Cheers to an incredible 2015. With your support, creators around the world have now shared over 1.1 billion, including NASA’s iconic images, educational materials in every subject, scientific research, government open data, 3D models, and more. Thank you!

And as we head into 2016 and beyond, there is much more to do. We’re thrilled to have you among our community as we continue to advocate for the widespread adoption of CC licenses, open policy, and the growth of the commons. And what’s more, we’ll be working hard to build an even more vibrant, usable, and collaborative commons. We look forward to sharing all our big wins with you.

The post Thank you and Happy New Year! appeared first on Creative Commons.

You’ve heard about the incredible 1.1 billion CC licensed works available to be reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed in infinite ways. You’ve heard about huge gains in OER and Open Policy. You’ve heard about the threats to our shared global commons, and that we now find ourselves in one of the most restrictive eras of copyright in recent history.

Creative Commons needs you right now to stand with us. We are a small team, working to solve global challenges. We have ambitious year end fundraising goals, and we’re not there yet. We rely on you, our Creative Commons community, to help support our work.

Our year end fundraising deadline is in 48 hours. Please take a moment to donate $10, $25, $50, or more to Creative Commons right now to join the movement and help us build a creative, free, and more connected global commons.

With thanks,

Ryan Merkley
CEO, Creative Commons

The post Keep the commons thriving appeared first on Creative Commons.

Below is a guest post by Esther Wojcicki from the Creative Commons Advisory Council.

As a lifelong educator and recent author of Moonshots in Education, I’m proud to serve on Creative Commons’ Advisory Council and to have served as Chair of the CC Board. CC is at the very heart of the open education movement — our licenses put the “open” in Open Educational Resources (OER).

I’m writing to ask you to support CC’s high impact work in open education. Will you make a contribution of $25, $50, $100 or more today?

At a time when the cost of higher education is skyrocketing, OER has delivered $174M in textbook savings to students to date. At a time when people around the world are demanding equitable access to education, CC and our open education partners make it easy for educators and students everywhere to freely share curriculum, textbooks, and research at near zero cost.

What’s more, our advocacy has helped direct a shift at the government level. The United States Department of Education just outlined a major open licensing policy, and today over 19 countries around the world have legislation supporting OER.

I’m proud of our work in OER, but there are too many more students around the world waiting for easy access to education. We need your support. Make your contribution to Creative Commons today. Thank you!

 

The post Special request from Esther Wojcicki, Creative Commons Advisory Council appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s hard to believe that it was 13 years ago today that we shipped the very first version of the CC license suite.

Before then, without the CC licenses, the barriers to collaborating in a global commons were too high. The benefits of shared educational content or scientific research, or paving the way for creators who could easily innovate as artists have throughout the ages, were hampered by complexity and confusion.

I never would have imagined the global commons as it stands today: over 1 billion CC licensed works, and millions of public domain materials. It’s incredible, and it’s because of all of us. We chose to build this together. And we need to remember that this has been the first step. We need to do more.

To help steward the continued growth, vibrancy, and usability of the commons, will you make a contribution of $10, $25, $50 or more today?

Join us as we continue to advocate for the widespread adoption of CC licenses, open policy, and the growth of the commons. And join us for the work ahead that will ensure that the very best content in the commons is easy to find, engaging to use, and that its data is accessible to both the contributor and the user.

We need to light up the content and creators of our shared commons.

Tonight is the night. Tonight you can help us soar past our first year-end campaign benchmark and kick off our next ambitious goal. In celebration of the 13th birthday of the CC license suite, will you help us raise $45,000 by next Tuesday to keep us on track toward our year-end goal?

Make your contribution to Creative Commons right now.

Creative Commons is delighted to announce two new appointments to our Board of Directors, Johnathan Nightingale and Katherine C. Spelman.

Johnathan Nightingale is the Chief Product Officer at Hubba, and was formerly the head of Firefox for Mozilla. In his role at Mozilla he was responsible for the engineering, product management, marketing, and design of the Firefox web browser on desktop and mobile platforms; a suite of products developed by a global community, used by over 400 million people worldwide, and localized into more than 80 languages. He has been an invited expert to the UK’s House of Lords on issues of surveillance and tracking, sat for 3 years on the W3C’s usable security working group, and has spoken often at industry conferences on issues of technology and security. He was among the first to graduate from the University of Toronto’s Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence program in 2001. He is an avid photographer, a Wikipedian, author of the ubiquitous Linux command line tool, “beep”, and a proud parent.

Kate Spelman, partner at K&L Gates, represents many of the players in the content distribution ecosystem: author, university, nonprofit, publisher, and technology developer both nationally and internationally. She serves on several copyright task forces and advisory committees, among them the American Bar Association Intellectual Property Section Task Force on Copyright Reform; American Law Institute Restatement of Copyright; and the American Intellectual Property Law Association Amicus Committee.  A graduate of the University of Wisconsin Madison and the University of Michigan, Kate also has further education in technology and engineering from the University of California Berkeley.

Kate and Jonathan were formally elected to the Board on Sunday, December 6 and will serve a 4 year term through 2019. We look forward to their many valuable contributions to the Creative Commons community.