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On Monday 2 March 2026, Creative Commons (CC) and Internet Archive Europe, together with the support of Open Nederland, hosted an event entitled “Ensuring equitable access to heritage in the digital environment: A leading role for the Netherlands on the global stage.” In this blog post, we offer a recap of the dynamic discussions and share why they matter for CC. 

Goal of the Event

The goal of the event was to bring together key actors from the Dutch heritage sector to celebrate the Netherlands’ pioneering efforts in opening up access to heritage collections. For over two decades, Dutch cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) have set the standard for equitable access to heritage that fosters imagination, creativity and innovation while deftly navigating the pitfalls that threaten access. With open heritage gaining momentum as a way to help address global challenges, the event was an opportunity to elevate Dutch good practices to the international level. 

Opening Remarks

Brigitte Vézina, CC’s Director of Policy and Open Culture, kicked off the event by setting the scene. She presented CC’s work and CHIs’ use of CC licenses in relation to heritage and offered some background on the Open Heritage Coalition and Open Heritage Statement. 

Panel I: Successes and Challenges of Open Heritage in the Netherlands

The first expert panel, moderated by Beverley Francis (CC), highlighted various experiences with open heritage in the Dutch context.

Amanda van Rij (Coordinating Legal Policy Advisor, Heritage and Arts Directorate, Ministry of Education, Culture and Science) presented the National Strategy on Digital Heritage (in Dutch) whose aim is to make digital heritage more easily accessible to everyone. She also introduced the Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed (Digital Heritage Network or NDE) Manifesto, a document developed with funding from the Ministry, which had already been signed by over 200 institutions across the country. She also emphasized that digitization influences how our heritage is being created, disseminated, and experienced, and pointed out that a careful balance is needed between respecting intellectual property on the one hand and the public interest of access to our collective memory on the other. 

Saskia Scheltjens (Head Research Services Department and Chief Librarian Rijksmuseum Research Library, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) gave an account of the museum’s open heritage journey, which started during a “perfect storm,” as she put it, starting with the first digitized collection in 2011 and the creation of Rijkstudio in 2012. Her key takeaway was that, defying expectations, opening access to the digital collection did not drive visitors away (the Rijks, with 2.3 million visitors a year, is the 23rd most visited museum in the world). Quite the opposite, in fact, for with free and unfettered online access (1.8 million people visit the website every year), people could build a relationship with the collection, which then became better known. 2023 saw the completion of the digitization of its entire collection of one million objects, while the last few years underlined the need for a more nuanced approach to access. For example, dealing with restitutions made her realize a collection has more cultural and societal stakeholders than was understood a decade or so ago. She concluded by noting that making information and data available online aligned with the institution’s mission, in accordance with FAIR principles, and that this requires investing in quality, structure, and coherence to ensure a successful digital transformation and to uphold the public values of a fair knowledge ecosystem. She parted on inspiring words: “Innovation requires infrastructure.”

Edwin van Huis (Member of the Supervisory Board of SURF and of the Internet Archive Europe Advisory Board) spoke about his experience working with digital heritage at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and Naturalis Biodiversity Center (today, the latter two are Open Heritage Statement signatories). He said that the Netherlands had always been at the forefront of digital openness, especially open science and gave the example of DiSSCo, a Dutch-led initiative bringing 1.5 billion specimens, 5,000 scientists, 400+ institutions and 23 countries into 1 European collection. As the first Chair of the Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed, he called for bringing the concept to the European level for greater impact. 

Marike van Roon (Member of the Wikimedia Nederland Board) talked about Wikimedia projects and the fundamental values of openness, community and collaboration that underpin the widely successful free knowledge movement. She mentioned the many partners from the heritage sector that help make heritage more accessible on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia projects, being grassroots initiatives, tend to work from the bottom up, leveraging the experience and expertise of volunteers who are willing to contribute to open heritage.

