Thanks to everyone who attended our CC signals project kickoff last week. We’re receiving plenty of feedback, and we appreciate the insights. We are listening to all of it and hope that you continue to engage with us as we seek to make this framework fit for purpose.

Some of the input focuses on the specifics of the CC signals proposal, offering constructive questions and suggesting ideas for improving CC signals in practice. The most salient type of feedback, however, is touching on something far deeper than the CC signals themselves – the fact that so much about AI seems to be happening to us all, rather than with or for us all, and that the expectations of creators and communities are at risk of being overshadowed by powerful interests.

This sentiment is not a surprise to us. We feel it, too. In fact, it is why we are doing this project. CC’s goal has always been to grow and sustain the thriving commons of knowledge and culture. We want people to be able to share with and learn from each other, without being or feeling exploited. CC signals is an extension of that mission in this evolving AI landscape.

We believe that the current practices of AI companies pose a threat to the future of the commons. Many creators and knowledge communities are feeling betrayed by how AI is being developed and deployed. The result is that people are understandably turning to enclosure. Eventually, we fear that people will no longer want to share publicly at all. 

CC signals are a first step to reduce this damage by giving more agency to those who create and hold content. Unlike the CC licenses, they are explicitly designed to signal expectations even where copyright law is silent or unclear, when it does not apply, and where it varies by jurisdiction. We have listened to creators who want to share their work but also have concerns about exploitation. CC signals provide a way for creators to express those nuances.  The CC signals build on top of developing standards for expressing AI usage preferences (e.g., via robots.txt). Creators who want to fully opt out of machine reuse do not need to use a CC signal. CC signals are for those who want to keep sharing, but with some terms attached.

The challenge we’re all facing in this age of AI is how to protect the integrity and vitality of the commons. The listening we’ve been doing so far, across creator communities and open knowledge networks, has led us here, to CC signals. Our shared commitment is to protect the commons so that it remains a space for human creativity, collaboration, and innovation, and to make clear our expectation that those who draw from it give something in return. 

Our goal is to advocate for reciprocity while upholding our values that knowledge and creativity should not be treated as commodities. 

Our goal is to find a path between a free-for-all and an internet of paywalls.

Copyright will not get us there. Nor should it. And we don’t think the boundaries of copyright tell us everything we need to know about navigating this moment. Just this week, Open Future released a report that calls for going beyond copyright in this debate, on the path to a healthy knowledge commons.

This is the beginning of the conversation, not the end. We are listening. From what we have heard, CC signals, or something like it, is the best practical mechanism to avoid the dual traps of total exploitation or total enclosure, both of which damage the commons. We have shared our current progress because we want to learn how to design it to meet your needs. We invite you to continue sharing feedback so we can shape CC signals together in a way that works for diverse communities.

In the months ahead, we’ll be providing more detail about how CC signals are developing, including key themes we are hearing, along with the questions we are exploring and our next steps.

The post Why CC Signals: An Update appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons (CC) today announces the public kickoff of the CC signals project, a new preference signals framework designed to increase reciprocity and sustain a creative commons in the age of AI. The development of CC signals represents a major step forward in building a more equitable, sustainable AI ecosystem rooted in shared benefits. This step is the culmination of years of consultation and analysis. As we enter this new phase of work, we are actively seeking input from the public. 

As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms how knowledge is created, shared, and reused, we are at a fork in the road that will define the future of access to knowledge and shared creativity. One path leads to data extraction and the erosion of openness; the other leads to a walled-off internet guarded by paywalls. CC signals offer another way, grounded in the nuanced values of the commons expressed by the collective.

Based on the same principles that gave rise to the CC licenses and tens of billions of works openly licensed online, CC signals will allow dataset holders to signal their preferences for how their content can be reused by machines based on a set of limited but meaningful options shaped in the public interest. They are both a technical and legal tool and a social proposition: a call for a new pact between those who share data and those who use it to train AI models.

“CC signals are designed to sustain the commons in the age of AI,” said Anna Tumadóttir, CEO, Creative Commons. “Just as the CC licenses helped build the open web, we believe CC signals will help shape an open AI ecosystem grounded in reciprocity.”

CC signals recognize that change requires systems-level coordination. They are tools that will be built for machine and human readability, and are flexible across legal, technical, and normative contexts. However, at their core CC signals are anchored in mobilizing the power of the collective. While CC signals may range in enforceability, legally binding in some cases and normative in others, their application will always carry ethical weight that says we give, we take, we give again, and we are all in this together. 

“If we are committed to a future where knowledge remains open, we need to collectively insist on a new kind of give-and-take,” said Sarah Hinchliff Pearson, General Counsel, Creative Commons. “A single preference, uniquely expressed, is inconsequential in the machine age. But together, we can demand a different way.”

Now Ready for Feedback 

More information about CC signals and early design decisions are available on the CC website. We are committed to developing CC signals transparently and alongside our partners and community. We are actively seeking public feedback and input over the next few months as we work toward an alpha launch in November 2025. 

Get Involved

Join the discussion & share your feedback

To give feedback on the current CC signals proposal, hop over to the CC signals GitHub repository. You can engage in a few ways: 

1. Read about the technical implementation of CC signals
2. Join the discussion to share feedback about the CC signals project
3. Submit an issue for any suggested direct edits

Attend a CC signals town hall

We invite our community to join us for a brief explanation of the CC signals framework, and then we will open the floor to you to share feedback and ask questions. 

Tuesday, July 15
6–7 PM UTC
Register here.

Tuesday, July 29
1–2 PM UTC
Register here.

Friday, Aug 15
3–4 PM UTC
Register here. 

Support the movement

CC is a nonprofit. Help us build CC signals with a donation. 

The age of AI demands new tools, new norms, and new forms of cooperation. With CC signals, we’re building a future where shared knowledge continues to thrive. Join us.

The post Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI appeared first on Creative Commons.

CC signals are a proposed framework to help content stewards express how they want their works used in AI training—emphasizing reciprocity, recognition, and sustainability in machine reuse. They aim to preserve open knowledge by encouraging responsible AI behavior without limiting innovation.

Love it! How can I show my support? Thank you! There are multiple ways that you can show your support including:

• Fund: Make an annual recurring donation via our Open Infrastructure Circle. This work will require a large amount of resourcing, over many years, to make happen.
• Join: Express early interest in supporting or implementing CC signals by getting involved in the next steps of development. 
• Amplify: Invite a CC expert to present, join a panel, or give a keynote address on AI and the commons, sharing in the age of AI, AI and copyright, and CC signals by sending an email to communications@creativecommons.org.

I’m interested. I want to learn more. We’ve got you! For a detailed analysis, download our report From Human Content to Machine Data: Introducing CC Signals. To dig into the more technical components of CC signals, head over to the CC Signals Implementation page.

Why CC Signals: Context & Considerations

This is an extremely complex challenge and the stakes are huge. Many intersecting and interconnected solutions are required, and thankfully, there are many public interest organizations joined together in this fight. CC’s involvement in only one part of the puzzle, but a critical one.

Here’s what we’ve been analyzing to inform our proposed solution.

AI depends on public web data. But who sets the rules?

The data that powers AI was created by people and communities. Today, billions of webpages fuel AI systems. This has happened quickly at an unprecedented scale. It has also happened without the involvement of content creators and stewards, reaching beyond people’s reasonable expectations for how their works would be used when they shared them publicly.

Machine use of web content is not new. So what’s changed?

Machines have long accessed and compiled web content to build search engines and digital archives. However, today, machines don’t just crawl the web to make it more searchable or to help unlock new insights—they feed algorithms that fundamentally change (and threaten) the web we know.

AI is outpacing the social contract. Why does this matter for the commons?

The norms that govern how machines use data are out of date and under threat. The current AI ecosystem is out of alignment with the social contract that has long governed the digital commons: we share openly, but we do so expecting respect, recognition, and reciprocity. This has resulted in (understandable) backlash against advances in AI that range from various types of enclosure to simply not sharing at all.

If everyone blocks access, everyone loses. How can we avoid this path?

The future of the commons is now under threat. This isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t leading to the future we want. The commons is one of our greatest shared assets. Barrier-free access to knowledge underpins scientific discovery, democracy, and acts as an antidote to mis and disinformation. If content is no longer publicly available or otherwise becomes more risky and uncertain to use, it becomes solely accessible to those with deep pockets. In addition to impeding human access to knowledge, we’re concerned that a shift to restrictive licensing would result in a less fair, diverse, and competitive AI ecosystem.

Copyright law was never meant to do this. So what’s the solution?

Ideas, facts, and other building blocks of knowledge cannot be owned. Expanding copyright to control AI training risks stifling innovation and access to knowledge. The future depends on shared expectations and responsible reuse. Any viable solution needs to be legally grounded, technically interoperable, and backed by the collective action of humans. We need a new social contract for the age of AI. This isn’t just about datasets or licenses — it’s about safeguarding open knowledge, trust, and equity in the digital age.

