenses and become a knowledge resource at your institution through this interactive, engaging, and one-of-a-kind learning opportunity.
Register today! https://pro.gofundme.com/event/2026-cc-certificate-course-registration/e720698
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🎨 Submit to our Zine - we’re collecting stories from 25 years of CC to create a special zine to commemorate our community’s contributions, achievements, and memories exploring the theme “Remix is Resistance”. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScVpc0z0G9B534AJZLKldyIxb6FrhPPBgSEIuAF8w0MMcwQdw/viewform
📝 And don't miss our newest blog post reflecting on the past quarter of a century and why the commons is more important now than ever. https://creativecommons.org/2026/04/14/celebrating-25-years-of-choosing-to-share/
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The final design is by Ellis Tolsma. This work is inspired by childrens' building blocks to represent the theme of building on each other's work and others using your creativity as a building block in their own process. In the piece, Ellis wanted to create a building that is playful and focused on creativity, being at home, and working to make the world a better place where everyone can live together. The use of textures in the work add an extra analog and human touch to the design.
CC's virtual panel event The Legacy & History of Open Education is tomorrow! Hear from experts across the movement as they reflect on the origins of the open education movement, the milestones that defined its evolution, and the communities that carried it forward across regions and generations.
If you haven't yet, register now! https://creativecommons.org/event/the-legacy-history-of-open-education/
Look what made it to UNESCO House 👀
You can never have too many tote bags. Especially when they're this cute! Get yours from our revamped merch store: https://creative-commons-shop.fourthwall.com
As a part of our 25th anniversary celebrations, we are pleased to announce the launch of a small fund for two to three regional events in 2026 to amplify the contributions of CC communities over the last 25 years and showcase the amazing networks of open advocates around the world.
Read more about our selection criteria and how to apply in our recent blog post 👇️
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There are still copies of Cory's exclusive new art book, Canny Valley, available to the first 250 donors who contribute $125 or more to CC's anniversary fundraising campaign. Give a gift and get your signed copy today!
https://giving.gofundme.com/campaign/778218/donate
On 29 April, Over 100 people gathered at UNESCO House in Paris to explore how equitable access to heritage can help solve the world's most pressing challenges.
Read our full recap of the event at https://creativecommons.org/2026/05/06/how-can-equitable-access-to-heritage-help-solve-global-challenges-an-exploratory-dialogue/
And if your organization hasn't signed yet, now is the time. openheritagestatement.org.
Upcoming events, recent blog posts, community highlights, and more! Sign up for CC's newsletter for the most up-do-date announcements and news from Creative Commons.
This special founders fireside chat is tomorrow, June 23, from 1-2:30 EDT! Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, Molly Van Houweling, and moderator Glenn O. Brown will come together to discuss Creative Commons in its earliest days, and you do not want to miss it.
Register now! https://pro.gofundme.com/event/creative-commons-founders-fireside-chat/e808739
The first of the four regional events celebrating CC's 25th anniversary took place in Kochi, India a couple weeks ago. The workshop brought together Wikimedians, archivists, GLAM practitioners, and language activists in an event that centered Indigenous languages, community archives, and the knowledge commons.
Photos from the event taken by Subhashish are licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Last call to submit work to CC's 25th anniversary zine! Send us your photographs, poems, reflections, memes, remixes, oral histories, and more by August 15. The theme is "Remix is resistance," celebrating how remix, reuse, adaptation, and sharing challenge power, build community, preserve culture, and imagine more just futures.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1KyKPJaIjeTGaoeGYRKC7b6-xutjvhdP1BoImIR8SA3A/edit
Not sure where to begin? Attend our next webinar about how to find and reuse CC-licensed material on 13 Aug! https://creativecommons.org/event/cc-201-finding-reusing-cc-licensed-works/
Recently, CC convened leading experts, practitioners, and builders for a day of conversation about the collaborative underpinnings of openness and what it can—and cannot—do to help communities and nations drive towards digital sovereignty.
