It is with our deepest gratitude that all of us at Creative Commons offer a bittersweet sendoff to Board members Hal Abelson, Michael W. Carroll, Laurie Racine, Eric F. Saltzman, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Esther Wojcicki whose Board terms will come to a close at the end of this year. It is impossible to overstate the tremendous leadership and dedication that these Directors have contributed to Creative Commons, and we remain proud to carry on the important work that they so tirelessly stewarded.

CC has benefited greatly from the exceptional commitments from these Board members to help support a smooth transition. All have graciously accepted our invitation to join CC’s esteemed Advisory Council or other CC affiliate organizations in order to remain engaged in the guidance and stewardship of the organization in the years to come. We are grateful for an extended year of leadership service from Board Chair Paul Brest who will remain as Chair throughout 2016.

With our deepest gratitude, we wish Hal Abelson, Michael W. Carroll, Laurie Racine, Eric F. Saltzman, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Esther Wojcicki our warmest farewell.  We look forward to keeping them all very close, and look forward to their ongoing contributions to Creative Commons in their roles on CC’s Advisory Council and CC Affiliate teams.

Annual State of the Commons Report highlights global cultural and policy impact of free and open content

Creative Commons, the global nonprofit that makes it easier for creators to share their work under simple copyright terms, announced a major milestone in the release of its 2015 State of the Commons Report today: over 1 billion works have been licensed using Creative Commons since the organization was founded.

This milestone was announced along with other significant data points in its State of the Commons report, which covers the growth of CC content on platforms, the globalization of CC tools, and cultural trends in the digitization of creative works. The State of the Commons report can be viewed at stateof.creativecommons.org/2015.

“We started the State of the Commons in 2014 to quantify the impact of creators everywhere who are making the conscious decision to share their content,” said Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley. “Our focus now is to create a vibrant, usable commons powered by collaboration and gratitude. Empowering the world to share free and open content and data results in more equity, access and innovation for everyone. We’re thrilled to see the impact fostering this climate is having on the Internet and society.”

Creative Commons works in over 85 countries to lead this expanding global movement. A major factor in its growth are official translations of the Creative Commons Version 4.0 license suite. To date, the 4.0 license suite has been translated into 7 languages, with 3 more languages to be published before the new year. In 2015, people viewed content under Creative Commons more than 136 billion times.

More than 50 cultural institutions have made their permanent collections or records available for liberal use around the world under CC licenses or public domain tools. Forms of content shared include photos, videos, research articles, audio tracks, training materials, and other educational resources. Major platform partners including Flickr, Wikipedia, 500px, Medium, Vimeo, and YouTube among others have helped to grow the number of CC licensed works, participating in a worldwide effort to expand the commons, along with millions of individual websites.

“Wikipedia relies on Creative Commons to make vast amounts of material available for the world to discover,” says Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “Freely licensed images and works of the world illustrate and enrich the articles Wikimedia’s volunteer editors write each day, making it possible for people everywhere to share in knowledge.”

There has also been a shift towards sharing in government. The recent #GoOpen initiative launched by the U.S. Department of Education with support from CC and technology giants Amazon and Microsoft signals a strong business case for open education. To date, the open education movement has delivered $174 million in savings to students using open textbooks with an additional $53 million projected through the next academic year — savings that can be used to improve access and equity for all students.

Highlights from this year’s State of the Commons report include the following:

1. CC licenses continue to be the global standard for sharing: CC-licensed works passed the 1 billion mark this year, and have nearly tripled in the last 5 years, signaling an exciting increase in the number of people choosing to share content.
2. Velocity of change: The CC-marked public domain is growing rapidly and has nearly doubled in size over the last 12 months.
3. Openness is far reaching: People are using CC licenses to share in as many as 34 different languages. Creative Commons now has affiliate institutions located in 85 countries.
4. Advances in Foundation policies: In 2015 a significant number of foundations switched their granting default from “closed” to open, including the Ford Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, Vancouver Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. These open funding policies ensure maximum impact of and access to Foundation-funded resources.
5. Momentum in the digitization of culture: The realization that there is a business and societal case for online sharing around culture–even in the presence of extremely divergent points of view–has resulted in museums opening their collections to share with the world under Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools. The Netherlands’ Rijksmuseum is leading the charge by digitizing collections.
6. A shift towards sharing in government: The proposed U.S. Department of Education open licensing policy will ensure government funded educational materials are openly licensed and freely available to the public that paid for them. Access to these materials will be open by default rather than require people to pay twice (or more) for access.
7. Open education movement goes mainstream: To date, the open education movement has delivered $174 million in savings to students through open textbooks.
8. Platforms as partners: Support and growth of openly-licensed content continues on platforms such as Wikipedia, Europeana, and Flickr, with new platform partners like Medium and edX.

The State of the Commons report can be found online in various formats for sharing at stateof.creativecommons.org/2015. The report has been translated into 17 languages by Creative Commons affiliates, with at least 5 more translations to come.

About Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization at the center of a high-profile, international movement to promote sharing of creativity and knowledge. Our goal is to help realize the full potential of the Internet—universal access to research and education, full participation in culture—to drive a new era of development growth, and productivity. CC provides the well-known suite of licenses and public domain tools that have become the global standard used by leading companies, institutions and individuals across culture, education, government, science, and more to promote digital collaboration and innovation.

The CC licenses are everywhere—1 billion CC licenses in use across 9 million websites—making it easy for anyone to use and reuse content. For example, CC licenses give the world access to NASA’s most iconic images from space, help educators create curriculum that reduce the cost of college for everyone, and allow scientists to freely share their work with medical professionals and researchers around the world. CC also works with foundations and governments to ensure that publicly-funded content, including research and educational materials, are made available for everyone to freely use, share, and improve.