Panel II: International Perspectives on Open Heritage

The second expert panel, moderated by Maarten Zeinstra (Chair, Open Nederland), zoomed out from the national context to explore existing international initiatives and future opportunities. 

Beatrice Murch (Program Manager at Internet Archive Europe) presented the Our Future Memory campaign, supported by the Internet Archive Europe and which aims to ensure the basic rights of memory institutions are respected in the digital world. She highlighted the alignment and complementarity between the campaign and the Open Heritage Statement, mapping how the rights outlined in the campaign are reflected in the language of the Statement. With more than 80 institutions worldwide already signatories, she called on more institutions across Europe to add their voice. 

Claire McGuire (Policy and Advocacy Manager, International Federation of Library Associations & Institutions (IFLA)) shared insights from her experience as a member of the Open Heritage Coalition’s Statement Workspace (the Statement’s drafting committee). She explained that the Statement addressed issues well beyond copyright to tackle barriers to equitable and meaningful access to heritage, within the wider context of access to information. She recalled that having a global shared framework could be very useful and said that the Statement had a home at UNESCO, since international policy routinely influenced national and institutional policies. Given the very fragmented landscape of open heritage and patterns of regression and backsliding due to the uncertainties brought about by artificial intelligence, the need for global harmonization and cross-border collaboration is all the greater in order to establish a supportive environment for openness. She was convinced that the Open Heritage Statement would make a difference.

Jan Bos (Chair, UNESCO Memory of the World International Advisory Committee) provided a useful overview of the Memory of the World Program, initiated at UNESCO in 1992 to focus on the protection of documentary heritage, as well as of the 2015 Recommendation concerning the Preservation of, and Access to, Documentary Heritage Including in Digital Form. He drew several parallels between the Recommendation and the Open Heritage Statement, starting with the basic principles that form the bedrock of both instruments, including public domain access and open licensing. But while the 2015 Recommendation only deals with documentary heritage, the Statement includes all forms of heritage, and constitutes, therefore, a very valuable complement.

Douglas McCarthy (Senior Open Content Specialist, Open Future Foundation), the architect, together with Dr. Andrea Wallace, of the influential OpenGLAM survey, said that the Open Heritage Statement very clearly expressed the “why” behind the need to ensure access to heritage. He said that online heritage collections are the currency of relevance, engagement and education with global audiences, with a very large majority of people never visiting physical institutions. He acknowledged the positive growth curve in access to heritage online, thanks in part to the greater legal clarity brought about by Article 14 of the 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market in Europe, but reminded the audience that policies and practices were extremely fragmented and confusing because of weak or nonexistent compliance regimes. He shared that about 1700 CHIs around the world had released some data openly,corresponding to roughly 100 million objects, but gave examples of prominent Dutch institutions still erecting barriers to public domain heritage by perpetuating outdated business models. In his view, driving change comes down to individuals with the leadership and vision to experiment.

Closing remarks

Brigitte Vézina and Brewster Kahle (Digital Librarian, Internet Archive) offered concluding remarks to a rich conversation. Together, they reiterated how the Netherlands is poised to help set global standards for access and use of heritage and has a unique opportunity to leave a mark on the international law stage to enable access to heritage for education, to fight climate change, promote access for people with disabilities, and encourage creativity in all its forms.

More about the Open Heritage Statement

The Open Heritage Statement is a global call to action led by Creative Commons and the Open Heritage Coalition advocating for equitable access to public domain heritage in the digital environment and calling on stakeholders to remove unfair, unnecessary barriers to enable everyone to enjoy their fundamental right to participate in cultural life and solve the world’s biggest problems. It aims to stimulate a global conversation about the need to establish international standards for open heritage under the aegis of UNESCO. 

What this means for CC

This event marked an important milestone in the advocacy and movement-building efforts of the Open Heritage Coalition, building on years of community work supported by CC, including the development of UNESCO’s 2019 Recommendation on Open Educational Resources and 2021 Recommendation on Open Science. Both rely on CC licenses and public domain tools to make knowledge open.