Dive Deeper
Want the full context behind CC signals?
Read From Human Content to Machine Data: Introducing CC Signals

We’re Fighting for the Commons: CC Signals Is Part of the Solution

The development of CC signals is based on:

• The belief that there are many legitimate purposes for machine reuse of content that must be protected;
• An ecosystem that better addresses the legitimate concerns of those creating and stewarding human knowledge is both possible and necessary.

CC signals draw inspiration from fundamental concepts often referenced in the AI debate—consent, compensation, and credit—but with a particular angle. Our approach is driven by the goal of increasing and sustaining public access to knowledge.

The proposed CC signal elements are structured to reflect different dimensions of reciprocity: credit, financial sustainability, and non-monetary forms of contribution. They do not aim to limit or restrict the types of AI training or other types of uses (for example,  text and data mining) that machines can undertake. Instead, they are designed to incentivize actions in return.

Curious how CC signals could reshape the future of AI?

Dive into our early thinking—then help shape what comes next! We’re looking for your ideas, feedback, and questions on the legal, technical, and social layers of this work.

Collective Action

Social norms are arguably the single most important aspect of human governance. They dictate how we behave, how we belong, and how we make decisions across nearly every aspect of our lives.

Norms can be powerful, but they require collective action. We’re wary of creators and collections of content each trying to shape how their works are used in thousands of different, incompatible ways. A single preference, uniquely expressed, is inconsequential in the machine age.

That doesn’t mean individual voices don’t matter. In many cases, a single collection will contain works by many contributors.

Power comes from coordination and solidarity. The more we align across sectors, communities, and geographies, the more leverage we gain to influence AI policy and practice.

The post CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’d especially like to gather input on the following questions:

• CC signals are aimed at demanding reciprocal action by AI developers. What does reciprocity in the AI ecosystem look like to you? How can we improve the proposed signals to better achieve reciprocity?
• Community governance will be key to determining when and how CC signals are applied. How do you think decisions by content stewards should be made? Whose preferences matter in these decisions?
• CC signals prioritize standardization and machine readability to increase their utility, but this comes with costs. How do you think we should consider the tradeoff between context-specific considerations and the goal of collective action that spurs behavioral change by reusers operating at a massive scale?

Get involved by sharing your feedback. 

The CC Signals

Start here: If you haven’t already, read through the context and considerations that are informing the development of CC signals. You can also download our report.

Now that you have the background, let’s dig into the details.

The idea behind CC signals is simple. Using CC signals, a steward of a large collection of content can express a set of criteria that AI developers must meet. The criteria are organized around different dimensions of reciprocity, and are intended to drive meaningful, practical action.

CC signals are designed to be interpretable by machines, as well as humans. 

The Suite of CC Signals

This project draws inspiration from fundamental concepts often referenced in the AI debate—consent, compensation, and credit— but with a particular angle. Our approach is driven by the goal of increasing and sustaining public access to knowledge. 

Each signal includes the conditions by which content can be used for machine reuse. These are criteria that AI developers must meet in order to use the content for AI development.  All of the criteria are designed to promote reciprocity in ways that are both meaningful and practical given the scale of machine reuse. Our initial proposal includes the following signal elements:

 Credit: You must give appropriate credit based on the method, means, and context of your use.

 Direct Contribution: You must provide monetary or in-kind support to the Declaring Party for their development and maintenance of the assets, based on a good faith valuation taking into account your use of the assets and your financial means.

Ecosystem Contribution: You must provide monetary or in-kind support back to the ecosystem from which you are benefiting, based on a good faith valuation taking into account your use of the assets and your financial means.

Open: The AI system used must be open. For example, AI systems must satisfy the Model Openness Framework (MOF) Class II, MOF Class I, or the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID).

Note: Credit is included in each signal because we believe it is a fundamental form of reciprocity, one that benefits the broader knowledge cycle. In this proposal, the other signals are mutually exclusive. The list of signals is intentionally limited so that the collective of data stewards and their communities data holding communities can align in calling for their adoption with AI developers. This will ultimately build networks for collective action, requiring reciprocity within the AI ecosystem.

How the CC Signals Work

Who is applying the signal:

A Declaring Party is someone who specifies how a content collection should be used by machines. Sometimes, the Declaring Party will hold copyright or have authority to represent rightsholders in the content. In these cases, a CC signal may have legal effect depending on the particular jurisdiction. In cases where a collection of content includes content from multiple authors, it will be the responsibility of the Declaring Party to coordinate among its community to determine the appropriate signal(s).

The scope of machine uses addressed by the signal:

The Declaring Party applies CC signals to a set of standard categories that encompass machine use, from general categories to more specific categories, such as Text and Data Mining, AI Training, Generative AI Training, and AI Inference. In order to maximize global interoperability, these categories will not be defined by Creative Commons. Instead, they will be based upon global standards being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The CC signals framework is designed to evolve as the standard categories are finalized. The selected category makes up the scope of what activity the tool is intended to address.

What signal is applied:

The Declaring Party selects among the available CC signals. Once selected, the signal reflects the Declaring Party’s preferences regarding machine reuse. This means that the Declaring Party says that the selected category of machine reuse is allowed under the terms of the particular signal elements. The four proposed signal combinations are:

Credit
Credit + Direct Contribution
Credit + Ecosystem Contribution
Credit + Open

Similar to the CC licenses, CC signals will be both machine and human readable. The human-readable explanation of what happens when a signal is applied will be called a declaration. There will be a declaration for each signal, with variations based on whether the Declaring Party has copyright authority and the particular scope of machine reuse selected. The string of code used to apply a CC signal to a dataset will be called a content usage expression.

Legal Considerations

CC signals are designed as global tools, which means they operate across legal systems that work differently. In the context of machine reuse, copyright law is limited, uncertain, and inconsistent across jurisdictions. As a result, applying a CC signal is likely to have a different legal effect depending on who applies it and in what context.

Where copyright exists and is applicable, CC signals are intended to leverage the power of copyright without increasing its power. 

This is not about creating new property rights; it is more like defining manners for machines.

For more detail, please see the report. Further research and analysis about the legal implications of CC signals will be a major focus of our efforts in the coming months.

Technical Considerations

CC signals are designed to build upon technical standards being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We have included technical considerations and components of the CC signals on GitHub. 

Adhering to CC Signals

Credit Signal

Attribution and provenance in the context of large AI models is complex, difficult, and rapidly evolving as technologies develop. However, this does not mean that the concept of credit should be seen as irrelevant or impossible in the context of AI. We seek to establish norms around what is possible, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Like the attribution condition in the CC licenses, we imagine the credit signal element being enacted in any reasonable manner. We plan to develop guidance and best practices around credit in future stages of this work, drawing on the progress being made in this area by others in the field. For now, at a minimum, we expect this signal to require citation of the training dataset by the reuser. For techniques that enable models to retrieve information in response to queries, such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and other use cases where it is technically feasible to connect content with particular outputs, outputs must cite the collection as a source with a link.

Direct Contribution

This is not intended as a commercial transaction. It is designed to create a structure for financial or in-kind contribution to support the sustainability of the Declaring Party. The application of CC signals should not be seen as a business model, or even a way to reliably recoup costs. The contributions are intended to be proportionate, both to the particular type and scale of machine reuse, and to the financial means of the party undertaking it. As with credit, we plan to produce guidance and best practices for direct contribution as CC signals develop.

Ecosystem Contribution Signals

This is designed to spur contributions that support the commons as a whole. While the initial phrasing is very open-ended, we hope and expect that norms, best practices, and even new, collective-minded structures could grow around this notion in different sectors and for different types of reuses. The aim is to encourage a practice of giving back, infusing a norm of reciprocity in ways that will help sustain the ecosystem for all.

Open Signal

This signal element reflects the fact that making AI models open—by releasing model weights, code, or datasets for others to use and build on—is a form of reciprocity.  Given the progress made by others in the field to provide meaningful definitions of openness, our proposal for this signal is more specific about what is required to adhere to it.

Incentivizing Adherence by AI Developers

We recognize that CC signals will rely on willing participation by AI developers to adhere to it. There are many reasons to be cynical about adherence, particularly when it is not legally required, and there are and will always be bad actors. However, we see many reasons to believe that uptake is likely.

For one thing, there is precedent. Although adherence hasn’t always been perfect, robots.txt functioned for many years as a way to encode normative expectations about—and help maintain the social contract for—machine reuse of content on the web. We also see the success of CC licensing as evidence that voluntary buy-in is possible. While CC licenses are built atop copyright law and therefore carry the weight of copyright infringement risk, in reality they work because people have chosen to adhere to them. Litigation involving enforcement of CC licenses is rare, and much of it involves litigants who are not operating in good faith. Instead, there are now tens of billions of CC-licensed works available in the commons because they are grounded in intuitive notions about what is fair and prosocial when it comes to sharing and reuse of knowledge. 