Creative Commons, Report Contact:

press@creativecommons.org

Press Contact:

Marci Hotsenpiller: marci@zincpr.com

The post State of the Commons Report Highlights Milestone of Over 1 Billion Creative Commons Works Shared Online appeared first on Creative Commons.

I’m proud to share with you Creative Commons’ 2015 State of the Commons report, our best effort to measure the immeasurable scope of the commons by looking at the CC licensed content, along with content marked as public domain, that comprise the slice of the commons powered by CC tools.

Creative Commoners have known all along that collaboration, sharing, and cooperation are a driving force for human evolution. And so for many it will come as no surprise that in 2015 we achieved a tremendous milestone: over 1.1 billion CC licensed photos, videos, audio tracks, educational materials, research articles, and more have now been contributed to the shared global commons.

Our small team continues to work to grow and improve the commons for everyone. We’re proud of our accomplishments, but there’s more to do and we need your help. Our goal is to raise $30,000 over the next week to celebrate the release and accomplishments of our 2015 State of the Commons report. Will you make a contribution of $10, $25, $50 or more today?

As we grow the size and scope of the commons, we are working hard to ensure that it becomes a vibrant, usable commons — full of collaboration and gratitude. We need our contributors to be able to talk to each other, find new content, give feedback, offer their thanks and encouragement, get analytics, and build networks and communities around the content they are creating. We want to light up the commons, and we need you to join us.

CC is a global charity that relies on our generous community of supporters like you. Kick off our year-end campaign strong by helping us meet our first benchmark: $30,000 over the next week to celebrate the release and accomplishments of our 2015 State of the Commons report.

Make your contribution to Creative Commons today.

Thank you for being a part of this.

With thanks,

Ryan Merkley
CEO, Creative Commons
@ryanmerkley

Read the full report: stateof.creativecommons.org/2015.
Read the press release.

In October we wrote that the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is considering an open licensing requirement for direct competitive grant programs. If adopted, educational resources created with ED grant funds will be openly licensed for the public to freely use, share, and build upon.

The Department of Education has been running a comment period in which interested parties can provide feedback on the proposed policy. Creative Commons has drafted a response, which discusses the open licensing policy and other questions proposed by ED. You too can share your thoughts with ED–here’s a guide about how to do it. The deadline is December 18.

We think the adoption of an open licensing requirement is useful because it clarifies the rights of the public in how we may all access, use, and adapt ED-funded resources.

The license must be worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable, and must grant the public permission to access, reproduce, publicly perform, publicly display, adapt, distribute, and otherwise use, for any purposes, copyrightable intellectual property created with direct competitive grant funds, provided that the licensee gives attribution to the designated authors of the intellectual property.

We think ED should include a specific mention that the open license definition they provide most closely aligns with the permissions and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 license (CC BY). This way, it will be clear to grantees which open license ED requires them to use.

It’s good to see the Department of Education proposing a similar rule that the Department of Labor introduced several years ago with their community college and career training grant program. That $2 billion grant pool required that educational resources created with Department of Labor grant funds be licensed under the CC BY license. By doing so, the Department of Labor made sure that the resources created with its grant funds can be easily discovered and legally reused and revised by the public.

Creative Commons draft response to Department of Education open licensing policy

How to submit a comment

cape point (panorama) by André van Rooyen, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In September we announced that Creative Commons and the Open Policy Network are hosting a second Institute for Open Leadership. We’ve seen a significant increase in the number and diversity of policies that require that publicly funded resources should be widely shared under liberal open licenses so that the public can access and reuse the materials. These resources range from scientific research to digital textbooks to workforce training curricula, and more. Philanthropic foundations have been stepping up too–requiring their grant-funded works to be made freely available under Creative Commons licenses. We want to see more of these open licensing policies flourish, which will feed the commons, promote cross-discipline collaboration, and even increase the transparency of government and philanthropic investments.

The Institute brings together mentors who work with the fellows to develop a open licensing policy for their government, university, or project. We received many applications, and our review committee has invited the following group to join us in Cape Town in March 2016.

• Jane-Frances Agbu – National Open University of Nigeria – Lagos, Nigeria
• Rim Azib – British Council, Tunis – Bizerta, Tunisia
• Steve Cairns – Greenpeace International – Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Amanda Coolidge – BCcampus – Vancouver, BC, Canada
• Daniel DeMarte – Tidewater Community College – Norfolk, VA, United States
• Paula Eskett – CORE Education – Christchurch, New Zealand
• Mostafa Azad Kamal – Bangladesh Open University – Gazipur, Bangladesh
• Roshan Kumar Karn – Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital – Kathmandu, Nepal
• Vincent Kizza – Open Learning Exchange Uganda – Kampala, Uganda
• Fiona MacAllister – University of the Witwatersrand – Johannesburg, South Africa
• Katja Mayer – University of Vienna – Vienna, Austria
• Caroline Mbogo – The World Agroforestry Centre – Nairobi, Kenya
• Niall McNulty – Cambridge University Press – Cape Town, South Africa
• Juliana Monteiro – Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo – São Paulo, Brazil
• Jacques Murinda – Great Lakes School of Open – Kigali, Rwanda
• Alessandro Sarretta – Institute of Marine Sciences – Venezia, Italy

None of this would be possible without the assistance of the Open Policy Network and ongoing support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Open Society Foundations. Thank you.