As an official NGO partner to UNESCO (consultative status), CC works towards UNESCO’s vision where education, culture, and science are equitably shared, based on the shared belief that openness can benefit everyone, everywhere.

Creative Commons provides critical infrastructure for open sharing, but the values behind our work matter more than the legal and technical details. The Open Heritage Statement is rooted in those values, eloquently describing why equitable access to heritage matters, and then laying out a set of principles and policy actions that put those values into practice. The Statement provides us with a compass in this effort; one shared across countries and communities. 

CC event at UNESCO in April

This event was a prelude to an event Creative Commons is organizing in Paris in April. Entitled “How Can Equitable Access to Heritage Help Solve Global Challenges? An Exploratory Dialogue,” it will take place on Wednesday, 29 April, 2026, from 14:00 to 17:00, followed by a networking reception, at UNESCO House, in Paris, France. To secure your seat, register today: https://openheritagestatement.org/dialogue.

The post Open Heritage Statement Event—Amsterdam, March 2026 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Last month, we published a preview of what we intended to bring to the AI Impact Summit in Delhi: a focus on data governance, shared infrastructure, and democratic approaches to AI that genuinely advance the public interest rather than replicate existing power imbalances. That piece outlined our core interventions and the principles that have guided our thinking as we grapple with how to ensure openness, agency, and equity in the age of AI. 

Since then, the Summit—a major global gathering of policymakers, technologists, civil society leaders, and researchers—unfolded against the backdrop of widespread calls for cooperative frameworks and measurable outcomes. For an excellent summary of the highs and lows of the Summit, take a look at this article by CC Board Member Jeni Tennison.

From CC’s perspective, what became clear in Delhi is that AI governance is shifting. The conversation is moving beyond high-level principles and into harder, more structural questions about infrastructure, stewardship, and power.

Data as a Leverage Point

Concerns about data capture and extraction abounded at the Summit. But alongside those concerns, a persistent theme emerged: data scarcity.

Participants repeatedly pointed to the lack of high-quality, localized, representative datasets as a fundamental constraint on public interest AI. The call for “really good data” came from startups, researchers, governments, and civil society actors alike—many working to build contextually grounded systems. Without accessible datasets, cultural representation is limited, competition falters, open-source development slows, and meaningful innovation remains concentrated in the hands of those with the most resources.

The gaps are especially pronounced across Global South languages and cultural contexts. Researchers are working to supplement large models with local norms and knowledge to address bias and misrepresentation. This is particularly urgent in sectors such as health, agriculture, climate, and development, where high-quality open datasets could unlock substantial public benefit.

There is a real tension here. High-quality open data is required to power public interest AI. At the same time, without guardrails, open data can be exposed to extraction and misuse. Communities are often presented with a false choice: open their data and risk exploitation, or close their data and risk exclusion from shaping AI systems that affect them. Addressing this tension is essential if governance frameworks are to support both individual agency and shared stewardship. In essence, we need to:

• Fill existing gaps in shared governance infrastructure through collaborative frameworks and development of globally accessible tools that balance the tension between agency and access;
• Uphold an understanding of data governance as something that is deeply participatory and democratic, and an absolute necessity for any AI system that becomes part of the public infrastructure, whether privately held or not;
• Rebalance the power inequities in the current landscape overall, with our focus being on the data layer.

We believe that the path forward is not enclosure. It is stewardship. Governance mechanisms, interoperability standards, and access frameworks will determine who participates in the AI ecosystem and who does not. If we want AI systems that reflect diverse knowledge and lived realities, we must build the infrastructure that makes responsible openness durable.

Openness as a Method for Collaboration 

At the Summit, openness was not framed as a philosophical preference. It was framed as a structural necessity and a baseline condition for equity, competition, collaboration, and democratic accountability.