There are also clear reasons why rational actors should respect and adhere to preference signals. As we’ve written earlier in this report, data from across the public web is a key component in developing large AI models. If those developing AI do not respect the wishes of creators, they risk eliminating incentives for people to share and widely distribute their works. Over time, this will compromise the accuracy, safety and currency of the models and services they build. This will be particularly acute for small firms, startups, nonprofits, and academic researchers, who would not have the resources to instead rely on costly licensing deals. 

Share your feedback now on GitHub.

The post CC Signals Implementation appeared first on Creative Commons.

Listening First: Community Engagement in 2022-2024

In response, we launched a global consultation effort. We hosted workshops in New York, Boston, San Francisco, London, and Berlin. We attended conferences and convenings globally and tracked and engaged in the development of AI policy and legislation.

A clear message emerged: many creators and communities feel uneasy about their content being used to develop AI without transparency and are seeking ways to regain agency. Our community has called on us to intervene with new tools that help rebalance power, ultimately infusing the AI ecosystem with reciprocity.

Why CC Is Uniquely Positioned

This moment mirrors another inflection point: the rise of the mainstream internet in the early 2000s. Back then, CC challenged the “all rights reserved” vs. “no rights reserved” binary by offering nuanced, practical tools for creators. The CC licenses made it easy to share and have been applied to tens of billions of works on the internet, growing the creative commons and increasing access to knowledge.

Today’s AI challenges call for similarly creative but practical solutions. Once again, sharing on the internet is being tested. Once again, the commons is at stake.

CC is striving to make sure that AI doesn’t lead to a more closed internet or reduce public access to knowledge and culture. 

Once again, Creative Commons is challenging the all-or-nothing binary to offer another way.

Guiding Our Work

The AI landscape is complex. Our principled response to sharing in the age of AI is simple.

• The commons is under threat but expanding copyright is not the solution.
• Ideas, facts, and other building blocks of knowledge belong to the public domain and should be free for everyone to use.
• The long term sustainability of the commons depends on an AI ecosystem that produces shared benefits.

Our Path Forward

AI is built on the commons. To serve the public interest, AI must help grow, not diminish, the commons, ensuring benefits are widely shared. We need a new social contract, anchored in reciprocity and a shared commitment to the commons. Here is our plan.

CC Signals

To meet this moment, CC is developing a preference signals framework to function as a simple pact among creators and AI developers. We believe openness and responsibility can and must co-exist, and that thoughtful tools can shape a better digital future for everyone.

• We want to hear from you. Get involved in the development of CC signals. Now ready for feedback.
• Learn why we believe CC signals are the most effective intervention we can make right now. CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI
• On board already? Jump ahead to give feedback on our draft proposal.  CC Signals Implementation

AI & the CC Licenses

While CC signals are designed to directly address the challenges raised by AI, CC licenses and public domain tools still have an important role to play. We are continually monitoring and helping to make sense of the complex relationship between AI, copyright, and the CC licenses.

Read more on our analysis and guidance on training AI on CC-licensed content.

AI Policy

We advocate for AI policies that protect the public interest and uphold the values of access to knowledge. We work with policy makers and other civil society organizations to ensure AI policy advances the public interest.

Let’s Work Together

This is a shared challenge, and a shared opportunity.

Whether you’re a funder, developer, policymaker, educator, platform operator, or creator, your participation matters.

Get involved:

• Fund: Make an annual recurring donation via our Open Infrastructure Circle. This work will require a large amount of resourcing, over many years, to make happen.
• Join: Express early interest in supporting or implementing CC signals by getting involved in the next steps of development.
• Amplify: Invite a CC expert to present, join a panel, or give a keynote address on AI and the commons, sharing in the age of AI, AI and copyright, and CC signals by sending an email to communications@creativecommons.org.

Change takes all of us. Let’s build this future—together.

The post AI and the Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

Our Commitment

Creative Commons (CC) is an organization and global community that champions openness, sharing, and creativity. We are committed to fostering a safe, inclusive, respectful, and harassment-free environment for everyone—regardless of age, ability, disability status, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.

We pledge to act in ways that contribute to a welcoming, diverse, and healthy community across all CC activities—whether online or in person, formal or informal.

Guiding Principles

Be Welcoming

Creative Commons is a diverse and multilingual global network. Make extra effort to welcome new participants, especially those who may be new to CC, the open movement, or digital collaboration.

Be Respectful

Disagreements and different perspectives are normal—and healthy. Disagreement is no excuse for disrespectful behavior. Express disagreements with curiosity and empathy, not hostility. Personal attacks, name-calling, or any form of harassment will not be tolerated.

Be Inclusive and Considerate

Your contributions may impact others—so consider the broader community in your communication, collaboration, and decision-making. Be mindful that English is not the first language for many community members, and we come from many levels of education and expertise. Always try to pick the simplest way to express the idea you are trying to share, considering the language, educational and cultural barriers always present.

Be Collaborative

Work transparently and involve others early. Seek feedback, listen deeply, and give credit where it’s due. The strength of CC lies in collective leadership, not individual dominance.

Ask for Help When Unsure

No one is expected to know everything. Asking questions and offering help are both encouraged.

Share Leadership

Mentor, uplift, and empower others—especially those who may be newer to the community or from historically and systemically excluded groups.

Unacceptable Behavior

Unacceptable behaviors include (but are not limited to):

• Harassment, bullying, or intimidation in any form.
• Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory language or behavior.
• Sexual language, imagery, or attention, including unwelcome advances.
• Deliberate misgendering or use of deadnames.
• Violent threats or incitement.
• Doxing (publishing others’ private information without consent).
• Sustained disruption of events or communications.
• Trolling, insults, or inflammatory comments.
• Self-promotion unrelated to the topic or community space.

Scope of This Code

This Code applies in all Creative Commons spaces—including events, chat, forums, GitHub, mailing lists, platforms, chapters, community, and social media—whether those spaces are managed by staff, community leaders, or partners.

It also applies when individuals represent CC in any official capacity (e.g., facilitators, speakers, ambassadors, staff, board members).

Reporting Incidents

If you witness or experience behavior that violates this Code, or have other concerns, please report it promptly. You can contact: conduct@creativecommons.org

Reports should include (as appropriate):

• Your contact information (kept confidential).
• Names of individuals involved and any witnesses.
• A description of what occurred.
• Links to relevant public records (if applicable).

All reports will be handled promptly, fairly, and confidentially by designated staff or governance bodies. Reporters will receive updates about next steps and resolution.

Enforcement and Consequences

Creative Commons reserves the right to take any action we deem appropriate in response to a Code of Conduct violation, including but not limited to:

• Verbal or written warnings
• Temporary or permanent removal from CC spaces
• Removal from leadership or facilitation roles
• Revocation of credentials or access to CC programs

Anyone asked to stop unacceptable behavior is expected to comply immediately. Appeals or questions about enforcement decisions can be directed to conduct@creativecommons.org or legal@creativecommons.org.

Attribution

This Code of Conduct draws from and is inspired by multiple community-driven documents including previous Creative Commons Codes of Conduct for the CCGN, the CC Open Source CoC, the Slack CoC, and the CC Certificate Code of Conduct. These codes have cited others including: the Contributor Covenant v2.1, Geek Feminism’s anti-harassment policy, Ubuntu Code of Conduct, Stumptown Syndicate Citizen Code of Conduct, Mozilla’s enforcement ladder, and other open movement communities’ codes of conduct.

It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

The post Code of Conduct appeared first on Creative Commons.

This year, we’re focusing on re-engaging with the CC community and building new relationships, especially as emerging technologies like AI reshape how people create and share. We want to ensure CC’s tools, training, and resources evolve to meet real community needs, and we’re committed to being transparent and realistic about what we can offer in support. This is happening during a period of economic uncertainty for organizations in the open movement, so we are focusing on delivering sustainable pathways for community engagement at CC.

From CC Global Summit to New Ways of Connecting 

One big change you may have noticed is that we haven’t announced the next CC Global Summit. Unfortunately, CC’s budgets over the last two years have not allowed for such a significant expense, and most of the past Global Summits ran at a deficit. Without sufficient funding to support participant attendance, the Global Summits cannot be as inclusive as we aspire for them to be.

But this doesn’t mean we can’t spend time together – quite the opposite! We believe that supporting more regional gatherings for in-person engagement and virtual gatherings for increased inclusion will help to meet these challenges. Interested in exploring collaborating on an event in your region or in your community? Let’s chat. 

The CC Community in 2025

Earlier this year, we shared some of the history of the Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN), and talked about the importance of an expanded view of the CCGN. 

In thinking about the future of our community, the shared sentiment is that the CC community is much more expansive than the formal structures of the CCGN; the CC community is anyone who uses, advocates for, or supports the infrastructure that enables open licensing or who supports and believes in the power of the commons.

To enable this broader community, we are evaluating the existing (though currently inactive) membership process of the CC Global Network and how we support country chapters. Our goal is to strengthen our community engagement spaces and create clearer, more accessible pathways for people to get involved with CC.