In a new blog post, Anna Tumadóttir reflects on clear throughlines from the symposium, key moments from the speakers, and what conditions we must build to allow open resources to exist, evolve, and endure.
https://creativecommons.org/2026/09/30/openness-digital-sovereignty-who-sustains-the-commons/
If you missed the event this morning, you can catch the recording now! Watch "Community Voices on AI: Attribution as the Norm," featuring panelists Monica Granados, Todd Carpenter, Archie Davis, Andrew Farrior, Rita Ho, and Pau Giner!
https://youtu.be/CZ2qJVQc5as
Community Voices on AI: Attribution as the Norm | 1 Oct
The open culture community has produced a remarkable amount of practical knowledge: guides, toolkits, case studies, policy templates, and more. What’s been missing isn’t expertise but rather a single place that points to all of it. CC is proud to publish The Open Heritage Companion: a practitioner’s guide developed to help cultural heritage institutions navigate the journey from closed to open collections. Access the Companion in English, French, and Spanish!
https://creativecommons.org/2026/07/16/cc-open-heritage-companion/
Our virtual panel event "The Legacy & History of Open Culture" is tomorrow, June 16, at 2:30 pm–3:30 pm UTC! You won't want to miss this panel featuring Medhavi Gandhi, Merete Sanderhoff, Andrea Wallace, and Giovanna Fontenelle, moderated by Brigitte Vézina and Dee Harris.
Register today! https://pro.gofundme.com/event/creative-commons-panel-the-legacy-and-history-of-open-culture/e805177
Attribution is the mechanism that lets a piece of knowledge or creativity stay connected to the people who made it possible. When AI systems produce outputs without sources, that connection breaks, making it harder to trust the information, verify accuracy, or give credit. In our new blog post, Jack Hardinges and Irina Bejan share reasons to be optimistic that AI systems can credit their sources.
https://creativecommons.org/2026/07/24/attribution-in-the-age-of-ai/
In two upcoming webinars on October 14, we will present our updated Guidance on CC Licenses in the Age of AI and how it impacts different sectors like Education, Science and Culture. We will then take questions from the audience and hear about any feedback you might have.
Register for the event and submit your questions beforehand!
👉️ Session A, 9:30am EDT: https://pro.gofundme.com/event/guidance-on-using-cc-licenses-in-the-age-of-ai-session-a/e839856
👉️ Session B, 4pm EDT: https://pro.gofundme.com/event/guidance-on-using-cc-licenses-in-the-age-of-ai-session-b/e840336
Submit your questions and feedback: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdL2ycimM51qd_rO2VNqIuFuOkEo3R-8lD-Xpmqx3nAYRgxMA/viewform
Creative Commons has been exploring questions around artificial intelligence for a long time, guided by a commitment to balance creator agency in how people participate in the commons, while preserving the public’s right to reuse. As the technology, its impacts, and what we’ve learned from communities have evolved, so has our thinking. But our principles and the fundamental questions informing our work have not.
https://creativecommons.org/2026/09/21/a-principled-approach-as-the-sands-shift/
Creative Commons has been exploring questions around artificial intelligence for a long time, guided by a commitment to balance creator agency in how people participate in the commons, while preserving the public’s right to reuse. As the technology, its impacts, and what we’ve learned from communities have evolved, so has our thinking. But our principles and the fundamental questions informing our work have not.
https://creativecommons.org/2026/09/21/a-principled-approach-as-the-sands-shift/
Twenty-five years ago, a small group of people believed that if you gave creators a simple set of tools and licenses, millions of people might choose to share their work with the world. Today, billions of works are CC licensed.
Read our recap of the CC Founders Fireside Chat, which included stories from the earliest days of Creative Commons and thoughts about the future of sharing from Lawrence Lessig, Molly Van Houweling, Hal Abelson, and Glenn O. Brown.
https://creativecommons.org/2026/06/30/inside-the-cc-founders-fireside-chat/
Five months after Creative Commons hosted an Exploratory Dialogue on Open Heritage at UNESCO House, we returned to Paris with a smaller group of open heritage champions to discuss what comes next: how Member States can help advance action at UNESCO to establish a UNESCO Recommendation on Open Heritage.