But the mental models we use to think about open versus closed must evolve. Openness cannot stop at model weights. It must extend across code, data, infrastructure, tooling, standards, and usability. And, crucially, openness and guardrails are not opposites. Responsible governance is not in tension with open systems; it is what makes them sustainable.

In this sense, openness is no longer the ceiling of ambition. It is the floor.

The Implementation Gap

Despite widespread agreement on concentration risks, data bottlenecks, and the speed of AI development, there was palpable exhaustion with principles that lack implementation pathways. Participants pointed to attempts like the Hiroshima AI Process and statements from past Summits as being great in theory but missing in practice. What’s missing are durable intermediaries capable of stewarding shared resources and translating shared values into operational systems. 

This is where the conversation becomes especially consequential for Creative Commons.

For more than two decades, CC has built legal and social interoperability at global scale. We have designed data governance frameworks that allow sharing of knowledge to function across jurisdictions and sectors. We have stewarded a commons model that balances openness with structure, enabling participation and mutual benefit through principles like attribution.

While debates about the limits of copyright were not central to most discussions in Delhi, there was significant interest in expanding high-quality open data, strengthening digital public infrastructure, and supporting community-led AI development​​—all areas deeply aligned with our expertise.

AI governance must move from principles to infrastructure. Shared, open digital infrastructure that works across borders is what Creative Commons is known for building. We believe that building the next generation of infrastructure for sharing—which would support the data layer of public interest AI—is not a departure from our mission. It is a timely extension of it and builds on the groundwork we have been laying for the past few years.

An infrastructure like this could include identifying high-impact open dataset initiatives in sectors such as health, agriculture, climate, and education to be opened up and prepared for machine reuse. It would require developing safe and trusted data-sharing models, with nuanced approaches depending on what data are being shared. This isn’t just about legal tools absent the context in which they are used; it is about comprehensive data governance mechanisms that balance openness with accountability and ensure interoperability across jurisdictions. 

Collaborative Construction

As we’ve talked about before, a central challenge in AI governance is avoiding false choices. Overly restrictive guardrails risk enclosing the commons, limiting access to knowledge, and stifling innovation and scientific discovery. Yet the absence of guardrails undermines trust, enables exploitation, and erodes the foundations of openness itself. Creative Commons operates in this critical middle space.

Our interventions at the Summit focused on advancing governance frameworks that protect human agency, cultural context, and trust in information while preserving openness, access, and reuse. An AI ecosystem that serves the public interest must be standardized where possible and contextual where required, especially across diverse linguistic, cultural, and regional settings.

If the Summit made one thing evident, it is that there is readiness for partnership. Policymakers, funders, technologists, and civil society leaders are looking for institutions capable of translating shared values into durable systems.

If We Do Not Intervene

It is worth being explicit about the alternative trajectory.

If sharing of data is only driven by commercial markets and not the public interest, and if data infrastructure consolidates in the hands of a few actors, “sovereignty” risks becoming a commercial product rather than a public capacity. Cultural representation will become extractive rather than participatory. Open models may technically exist, but without access to high-quality datasets, they will struggle to compete. The language of openness could persist while the data infrastructure beneath it quietly closes. What is the value of open weights and open code when the very essence of our cultures and languages isn’t carefully and deliberately shared, through robust open datasets?

The infrastructure phase of AI governance has begun. Creative Commons intends to help build what comes next—in partnership with those who share a commitment to an AI ecosystem that is open, inclusive, and grounded in the public interest. 

A huge thank you to our partners, event organizers, and co-panelists who helped to shape a meaningful engagement for CC during the Summit. We are particularly grateful for the thoughtful welcome provided by CivicDataLab, who ensured balanced dialogue and representation between those attending from elsewhere and those actively engaged on the ground in India. If we chatted during the Summit, we look forward to ongoing discussions. If we didn’t have a chance to connect, our doors are always open—send us a note! 

The post AI’s Infrastructure Era: Reflections from the AI Impact Summit in Delhi appeared first on Creative Commons.