Let’s Get to Work!

We are excited to reconnect and hear about your experiences and vision for the future of the CC community. Your input will help shape future decisions around governance, community infrastructure, communication tools, and engagement spaces. Please fill out the CC Community Survey by May 30:

• Creative Commons Community Survey – English
• Creative Commons Community Survey – Español
• Creative Commons Community Survey – Français

Our commitment is to make CC a space where collaboration thrives, knowledge flows freely, and communities feel empowered to shape the future of the commons. Stay tuned for opportunities to share your input, connect with others, and co-create what comes next.

The post The Next Chapter: Strengthening the Creative Commons Community Together appeared first on Creative Commons.

If you’ve been following along on the blog this year, you’ll know that we’ve been thinking a lot about the future of open, particularly in this age of AI. With our 2025-2028 strategy to guide us, we’ve been louder about a renewed call for reciprocity to defend and protect the commons as well as the importance of openness in AI and open licensing to avoid an enclosure of the commons. 

Last month, we took some of these conversations on the road and hosted the Open House for an Open Future during SXSW in Austin, TX, as part of a weekend-long Wiki Haus event with our friends at the Wikimedia Foundation. 

During the event, we spoke with Audrey Tang and Cory Doctorow about the future of open, especially as we look towards CC’s 25th anniversary in 2026.  In this wide-ranging conversation, a number of themes were reflected that capture both where we’ve been over the last 25 years and where we should be focusing for the next 25 years, including: 

• The Fight for Technological Self-Determination: Contractual restrictions are increasingly being used to lock down essential technologies, from printer ink to hospital ventilators. The push for openness and economic fairness must go beyond just content-sharing and extend to fighting for the rights of people to repair, modify, and use technology freely.
  
• Shifting from Resistance to Building Alternatives: The open movement is not just about opposing corporate restrictions but also about creating viable, open alternatives. Initiatives like Gov Zero show that fostering decentralized, user-controlled platforms can help counteract monopolistic digital ecosystems.
  
• The Power of Exit as a Lever for Change: Simply having the option to leave restrictive platforms can influence corporate behavior. Efforts like Free Our Feeds and Bluesky aim to create credible exit strategies that prevent users from being locked into exploitative digital environments.
  
• Beyond Copyright: New Frameworks for Openness and Innovation: While Creative Commons began as a response to copyright limitations, the next phase should focus on broader issues like supporting an infrastructure for open sharing, ethical AI development, and open governance models that empower communities rather than just limiting corporate control.
  
• Reclaiming the Ethos of Open Source and Free Software: The movement must reconnect with its ethical roots, focusing on freedom to create, share, and innovate—not just openness for the sake of efficiency. This includes resisting corporate capture of “openness” and ensuring technological advances serve public interest rather than private profit.

Since the proliferation of mainstream AI, we’ve been analyzing the limitations of copyright (and, by extension, the CC licenses since they are built atop copyright law) as the right lens to think about guardrails for AI training. This means we need new tools and approaches in this age of AI that complement open licensing, while also advancing the AI ecosystem toward the public interest. Preference signals are based on the idea that creators and dataset holders should be active participants in deciding how and/or if their content is used for AI training. Our friends at Bluesky, for example, have recently put forth a proposal on User Intents for Data Reuse, which is well worth a read to conceptualize how a preference signals approach could be considered on a social media platform. We’ve also been actively participating in the IETF’s AI Preferences Working Group, since submitting a position paper on the subject mid-2024 .

As CC gets closer to launching a protocol based on prosocial preference signals—a simple pact between those stewarding the data and those reusing it for generative AI training—we had the opportunity during SXSW to chat with some great thought leaders about this very topic. Our panelists were Aubra Anthony, Senior Fellow, Technology and International Affairs Program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Zachary J. McDowell, Phd, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago; Lane Becker, President, Wikimedia LLC at Wikimedia Foundation, and our very own Anna Tumadóttir, CEO, Creative Commons to explore sharing in the age of AI.  A few key takeaways from this conversation included: 

• Balancing Norms and Legal Frameworks: There is a growing interest in developing normative approaches and civil structures that go beyond traditional legal frameworks to ensure equitable use and transparency.
  
• Navigating AI Traffic and Commercial Use: Wikimedia is adapting to the influx of AI-driven bot traffic and exploring how to differentiate between commercial and non-commercial use. The idea of treating commercial traffic differently and finding ways to fundraise off bot traffic is becoming more prominent, raising important questions about sustainability in an open knowledge ecosystem. From CC’s perspective, we’ve found that as our open infrastructures mature they become increasingly taken for granted, a notion that is not conducive to a sustainable open ecosystem.
  
• Openness in the Age of AI: There is growing reticence around openness, with creators becoming more cautious about sharing content due to the rise of generative AI (note, this is exactly what our preference signals framework is meant to address, so stay tuned!). We should emphasize the need for open initiatives to adapt to the broader social and economic context, balancing openness with creators’ concerns about protection and sustainability.
  
• Making Participation Easy and Understandable: To encourage widespread participation in open knowledge systems and for preference signal adoption, tools will need to be simple and intuitive. Whether through collective benefit models or platform cooperativism, ease of use and clarity are essential to engaging the broader public in contributing to open initiatives.

Did you know that many social justice and public good organizations are unable to participate in influential and culture-making events like SXSW due to a lack of funding? CC is a nonprofit organization and all of our activities must be cost-recovery. We’d like to sincerely thank our event sponsor, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for making this event and these conversations possible. If you would like to contribute to our work, consider joining the Open Infrastructure Circle which will help to fund a framework that makes reciprocity actionable when shared knowledge is used to train generative AI.

The post CC @ SXSW: Protecting the Commons in the Age of AI appeared first on Creative Commons.

Big Question / Why It Matters

Laying the groundwork for implementing your open access policy is time consuming and resource intensive, but once done, you can reap the benefits of open access. Communicating copyright policies is crucial to make sure that the public and reusers can understand what they can do with the openly available content. Clear communications allows for different communities to engage with the content and remix and reuse it in new and innovative ways.

Learning Outcomes

• Analyze how copyright policies can be communicated within institutions
• Explore ways in which you can engage with different communities of re-users

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

Have you ever edited a Wikipedia page? Have you ever used an artwork to design a flyer for an event? How did you find out if you could reuse the content? Have you ever been impressed by the ways in which culture can get creatively re-interpreted?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

There are many ways in which your institution can measure the impact that an open access policy might have. But without a doubt, an important aspect of measuring that impact will be how the content is being used and shared by members of the public.

Not only is it important to identify stakeholders, communities and end users before an open access release, but incorporating them into the planning process will also help you achieve impact. You can also plan to incorporate different stakeholders and users in later stages, according to the resources that you have available.

It is important to make sure your copyright policy actually makes sense for your audience and public.

Understand your environment

When an institution starts to look at implementing open access, it might start with the ambitious goal of “releasing as much content as possible.” However, it is also important to start small and build upon success with incremental steps. For this, exercising due diligence is key. Exercising due diligence requires considering varying factors that may affect your project, including: the type and complexity of the collection you want to release, the size and resources of your institution, and the stakeholders involved.

Each institution is unique, so there is no “one size fits all” approach. However, there are commonalities across institutions, and these are important elements to consider when designing a plan on how to release collections.

Here are some recommendations to help you understand your environment.

• Assess capacity, logistics, resourcing and sustainability. The exercise of assessing the capacity of your institution should lead to a better understanding of the actual resources that you can count on and being realistic about expectations and potential impacts of your open access program. This does not mean that nothing can be done until you have all the resources and technologies in place, but rather that you should plan according to the resources you have available. Important questions should include: Is there any support for open access at your institution? Which shapes does this support take? What are current projects and activities that could help start a conversation about open? Can you start with something small? Do you have in-house capacity to assess and evaluate copyright issues? Do you need to partner with another institution? Are you able to maintain the open access policy and release accessible in the future?
• Test and build pilot projects.
• Identify stakeholders, communities and end users. If you want to involve communities in your project (whatever those communities are), remember that building those relationships takes time and resources too. Even when there are many benefits from crowdsourcing, people volunteering or collaborating in enhancing your digital collection need to feel a personal connection with the institution. You should be able to answer the question: Why is the institution building this digital collection, and for whom? Having clarity on who your end user is will also help guide the activities and steps that you will take for achieving your goals.
• Look for peers, allies and examples. A good way to build your case for open access is by getting in touch with other people that have gone through a similar situation. They might be able to provide you with smart advice. What would they have changed in their approach? What things helped them on their path to open? What worked, and what did not work for them?
• Make your case. Making your case is all about being prepared with the arguments and the supporting data to present to leadership, authorities and colleagues at the institution. But it is also about being able to seize opportunities that might present themselves. For example, several institutions decide to change their policy around open access when they redesign their website. Identify what might be the window of opportunity in your own institution. Maybe a change in technology; a workflow redesign; a departamental re-arrangement, or some other opportunity that might present itself to spark the conversation.
• Persuade colleagues and leadership. Do you know what the concerns of colleagues and leadership are? Take a moment to listen to the concerns and try to connect how implementing open access might help solve some of them. Focus on what colleagues might care about, and do the research to understand if and how open access might come in handy for solving that problem.