📑 Read the blog post recap from the event: https://creativecommons.org/2026/10/02/from-reflection-to-action-8-hot-takes-from-ccs-open-heritage-roundtable/
🎈 Sign the Open Heritage Statement: https://openheritagestatement.org/
To advance the work on CC signals, we have been regularly holding convenings and engaging with people at events around the world. We recently held a workshop in London, bringing together policy, legal, and technical experts to discuss the evolution of the CC signals framework into legally enforceable tooling. There were a few clear takeaways that emerged during the workshop. Read our latest blog post, which digs into what surfaced and where we go from here.
https://creativecommons.org/2026/07/06/takeaways-from-a-london-workshop-on-cc-signals/
Our next virtual panel event "Community Voices on AI: Attribution as the Norm" is tomorrow, October 1, from 10-11am EDT! Join practitioners from Creative Commons, NISO, AXM, and the Wikimedia Foundation for a grounded community conversation about why attribution should be the norm in AI systems, and how the field is actually building solutions for the future.
Can't make it? We'll be posting the event recording after! Watch our social channels later this week.
https://pro.gofundme.com/event/community-voices-on-ai-attribution-as-the-norm/e845858
Tomorrow, September 1 at 3 pm UTC, Creative Commons and Local Contexts are hosting a virtual conversation with the authors of "Guidance for Indigenous Collections and Indigenous Data." Read the report before or after the event to deepen your understanding. If you can't attend, register for the event to be notified when the event recording is published!
Register for the event: https://pro.gofundme.com/event/responsibilities-ethics-and-access-a-conversation-with-the-authors-of-guidance-for-indigenous-collections-and-indigenous-data/e832077
Read the guidance: https://zenodo.org/records/21071544
You do not want to miss the recording of our Founders Fireside Chat with Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, Molly Van Houweling, and Glenn O. Brown, where they discuss the growth of Creative Commons into a global movement, how they are thinking about AI and the commons, and stories from the very earliest days of CC.
https://youtu.be/OOHUhSEdkB0
Creative Commons will be developing new trainings to continue providing the most relevant and up-to-date content. These trainings, which we aim to offer in 2027, will likely be two-week courses that offer a digital recognition, or microcredential, upon successful completion.
Help inform the future trainings by completing this short (1 to 2 minutes) survey on professional development needs, subject matter, and learning formats.
https://forms.gle/RZxKhGx5eTWzk3Su5
After months of collaborative development and iteration with the community of the common European data space for cultural heritage and the Europeana Initiative, the landmark paper ‘The case for Public AI: making it happen with cultural heritage’ has been published. The position paper was developed with over 400 cultural heritage professionals through the Alignment Assembly on Culture for AI.
👉 Read the full paper: https://bit.ly/4xLdyU3
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🙏 Make a donation - the first 250 donors who give $125 or more will receive a signed copy of Cory Doctorow’s exclusive art book, Canny Valley! https://giving.gofundme.com/campaign/778218/donate
🪩 Attend an event - all year long CC will be hosting virtual events to mark our anniversary (and there's one happening today 👀 ) https://creativecommons.org/events/
💌 Join our newsletter list to stay up to date on CC stories and news. https://mail.creativecommons.org/subscribe
We are thrilled to recap the first in our series of 25th anniversary events, celebrating some of the most notable moments in the history of the development and deployment of our legal tools. Each event highlighted both the ways in which CC licenses created unique movements within each sector but also the commonalities between fields and the people who have dedicated their careers to better sharing.
https://creativecommons.org/2026/07/02/the-legacy-of-25-years-of-creative-commons/
What does it mean to be part of the CC community today? This year, our annual community survey received responses from 62 community members from 23 countries. They shared their experiences, priorities, ideas, and hopes for the future of the Commons. In a new blog post, we share key takeaways and how those learnings are already shaping our community strategy for the year ahead.
https://creativecommons.org/2026/10/01/what-we-heard-from-the-creative-commons-community/