Over the past year,  we’ve been engaged in a series of conversations with a small group of researchers specializing in IP, AI policy, and data governance about what CC  licensing means—and does—in African contexts today. These discussions began informally and continued at the AI Summit in Rwanda and later through presentations and discussions on the NOODL license, Mozilla Data Collective, the ESETHU License & Framework, and NaijaVoices.

What started as an organic exchange in various spaces has revealed something larger: a strong appetite to move these conversations into the open. At stake are not only questions about CC licenses but deeper issues of data sovereignty, equity, governance, and power in global knowledge systems. This blog post summarizes the themes emerging from those discussions and asks a broader question: how must “open” evolve to remain just, relevant, and community-centered?

A Shift 

CC licenses were designed to reduce friction in sharing knowledge. For many years, CC’s focus has been on legality, access, and reuse. By all accounts, we’ve been successful in meeting these goals and objectives. But in today’s digital and AI-driven landscape—particularly in the Global South—that framing is no longer sufficient.

Across the discussions, participants raised concerns that CC licenses, especially CC BY and CC0, are sometimes (inadvertently) enabling extractive practices. African language datasets, cultural knowledge, and community-generated data are increasingly being reused in ways that benefit global institutions and corporations, while the originating communities see little agency, recognition, or return. This governance and equity issue rightly challenges some long-held assumptions about openness. When data producers are required to share their data with a specific permissive license, it introduces a potential conflict between the requirement to share and whether that specific data should be shared at all.    

Key Challenges Identified

Colleagues highlighted the following challenges and concerns that are arising in their context and within their communities:

1. A perception gap around extractive use

CC licenses are often viewed as neutral tools, but in practice they can amplify existing power imbalances (as we know, infrastructure is not neutral!). For example, marginalized language and data communities may lack the leverage to negotiate how open resources are reused. Yes, open data can lead to communities having better access to information about where they live like air and water quality, but that same data can be used by large corporate entities to make decisions on where, for example, to build a new factory. 

2. Equity blind spots in traditional openness

In the context of the CC licenses, openness has historically been framed as a legal condition answering the question: can something be reused, modified, or shared? But we know that openness is much more than a set of legal tools; it is a set of values, a way of belonging, a wish for a better future. As large AI models continue to train on the billions of works and datasets made available via the CC licenses in the commons without giving back and while hoarding power, communities are responding by asking for openness that also accounts for agency, consent, reciprocity, and governance.

Data Governance and the Limits of One-Size-Fits-All Licensing

One of the most challenging threads in these discussions centers on data governance, particularly for African languages and community-curated datasets.

Several tensions stand out:

• Funders often mandate CC BY or CC0 for publicly funded research, leaving little room for community-specific governance models or the potential for a powerful interplay between CC licenses and community-created fit-for-purpose open licenses like NOODL. 
• CC licenses, by design, cannot prevent extractive reuse once content is made open.
• Local languages, cultural data, and community knowledge are not interchangeable with generic datasets—but licensing frameworks often treat them as such.

Openness is not binary, and context matters. Standardization matters and can amplify efforts to make knowledge accessible but only works when paired with governance. CC has worked with major funders of research to harmonize CC BY or CC0 across funders, but this work is built around the assumption that the license terms are adequate for all data and data distribution contexts. When there is no governance, what is the cost of harmonization? This community of researchers are asking whether CC can use its influence not only to promote CC licenses and legal tools but also to validate and support alternative, community-driven approaches where CC licenses fall short.

Open resources do not exist outside systems of power. Historically, openness has favored those with infrastructure, capital, and technical capacity—often institutions in the Global North. Simply making something open does not make it equitable, accessible, or just.

If the idealized version of openness has not delivered on its promise, is it time for CC to redefine it? What role can CC play in holding space, convening dissent, and legitimizing plural approaches to openness?

Where Do We Go From Here?

These conversations are not about arriving at neat conclusions. In fact, the goal is the opposite: to resist premature certainty and instead listen, reflect, and adapt.