Explain your copyright policy

One of the reasons cultural heritage institutions release works and content is an interest in better serving their users and fulfilling their mission. An important aspect of “serving users” is to make copyright policies clear and easy to read for non-legal experts.

CC licenses and tools as well as other labels such as Rights Statements are not a copyright policy: they are practical, legal tools or labels to practically implement an institution’s copyright policy. Your copyright policy reflects your decisions on copyright issues and governs the use and reuse of content.

CC licenses and tools help because they offer a simple way for users to understand that copyright policy. But it is also good practice to explain your copyright policy on your website, as a way to give users different access points to figure out how they might be able to reuse works and content.

Your copyright policy should also explain how users should credit you as the steward of the collection. Crediting an institution is good practice by users and shows good faith on those institutions that decide to openly share their collection. We recommend including a sample attribution statement that users can simply cut/paste in order to credit you appropriately. For examples, see our 2024 report: Nudging Users to Reference Institutions When Using Public Domain Materials, Creative Commons Guidelines.

For a great example of a clear copyright policy, see the National Library of Scotland page on Copyright. In that page, you can see that the NLS also refers to the content that they currently have hosted in other platforms, such as Flickr.

Build an FAQ

FAQs are valuable instruments to clearly outline your policy and explain additional information about how you are making items on your collection available. The basic information should include a clear indication of what users can do according to the tools and labels you might be using and when they should conduct additional rights research. Another option is to include information about the files you are making available, i.e., format, resolution, size or quality.

There are several good examples to look at. The Nationalmuseum in Sweden has built the information provided to users in their “Rights and Reproductions” section. Take a moment to look at its policy. What do you see?

You will find that in this case the Nationalmuseum decided to include the license deed information directly in the FAQ (remember what we saw in Unit 3 around the three layers of the CC license?). They also included very specific information on how they expect users can attribute them.

Additionally, aggregators can decide to write their own FAQ. See for example the one that Europeana did on Reusability to explain the different categories that you can search for and how a user should interpret the reuse licenses. Other examples include the DigitalNZ that has a section on Copyright, Accessibility and Privacy. These are good examples of how different aggregators might approach copyright questions differently.

The Smithsonian has a long FAQ that also includes relevant information about its open access initiative. Take the time to look at the policy. In this one, we want to highlight one of the questions:^[1]

In this way, the Smithsonian also solves a very pressing concern that some cultural heritage institutions have around the accuracy of their metadata.

Consult the Survey of Open GLAM practices and policies. Go to Column M, “Rights policy or terms of use.” Organize the spreadsheet by your country and explore how institutions in your country are building their FAQs.

Make your expectations on re-use clear

Inform your user what your minimum expectations around re-use might be. As we have seen in previous units, you cannot add additional restrictions to public domain works or to works that you decide to release under a CC license. Some of the important points described in the FAQ, “Alterations and additions to the CC license,” will apply:

• you cannot ask for an exact placement of the license;
• you cannot add additional restrictions on the license.

Moreover, the biggest favor you can do for your users is to maintain terms and conditions that are as clear and straightforward as possible.

In several countries, users are not obliged to include attribution for public domain works. You can, however, ask your users to adopt the best practice of properly crediting the institution when reusing the work. You can also provide sample citations or attribution statements indicating how you wish the works to be credited. Check out this example by The Wellcome Collection, a museum and library in the UK.

Take a look again at the Public Domain Guidelines created by Creative Commons. Those Guidelines are licensed under a CC BY SA license, so you can reuse them and adapt them as you see fit to serve your own purpose (and Europeana has translated them into several languages!). Educating your users on how you expect them to abide by good faith will go a long way to help prevent some uses that you might find distasteful.

Maintain consistency across websites and third-party platforms

One of the biggest challenges is to maintain a consistent open access policy across multiple websites and third-party platforms. Such websites could include proprietary or open source digital collection software (e.g. Access to Memory, Collective Access, Islandora, Dspace), which include varying abilities to represent rights metadata. In some cases, institutions might maintain more than one website. For example, a particular research project that digitized a specific collection might need its own stand-alone website. To the extent possible, those websites should try to replicate the same policy as the main website of the institution to avoid confusion.

Institutions that choose to go open access also tend to put their images into multiple platforms. Third-party platforms can be challenging, because some platforms might support CC licenses and tools, while others might not. Social media platforms can also be challenging. If you are interested in seeing how different institutions adopt social media strategies to properly attribute authors and credit institutions, check out this conversation between professionals at Europeana, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and The Getty Museum.

The best way to ensure attribution by reusers is to link back to your institution’s website if the platform does not allow for a proper mechanism to acknowledge you. For example, the Auckland War Memorial Museum has a Pinterest account; take a look at this Croatian woven wool bag.

Croatian Woven Wool Bag, Auckland Museum, CC BY.

In this case, the Auckland War Memorial Museum decided to manually indicate the CC BY rights in the description box next to the photo. They also included a link back to the item on their collection website, which then leads to the user to see the same reference to the CC BY license when browsing  through the objects.

In some third-party platforms like Flickr, Sketchfab and Wikimedia Commons, CC licenses and tools are supported (i.e. “built-in” the platform), or they might even have their own statements (called “templates” in Wikimedia Commons). Wikimedia Commons in particular has a high threshold for accepting photos per their copyright rules. They only accept works identified to be in the public domain or voluntarily released under a Wikimedia Commons-compatible CC license by the rightsholder.

However, even when the copyright statement is mandatory and already standardized by a template, there is still some room for variation. See for example how the National Archives of Brazil are releasing their collection on Wikimedia Commons. Most of their items are marked as being in the public domain, with a special note that states, “Please attribute as: Public domain / Arquivo Nacional Collection,” as you can see in this example.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is another example of an organization releasing their collections on Wikimedia Commons. Check out this sculpture, “Winter,” by an unknown artist. In this case, the Cleveland Museum of Art decided to link back to their open access initiative on their own website.

And last but not least, we have Flickr. Flickr has a special section for GLAMs that want to release their collections called Flickr Commons, now managed by the Flickr Foundation. Flickr offers participating institutions to apply a Public Domain Mark as a way to identify works that are in the public domain. As in Wikimedia Commons, institutions can choose to add additional information on each of the images.

Finally, more and more institutions are choosing to build APIs for uploading and releasing their open access content. If you have the resources to build an API, an important consideration is its accessibility over time. As this article explains, not maintaining these APIs might make information disappear from the internet or make some pieces of software code impossible to use.

Engage with communities

The communities that you engage with are the ones that will prove the impact of the open access policy and they are the ones that will allow you to put in practice some of the benefits explored in this unit. Communities are also the ones that will take your content, put it in different platforms, and enhance your collection by finding new, different, and innovative ways to use it and reuse it.

Integration into external interfaces

An important part of making your content and collection available is being able to put your work out there in other channels, such as Wikimedia Commons. There are plenty of examples of institutions doing “GLAM-Wiki” activities, and several case studies to explore.

An example is the Ipiranga Museum from Brazil, which you can read about in this article by Wiki Movimento Brasil. Like the Rijksmuseum, the Ipiranga Museum had to close its premises for renovations, but they managed to open their collection through Wikimedia Commons and by integrating it into Wikipedia.

However, this integration may also attract funding from different sources. For example, the Sloan Foundation in the US supported the collaboration between DPLA and Wikimedia to make DPLA’s content more prominent in Wikimedia platforms.

Additionally, Wikimedia projects allow for very interesting ways in which your content can be enhanced. For example, take a look at the Wikidata Art Depiction Explorer, which allows for reusers to describe what is being depicted in a particular artwork.

Wikimedia projects are only one of the examples in which you could feature your content, but it is a prominent one given the fact that Wikipedia is the only website run by a non-profit to be among the top ten most visited websites on the internet. It is also a great platform in terms of what you can achieve if you connect wisely with the Wikimedia community. This means taking the time to understand how the platform works and what the avenues to connect with the community are. For example, if you want your collection to be on Wikipedia but you don’t have relationships with the Wikimedia community, consider hiring a Wikimedian in Residence (WiR), or dedicating staff time to engaging on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.

Foster reuse and remix culture

Putting your collections online can also allow for new creative works to be created. For example, that’s exactly what the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Black Hole Club and Cold War Steve Trust did with their campaign “Cut, Copy, Remix,” inviting artists to remix their openly available collection. And some of the results are quite amazing, like this “Cold War Steve vs The PRB, 2020” (Cold War Steve (Christopher Spencer), CC0. Photomontage commissioned by Birmingham Museums Trust.)