For us as a community, this may mean:

• Being clearer about where CC licenses work and, just as importantly, where they don’t
• Acknowledging the limits of license-centric thinking
• Using the CC platform to amplify community-led definitions of openness
• Accepting that “the new open” may be more complex, more contextual, and intentionally less frictionless

The future of open knowledge depends on trust, dialogue, and shared governance. 

A special thank you to Vukosi Marivate, University of Pretoria; Chijioke Okorie, Data Science Law Lab, University of Pretoria; and Melissa Omino, CIPIT, Strathmore University; as well as members of the CC board of directors for convening these dialogues and sharing their perspectives with us at Creative Commons.

We want to know: Does this resonate with you? What are you seeing within your own context and community? We plan on continuing this dialogue throughout 2026 as we celebrate our 25th anniversary. What better time to reflect on our past contributions and challenge our thinking about the future. 

The post CC Licenses, Data Governance, and the African Context: Conversations and Perspectives appeared first on Creative Commons.

Over the past year, Creative Commons communities around the world have continued to show what’s possible when people come together around shared values of openness, collaboration, and care. From regional gatherings and thematic conversations to hands-on creative work, CC’s communities have remained active as the digital landscape grows more complex.

In 2025 we were focused on gathering feedback on our ongoing preference signals explorations, creating and gathering feedback on new governance frameworks for future implementation, streamlining community communication channels, and transitioning to an open source chat platform for community collaboration.

As we look ahead, we want to share how we’re thinking about deepening community engagement, strengthening connections across the network, and creating more meaningful ways for everyone to contribute to CC’s work in partnership with one another.

A Clearer Path Into the Commons

One theme we’ve heard consistently is that people want more clarity about how to get involved with CC and more connection once they do. In response, we’re beginning work on a set of new engagement opportunities that enable community members with varying degrees of expertise and diverse skillsets to participate in our work.  We will work to support community members in getting involved, learning more, and leveling up their experience and expertise along the way, from participating in conversations to leading community initiatives.

We are excited that our new unified Community Intake Form will allow for more collaboration across interest areas and lower the barrier to entry for participating in CC’s work. Alongside this, we’ll be working to strengthen our onboarding process with more information about CC’s work as well as more opportunities to plug in and connect with longstanding efforts and leaders in the Open Movement.

Strengthening the Network

CC’s community doesn’t live in one place, and we want our engagement approach to reflect that. Over the coming months, we’ll be:

• Creating best practices for chapters, a model for supporting community-driven working groups, and a workflow for volunteer translations
• Researching and reaching out to adjacent movements and open communities to create more intentional bridges across the broader open ecosystem
• Facilitating peer sharing and documenting best practices and effective strategies across our communities through regular sharing and more frequent communication
• Supporting regional and topical groupings to share knowledge directly with one another, including experimenting with topic-based show-and-tells in place of more formal meetings

The goal is simple: reduce friction, encourage peer learning, and help communities align and collaborate on their own terms.

Supporting Communities to Tell Their Stories

As Creative Commons approaches its 25th anniversary, storytelling—especially community-led storytelling—will be central. 

One part of these efforts is publishing a 25th anniversary zine which will commemorate our community’s contributions, achievements and memories over the past quarter of a century. We plan to launch the zine full of community-created work at Wikimania as part of our anniversary activities. The call for zine submissions is open until March 31, 2026. Submit your work here!

For our anniversary, we are also developing training and templates to help communities document and share their own stories through writing, visuals, or other creative formats. Our aim is not to centralize narratives but to create tools and support that make it easier for communities to speak in their own voices.

Listening, Learning, and Building Capacity

Looking ahead, we’ll continue to prioritize listening as a core part of our work. This includes conducting an annual community survey, which helps us understand what’s working, what’s missing, and where we should focus our energy.

We’re also beginning work on guidance for chapter activities, informed by what chapters are already doing well. By supporting regional and topical groups to share practices and lessons learned, we hope to strengthen the network as a whole, not by prescribing solutions but by amplifying what’s already effective.

An Ongoing Invitation

This work is iterative by design. Not everything is fully formed, and that’s intentional. Community engagement at Creative Commons isn’t about rolling out a finished product; it’s about building relationships, creating space for experimentation, and learning together.

We’re grateful to everyone who continues to show up, share knowledge, ask hard questions, and imagine what the commons can be next. More updates and more invitations to participate are coming soon.

Stay connected, and thank you for being part of this work. We’ll also be launching a new series of community office hours.

• March 20, 12 pm EST: Register here.
• June 8, 5pm EST: Register here.

Sign up and stay tuned for more details if you’d like to chat! 

The post Building What Comes Next: Community Engagement at Creative Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

It is time to update our mental models about open knowledge

I like to say I am a “writer who lawyers”. I begin here because I want to name my biases up front. I am a lawyer, but I come to this work first and foremost as a writer thinking about the conditions that will allow us to continue to share knowledge publicly. And in spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that I am a lawyer, I have a healthy skepticism about the power of legal terms and conditions. The law will play a role, but the challenge of keeping the internet human will ultimately be navigated by the stories we imagine and tell. 

We need new stories. 

I spent the first 15 years of my legal career working in intellectual property. For most of that time, I was part of the open movement, fighting overly restrictive intellectual property laws to promote access to knowledge. But over time, I began to feel like the message of open licensing did not resonate with me in the same way, especially in my identity as a writer. Eventually I left the open movement to go into the field of privacy. 

Immersing myself in digital privacy led me to realize why the story of open felt incomplete. We had been undervaluing the role of boundaries around reuse. The tension between the instinct to share and the need for boundaries around reuse is the point. And right now, that tension is completely out of balance. Instead, what exists online is a free-for-all.

If you are familiar with the concept of a commons, you know it requires shared rules that govern reuse of resources. Those shared rules represent a mutual commitment by producers and reusers, and they ensure that the cycle leads to collective benefit and begins again. A free-for-all, on the other hand, has no shared rules. As a result, we are losing the instinct to share. 

What happened to the commons? 

It would be easy to blame AI for this situation, but it is not so straightforward. AI is simply speeding up and exacerbating longstanding challenges with open knowledge. As privacy scholar Daniel Solove has written, “AI is continuous with the data collection and use that has been going on throughout the digital age.” 

In preparation for this talk, I went back and reread the brilliant CC Summit keynote “Open As In Dangerous” by Chris Bourg from 2018 and the seminal Paradox of Open report by the Open Future Foundation. For many years, these and countless other voices have been warning us about the vulnerabilities that open knowledge creates. Whether it is the use of CC-licensed photos for facial surveillance technology or the creation of Grokipedia, it is clear that open content is particularly vulnerable to abuse. 

But of course, it is not just open content that is vulnerable. All content online today has essentially been treated as fair game. The free-for-all extends to everything online. 

This has led to a vast renegotiation of what it means to share publicly, still currently underway. We see this in the massive wave of litigation against AI services, the rise of paywalls and commercial licensing deals, the introduction of new technologies to increase control over content in ways that scale back the open web, and the extreme backlash against AI by creators and the general public.

All of this constitutes a threat to open access to knowledge. It is unlikely that the incentives to share can outweigh all of the growing countervailing forces at play: economic, moral, safety, more. We cannot respond by accepting these risks and harms as inherent and inevitable costs of public sharing knowledge.  

Changing our mental models

To meet the moment, we need to rethink our most fundamental assumptions about open knowledge. 

The old taxonomies no longer apply. 

For a very long time, we have used categories to help us determine the appropriate rules for sharing knowledge. Open content could be licensed one way, while open data had different parameters. This distinction no longer applies when everything online is used as data by machines. Even the difference between copyrighted material and public domain is not very useful, since even copyrighted works are largely used by machines for the public domain material within them (e.g., facts and ideas). 