There are other examples, such as the Rijksstudio award, that encourages people to remix their collections and even encourages them to be used and applied on everyday items. Others, such as the Library of Congress of the US, encourage people to explore their public domain catalog of music and become “Citizen DJs.” And others, such as the Coding Da Vinci project in Germany and The Heritage Lab in India, encourage reusing cultural data as a way to explore and reuse collections.

This selected set of cases shows how  important it is to allow users to engage on their own terms and to explore the wide range of possibilities only limited by their own imagination.

Aim for accessibility

In her article “The Marrakesh Treaty: challenging GLAMs to generate readable documents for people with disabilities” Argentinean librarian Virginia Simón identifies some ways in which GLAMs can help make works more accessible for people with disabilities. Engaging diverse users is one of the main benefits that come with digital cultural heritage. Explore different ways in which open access can allow for providing new experiences for users.

Crowdsourcing & volunteering

Another important aspect of open access is that it gives new opportunities for communities to engage with your collections and content. Engagement with communities can be achieved through crowdsourcing tasks or through working with volunteers in different content campaigns, among other examples. This contributes to overall better engagement of citizenship and communities with cultural heritage.

However, this is not to say that by crowdsourcing tasks there is no effort involved. Normally, crowdsourcing requires a lot of time from the institution, to prepare in advance the content or collections that might be used in crowdsourcing tasks or content campaigns.

As an example, see what Siobhan Leachman has to share. Siobhan is a very active community member of Wikimedia projects. Siobhan participates as a volunteer for the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Smithsonian Transcription Center. She is also very vocal about which projects she decides to invest her time in, as described in this tweet:

In 2016, Siobhan gave a talk called “Crowdsourcing & how GLAMs encourage me to participate” at the National Digital Forum. In that talk, she gave three suggestions for GLAMs who want to attract people like her to collaborate:

• 1. Be generous with your CONTENT: allow for volunteers contributing to your projects to play with your content and your data, download it, reuse it, and place it in other websites and projects where they are collaborating;
  2. Be generous with your TRUST: allow for volunteers to go right away into hands-on projects; make it easy for them to participate; design concrete, achievable tasks they can accomplish; allow for feedback and improvement, and be forgiving of mistakes;
  3. Be generous with TIME: implement different communication channels (social media, online meetings, office hours) where volunteers can reach out to you and chat about what they are doing and what excites them about their volunteer project; establish collaboration.

More importantly, as Siobhan noted, “Crowdsourcing isn’t about getting free labor. It’s about being open to your volunteers, ideas, and contributions. It’s about collaboration, and collaboration requires communication.” This is what we refer to in this section around planning for allocating proper resources to build these relationships!

Another amazing example of collaboration in Open Culture is the NEO Lab at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. The NEO Lab “aims to explore new ways of working together – both internally and with different communities outside the museum – in order to transform how stories are told and how collections are conceived and used.”

What other cultural heritage projects do you know that are incorporating the value of collaboration? Which ones do you like? Have you thought about implementing a crowdsourcing project at your institution?

Evaluate your impact

Evaluating your impact is crucial to understand if the resources are being properly allocated. It also allows you to advocate internally for the importance of putting more resources into building digital capabilities.

Your impact will always be dependent on your goals, but an important part of evaluating that impact will be to track reuse. Well-resourced institutions might be able to track their impact by deploying tracking tools, such as the work that the Cleveland Museum of Art is doing with their CMA dashboard.

But even if you do not have those resources, you can still do things to measure your impact. For example, you can offer ways for people to give you feedback on how they are using and reusing the cultural heritage you make openly available online. Offer avenues for people to tell their story about how they value and appreciate what you are doing.

By encouraging users to refer back to you in their credit statements, you might also be able to get a better overview of how, where, and by whom your collection is being reused to inform your impact evaluations.

Final remarks

Communicating your copyright policies clearly is fundamental to allowing communities to reuse your content. There are many ways in which different communities can engage with your content. Tracking some of these reuses allows you to build your case on how releasing your collections and content has a broad impact.

1. The text reads: “What is the Smithsonian’s commitment to cultural responsibility with open access? The Smithsonian respects the rights and sovereignty of the diverse cultures Smithsonian collections represent. The Smithsonian engages with these communities about the use of these assets, so culturally sensitive content may not be Open Access now or in the future. Please view the Smithsonian Open Access Values Statement to learn more about the Smithsonian’s core values in adopting and executing the Open Access Initiative, now and going forward. Please note that the language and terminology used in this collection reflects the context and culture of the time of its creation, and may include culturally sensitive information. As an historical document, its contents may be at odds with contemporary views and terminology. The information within this collection does not reflect the views of the Smithsonian Institution, but is available in its original form to facilitate research. For questions or comments regarding sensitive content, access, and use related to this collection, please contact openaccess@si.edu”. ↵

The post 5.4 Opening Up & Sharing Collections and Content appeared first on Creative Commons.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the opportunities and challenges of Open Culture
• Learn practical ways in which various institutions are seizing the opportunities and facing the challenges of Open Culture

Big Question / Why It Matters

A crucial mission of cultural heritage institutions is to provide access to knowledge and culture to help broaden the understanding that people have about themselves and the world. In doing so, institutions embark on a variety of projects, from on-site educational programs to digitization of works to increase access.

How well prepared are these institutions to reap the benefits of releasing their content? And how will they face the challenges that might appear along the way? How can institutions better support their missions, as well as scholarship and education, while mitigating the negative outcomes of giving away control?

This section will explore the benefits and challenges of Open Culture and look at how a broad understanding can support institutions in implementing open access practices and policies.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

Have you ever engaged in a conversation about why you think open access is important or how it can be challenging for cultural heritage institutions? Ever wonder what institutional case studies might help to build your case for opening access to a collection?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

What are the opportunities of Open Culture?

In Unit 1, Section 1.3, we provided a short summary of the benefits of open culture. Here, we take a deeper dive into some of these, based on over two decades’ worth of collection holders’ experiences.

One of the best reports that summarizes these benefits is “The Impact of open access on Galleries, Libraries, Museums, & Archives” (2016) written by Effie Kapsalis, who was Senior Digital Officer at the Smithsonian at the time. She also created a video overview of the report, for a presentation at SXSW 2016:

This report served as a resource for internal advocacy and promotion of open access at the Smithsonian Institution. Kapsalis also identified partners and allies that were showing the value of opening their collection to help her build her case. In February 2020, the Smithsonian launched their open access initiative, placing more than 2 million items in the public domain. Imagine trying to display 2 million items in an in-person physical exhibit! You can hear Effie talk about it in a 2021 episode of CC’s Open Minds podcast, and you can read three case studies featuring some of the pioneers of open culture in this CC blog post. The case studies are available in français, Igbo, Ελληνικά, Bahasa Indonesia and English.

Cultural heritage institutions have amazing collections, and it is impossible to show all those items in one physical space at one time. When Lizzy Jongma joined the Rijksmuseum as a Data Manager for the Collections Information Department in 2011, the museum was closed and undergoing renovations to extend its space. But she had a moment of insight. As Lizzy explained for this profile made for the book “Made with Creative Commons,” even with the renovated and larger space, the museum would still not be able to show more than one percent of their collection—8,000 out of over one million works.

Increasing the visibility of the collection can be easily achieved by using CC tools and licenses. Using such standardized tools to communicate the copyright status and use permissions for different works enables search engines to include more multimedia files and images from cultural heritage institutions into search results. Educators, researchers, artists, and general users that are looking for free and open images and content are more inclined to use the high-quality, openly available content provided by these institutions.

Hear about these and more benefits (as well as barriers and many other informational tidbits) in our Open Culture Voices series.

Benefits of Open Culture

Entrusted with the mission to care for cultural heritage for the benefit of the public, collection holders are key interfaces between people and cultural heritage. They make up the “zone” where such interactions can happen. Nowadays, many people expect this zone to be not only physical — in the brick-and-mortar space — but digital, too. People also expect fresh forms of interactions that can only happen when culture is open, for example via popular open content portals such as Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, Europeana, Flickr, Openverse, and the Internet Archive, to name a few. Merete Sanderhoff, Senior Adviser, Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark, is often credited with saying, “if it isnʼt online, it doesnʼt exist.”^[1]

Some of the key benefits of open culture are:

• Making cultural heritage easier to find. When shared openly, collections and related data are more discoverable, including through portals like those mentioned above. Collection materials become more visible, able to be presented in various ways, as well as being more searchable and findable through techniques such as linked metadata. They become more interoperable and compatible thanks to licensing and labeling standards, which also increases findability and usability. And, they allow collection holders to further enrich their collections through user contribution and co-creation.
• Reaching broader and more diverse audiences. Open sharing of cultural heritage means a greater number and wider range of users from all over the world have access to collections, on local, national, regional, and global scales. This includes more potential on-site visitors as well. Open licenses also allow for content to be more easily and potentially available in multiple languages, further expanding access outside of a CHI’s immediate physical location.
• Preserving, safeguarding, and refining in digital formats. The more we are able to share in a way that enables maximum use and reuse of collections, the more we contribute to the protection of cultural heritage. We know many collections are lost, for example, due to accidents, natural disasters, human conflicts, and climate change. Having collection materials available in multiple formats and shared online means we are still able to retain information about physical items that may be lost.
• Enabling (re)use with more legal certainty. Many collection holders, and even individual visitors, are reluctant to interact with collection materials because they simply are not sure what the legal requirements are for doing so. Creative Commons licenses and legal tools are a clear way to indicate the copyright status of an item and to quickly communicate that status to others. Indeed, as we saw in Unit 2, specific legal frameworks can vary widely across countries and jurisdictions, but the CC licenses are a global standard that allows for easier sharing across boundaries.

Open cultural heritage also leads to:

• More resilient and relevant collection holders. Open access to cultural heritage allows CHIs to more meaningfully connect with remote audiences, including audiences that may not otherwise have any interaction with that particular institution. This can increase both virtual and even physical foot-traffic, community support, and enhance an institution’s reputation and increase their relevance in an ever-evolving world. As open access policies are put in place, legal permissions and rights become more clear. This gives staff more time to steward their collections and make connections with their communities, instead of spending inordinate amounts of time wading through legal uncertainties.
• More vibrant research and more participatory education. Open culture efforts can galvanize researchers by offering them access to new resources while empowering educators and learners to create and remix resources directly. This helps create a bigger, richer, and more meaningful conversation around collections beyond the physical walls of an institution, allowing individuals to express themselves in their own voices, make new discoveries and connections, create new narratives or reshape those distorted through history, find new meanings, and offer new perspectives and interpretations, using the cultural heritage of our past to shape new futures. This can result in new research discoveries that alter the way we think about the world, increased community cohesion and collaboration to help us address global challenges, and more participatory and inclusive learning and teaching practices.
• More dynamic cultural creativity. Open culture can stimulate creativity and inspire new creative enterprises with positive economic and social impacts. Open access to cultural heritage enriches and augments our pool of preexisting materials, allowing for increased creative reuse and remix. This helps to democratize access to and participation in art and creativity. It also allows for increased collaboration, exploration, and experimentation, both commercially and non-commercially.
• More just, democratic, diverse, free, and equitable societies. Open access to cultural heritage reinforces the social fabric and can lead to greater societal cohesion and wellbeing. It can be a powerful tool for social justice, helping empower new voices and build fairer and more equitable relationships. It can also help solidify our democratic foundations by inspiring civic engagement. It also contributes to increased access to reliable and trustworthy information, especially online. By the same token, this helps contribute to fighting dis- and misinformation.

What are the challenges of Open Culture?

There are many benefits to releasing a collection openly. But, of course, there are also challenges. There are several reasons why institutions may not be ready to open access to their collections.

By talking to people working in or with institutions all over the world, Creative Commons has learned a great deal about some of the challenges, barriers, and fears that institutions face when trying to release their collections under an open license or tool. Most challenges that institutions face concern (1) money, (2) attribution or credit^[2] and/or (3) quality.

A more detailed summary includes:

• Funding, losing revenues, and economic models. Institutions sometimes are afraid that releasing collections might end up affecting some business models, such as selling digital images, or might negatively impact on revenue streams from other funding sources.
• Liability and risk aversion. Copyright law can be complicated, and understanding how it applies to specific works or across jurisdictions can create uncertainty that might lead to overly conservative approaches when releasing digital reproductions of collection items.
• Lack of control over third-party use of digitized copies. This challenge is not specific to open culture, but may be something that collection holders commonly encounter as they share their works more publicly.
• Uses of public domain works that may cause intentional or unintentional harm. Some uses of public domain works may create societal, community, or individual harm, whether intentional or unintentional, for example, when works are used to convey racist, demeaning, derogatory, or otherwise offensive messages.
• Wrong, messy, or inaccurate metadata or information. Information and metadata experience changes over time: in the amount of data that is available about works at a given point, in the way in which data about works was represented in previous eras, and in the data input and technologies used to represent it. Some institutions fear that wrong or inaccurate information might represent visions of the world that are not aligned with the values that the institution currently holds. Learn more about ways to mitigate this risk in our webinar about Respectful Terminologies.

Alternatively, if an institution is not ready to fully “open” its collections, there are intermediary options available. Anne Young, Director of Legal Affairs and Intellectual Property at Newfields, refers to one option as “Semi Open Access,” which consists of releasing only small portions of the collection to test the waters and assess how comfortable the institution feels with these initial steps. And, as Anne points out, it is also more attainable for a lot of institutions in terms of capacity, resources, and appetite for risk. This is important to acknowledge because the resources that institutions have vary greatly.

Let’s briefly discuss each of these challenges in turn.

Challenge: Funding, loss of revenue, and economic models

Depending on the type of collections your institution holds, the cost of digitizing materials and maintaining a digital presence can vary dramatically. If you decide to have your own content management system or platform (which does not have to be the case, as some of the examples we have provided show), then it might become more burdensome to maintain.

Funding, both public and private, is crucial for sustaining digitization projects. CHIs’ funding options vary immensely across geographies, with some institutions relying mostly on public funding, and others strongly dependent on private funding. Oftentimes, openness is a condition for obtaining funding: for example, digital reproductions being made available open access is a requirement. Digitization can be an expensive process, and institutions need to have funding for it as the demands of the general public and specific users pivot towards more digital presence.

Institutions that receive public funding might have less pressure to diversify revenue streams. Their main concern will be to fulfill their mission in the best possible way. A 2011 Europeana workshop explored the importance of revenue streams for publicly funded institutions; Europeana published a follow-up report “The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: A Business Model Perspective on Open Metadata,” recommending:

“Opening up data should be seen as an important part of the responsibility of our public cultural sector. Instead of measuring success by the amount of commercial revenue that institutions are able to secure from the market, new metrics should be developed that measure the amount of business generated (spill-over) based on data made openly available to the creative industries. This requires a change in evaluation metrics on a policy level.”  

However, public funding often does not cover all the costs of digital projects. Institutions without public funding still have concerns around revenue loss. Revenue loss can express itself as various concerns regarding:

• losing revenue from licensing reproduction rights;
• losing footfall in the physical space, which impacts the sale of tickets as well as sales in related facilities, like the gift shop or cafeteria;
• the willingness of funders to support projects that are not as immediately visible or impressive as, for example, building or renovating a facility; and/or
• private sector partners not securing intellectual property rights over digitized versions of works that could be later exploited (copyright claims over digitized objects).

Let us address these concerns. Several studies and experiences have demonstrated that there are actually cost savings associated with rights and reproduction overhead.

• Rights & permissions requests cost money. In his seminal study, “Reproduction charging models & rights policy for digital images in American art museums: A Mellon Foundation funded study Simon Tanner found that sometimes the Rights & permissions requests are actually more expensive to maintain than the overall revenue that they bring to the institution.
• Open access can make the institution more efficient. Reducing the amount of Rights & Permissions requests increases efficiency. The Te Papa museum was able to reduce around 14,000 image requests just by adding copyright status statements on their collections. “We’ve built a robust, cost efficient, centralised system that users have said they find easy to use.“ (Reusing Te Papa’s collections images, by the numbers).
• Clear policies and self-service delivery reduces burden on staff. Staff is able to spend more time on clearing the rights of works that are not yet digitized rather than attending requests of works that are already digitized. It also allows for other departments, like social media and education, to be able to self-serve and work with material that they can trust as being cleared, rather than having to only use a small batch of pre-selected content. For an in-depth exploration on this argument, read Karin Glasemann’s reflection on how openness transformed the Nationalmuseum.

There are also new economic models to explore. First, making collections available does not mean that you need to stop charging for producing copies, or that you cannot explore different models for those digital copies. Indeed, digitization costs money and in certain cases those costs can still be transferred to the users making specific digitization requests, like many archives currently do. Importantly, those costs need to be transparent for the user. What is not recommended practice under open access principles is to charge licensing fees over works that are in the public domain. In those cases, copyright claims are dubious at best, and it goes against the institution’s mission to provide access to the public.

An increase in brand licensing is also possible. For example, after The Metropolitan Museum of Art did their major open access release, new branding opportunities arose for them. The same was true for the Rijksmuseum, which had the opportunity to do a co-branding campaign with the Dutch brewing company Heineken, German toy maker Playmobil, and even Japanese shoe brand Mizuno. Of course, these are major museums with very well known brands, but these examples can help us think differently about the kinds of impact and public recognition that institutions can have when providing online access to their collections. A pilot study conducted by academics in the UK: “Reaping the benefits of digitisation: Pilot study exploring revenue generation from digitised collections through technological Innovation” explored other possibilities for smaller institutions.

Finally, foot traffic is of major importance for several CHIs. COVID-19 demonstrated both the importance of these visitors, but also the crucial role that the digital environment played for these institutions while people were isolated due to public health measures. People actually feel a stronger connection with the institution if it does not set artificial barriers to the content. An increase in the discoverability of the collection also makes people more aware of the existence of GLAM institutions and helps raise awareness of the need to support them.

Challenge: Liability and risk aversion

Cultural heritage institutions face an inherent tension in dealing with works, irrespective of their nature. This tension arises between their roles as stewards of the physical objects embodying the works in their collection and the fact that most often copyright in the works belongs to someone outside the institution.^[3] In particular, copyright’s strict rules and long term of protection impact such institutions’ ability to manage objects and openly release their collections (in part or entirely). Each institution finds their own balance between their goals of sharing cultural heritage content with the public, and the responsibilities and risks as stewards of that content.

Additionally, mistakes in releasing collections, such as infringing copyright (even if accidental), can be costly. In some cases, when GLAM communities make works available online, there might be some collaborators that feel that such a use infringes on an implicit social agreement. This is what Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi have called the “permissions culture” in the visual arts (it is applicable to other sectors beyond visual arts). It is important to be aware of how limitations and exceptions protect your institution, but also to offer ways to fix mistakes.

Copyright infringement is one of several factors that can result in institutions’ understandable risk aversion and fear of liability. However, decision-making based solely on risk aversion also impacts an institution’s ability to fulfill its mission. Here are some ideas on developing a risk assessment strategy.

• Have a clear, proper risk assessment. Ideally, a proper risk assessment will help assess undue liabilities in the institutions’ decision-making processes. It will also guide staff when making copyright-related decisions. If you or your institution lack experience with risk assessments, we will explore some examples in Section 5.4. For doing these risk assessments, you can rely on your awareness (or access to information about) local laws and court cases.
• Offer clear ways to fix mistakes. This is a solution typically used in the case of orphan works, where some institutions have taken their chance to upload and make available some works (even when not necessarily as open access) by offering ways to potential rightsholders to remove those works from the internet. In any case, it is good practice to have mechanisms in place to solve copyright complaints, even if they are rather rare and sometimes ill-founded.

Challenge: Lack of control over third-party use of digitized copies

One example of this challenge that is common to Open Culture institutions is:

There are businesses that offer “stock photo” services on their website, where they sell reproductions of some of the public domain works released by institutions. It is important to note that these services are likely legal from a copyright perspective, unless they infringe on a trademark or patent right of the institution or are breaking other laws. This is because the underlying work is in the public domain, which means there is generally no copyright to infringe, even if the business applies a watermark over the digital reproduction of the work. When an institution releases a digital reproduction of public domain material under CC0, it releases any and all copyright claims that it might have over the digital reproduction.

Of course, this is a frustrating experience for many institutions that have decided to share these materials out of their mission to serve the public. It is also problematic from the perspective of quality: some of these services offer poor quality reproductions with watermarks all over them, or even lock them up with Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) designed to prevent reuse.

There may not be a sure-fire way to counter these free-riding practices; however, the inconvenience is outweighed by the many benefits of releasing a collection.

Also, it is important to note that both people seeking images and search engines will usually prioritize good quality sources that offer the free, high resolution, highly detailed images, with supporting information and metadata and no watermarks on them. More likely than not, an institution’s official website will also offer additional features (from better search capabilities to list-generating capabilities, or the generation of data dumps), which stock photo websites do not provide.

A good approach to addressing the stock photo site challenges lies not with legal recourse necessarily, but in appealing to social norms. Suggestions include:

• Raise users’ awareness by explaining the nature of these “stock photo” websites. If they find images available to purchase that are part of your collections, let them know they have free, high-quality, and legitimate download options at your own institutional website or other preferred repository or platform. You could also include a warning to alert people about scams.
• Trust your brand. Most of these websites are of dubious quality, while a cultural heritage institution has a brand that can be recognized and trusted by the public.
• Emphasize the value added you provide. Your institution is not just offering “stock photos,” but also providing context and background to the heritage that it stewards. That’s a value added.
• Keep in mind that charging for digital images is likely not profitable for cultural heritage institutions. There is likely a negligible shortfall, if any, for the institution if a stock photo business charges for their photographs.

As a general principle, unless a user is searching for a specific artwork that is more readily available on a commercial website, they will default to using risk-free and cost-free images.

Challenge: Uses of public domain works that may cause intentional or unintentional harm

The misuse of cultural heritage materials is a great concern for collection holders, especially when it comes to materials that embody or represent culturally-sensitive content. There are actors that might use those materials in ways that you do not intend or that you or others find offensive.

This “misuse” does not refer to materials that for a variety of reasons might not be sensible to release. Indeed, there are some reproductions of works that despite being in the public domain, might not be appropriate to release without proper consideration. Such works range from digital copies of photos of human remains to digital reproductions of objects of Indigenous peoples. We will further discuss the ethical considerations later in the Unit, but a general approach is “open to the extent possible.” There are indeed some ethical considerations to take into account when doing open access releases.

One example of a harmful use case of a public domain work was of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Slave Market” (1866). The work is stewarded by the Clark Art Institute (United States) but was used by the German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Instead of removing access to the work, or claiming copyright over the digitized version, the Clark Art Institute publicly disapproved of the use of the public domain image. Several months afterward, the museum still enacted an Open Access policy, allowing for any reproduction of a public domain work to be downloaded high-resolution for free, as expressed in their FAQ.

The Clark Art Institute recognized that some challenges related to the reuse of public domain works are not actually about (or within the realm of) copyright. In this case, a better solution to policing offensive or harmful behavior existed within social norms or other legal requirements.

Some social norms to consider include:

• 1. Publicly disagreeing with the way in which the work was used: if the story is being elevated by the media, the institution can always remind people that although they do not control the use of the work since it’s in the public domain, the institution finds the use harmful, out of context or inaccurate. This strategy however can be counterproductive in some situations, especially if the institution ends up being dragged into a low-brow debate.
  2. Educate audiences about the work: the institution can also use the opportunity to educate its audience about the work. In general, newsflashes might increase the views of certain objects or works; when a public conversation is happening, it is more likely that people will look for that information on the web.^[4] That offers the opportunity to bring people’s attention to the context of the work or object, either on the institution’s website or through third-party websites, news outlets, etc.
  3. Offer non-mandatory guidelines or protocols: building community norms is also a good way to encourage good reuse of works. There are different ways in which you can encourage appropriate behaviour, from FAQ sections to buttons and reminders when people download a work that serve as a gentle nudge.

The above examples of social sanctions and community norms are presented here to initiate further thought. Learn more about these key issues in the Additional Resources.

Challenge: Wrong, messy, or inaccurate metadata or information

Another common concern relates to releasing inaccurate or inappropriate metadata or information about the collection. In some cases, there are historical reasons that explain the improper information in metadata. This is a legitimate concern, and there are many workarounds to solve some of the underlying issues.

1. One way is to make a disclaimer. In your release, you can explain that some data might actually be inaccurate. This is for example what the Smithsonian did in their release, by adding a question to their FAQ around “What is the Smithsonian’s commitment to cultural responsibility with open access?”

“Please note that the language and terminology used in this collection reflects the context and culture of the time of its creation, and may include culturally sensitive information. As an historical document, its contents may be at odds with contemporary views and terminology. The information within this collection does not reflect the views of the Smithsonian Institution, but is available in its original form to facilitate research.“

2. Offer ways for improving metadata upon feedback. Releases can actually help improve metadata and information about the collections. Look at this small example of the Swedish Heritage Board collection on Flickr Commons. They uploaded a photo signaling that it was a “monastery,” but a user pointed out that the building depicted was indeed a castle, allowing them to correct a mistake in their records.

3. Explore how collaboration and crowd-sourcing can improve your metadata. Other projects also focus on improving or adding metadata through crowdsourcing, like the trailblazing example of the United States Library of Congress: they uploaded part of their collections to Flickr Commons to improve their information about these historical pictures.

Of course, ensuring metadata is usable requires work. But fear of inaccuracies should not prevent this very relevant information from being shared. And last but not least, it is important to remember that “perfect is the enemy of done.” The interaction with users and the public can actually help to improve substantive parts of the information about the collection.

Final remarks

Open access to collections is an integral part of many institutions’ missions to engage contemporary audiences. There are many benefits to releasing collections, and it is important to choose benefits that resonate with your institution, your institution’s mission, and the audiences your institution serves. But there are also challenges to assess. Luckily, awareness of the challenges helps institutions plan ahead and design creative solutions to overcome them.

1. From Open access can never be bad news | by Merete Sanderhoff | SMK Open | Medium. ↵
2. We will address the element of credit in Section 5.4, when describing different options for an institution to help users provide proper provenance of the works. ↵
3. Having ownership over the physical object does not mean that the institution is the copyright holder. Physical ownership and copyright ownership are separate and distinctive types of ownership. We will explore this distinction further in Section 5.3. ↵
4. A good example is to measure the relationship between page views on Wikipedia and events related to celebrities, such as in this article. ↵

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