Copyright is not the main event.

The original “enemy” of the open movement was copyright, and things were simpler back then. Even the most restrictive open license was more permissive than the default under copyright law, so any boundaries we set around the commons were still fighting the copyright war. Overly restrictive copyright laws still cause problems today, but they are no longer the biggest threat against the commons. In fact, it is copyright’s weakness in the context of machine reuse that is the real challenge. The inapplicability of copyright in protecting against unwanted machine reuse guts the CC licenses of the same ability, creating the free-for-all even on CC-licensed content. And importantly, because the aim was to avoid having CC licenses impose restrictions on activity that was otherwise allowed under copyright, this was by design. 

We have to stop confusing property with morality.

This is where I depart from my younger self and from many of my peers in the open movement. I think we have let important principles like the notion that facts and ideas should not be privately owned, or the fact that some permissionless reuse plays a critical role in free expression, convince us that the scope of copyright is an ethical line. The logic goes: if no one can own it, then no rules should apply. This leads to an impoverished sense of morality, where the only justification for constraint is property rights. As Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “In that property mindset, how we consume doesn’t really matter because it’s just stuff and the stuff all belongs to us. There is no moral constraint on consumption.” 

The ethics of sharing—which is what open is about—needs to be broader than what we can own. 

Boundaries benefit us all.

Boundaries on reuse are what create the reciprocity that fuels a commons. Without them, there is no assurance that sharing leads to collective benefit, and people lose their instinct to share. But boundaries can also have social value in their own right. Even when sharing in public, people rightfully expect some boundaries around how their works are used, regardless of what copyright law says. This is foundational in the field of privacy, but somehow we lose sight of it when we are sitting in the realm of content sharing. Daniel Solove writes: “People expect some degree of privacy in public, and such expectation is reasonable as well as important for freedom, democracy, and individual wellbeing.” Similarly, we establish boundaries around reuse of knowledge because those protections serve us all. 

Open should not be a purity test. 

The open movement has had incredible success creating global standards, and this has helped make it so successful. But the emphasis on standardization has led us to hyper-focus on definitions, and this focus is distracting us from the bigger picture. What matters is not open versus closed, or even abundance versus scarcity. We need to focus on values, not prescriptions. Open licensing has always been conditional, and it has always been a spectrum. This means we have to accept that there will be gray areas. What we lose in certainty, we will gain in relevance and moral clarity. As Rebecca Solnit says, “Categories are where thoughts go to die.” 

Where do we go from here? 

All of this leads back to where we began. We have to reconstruct the mutual commitment that keeps the commons cyclical.

Rebuilding the mutual commitment that comes with sharing knowledge requires us to balance opposing values. On the one hand, we must protect important freedoms of the reusing public. On the other, we must establish boundaries around responsible reuse. The goal is to be as open as possible and as restrictive as necessary. And before we start panicking about slippery slopes, we should remember there is an important limiting principle we can leverage:  does the boundary shift power in ways that further concentrate it or redistribute it? We can also ask whether there are ways to mitigate a boundary’s effect on access. 

We already have a good sense of the dimensions of boundaries around responsible reuse. They all have roots in the existing CC license suite.

Attribution: While the AI landscape complicates methods and norms for attribution, the principle is more important than ever for informational integrity, authors rights, and transparency. 

Reciprocity: Molly Van Howeling calls this “extractability,” the idea that those extracting facts and ideas from others’ works have a moral responsibility to ensure that knowledge remains extractable by others. This is essentially about crafting a ShareAlike obligation for the age of AI. 

Financial sustainability: This has been a longtime challenge in the open movement, and it is more urgent than ever. It is not about preserving business models, it is about financially sustaining the production of knowledge and culture as public goods. 

Prohibitions on harmful use cases: This dimension may feel less familiar in open licensing, but the sentiment is one we hear regularly. There are simply some use cases or even actors that feel out of bounds for people sharing knowledge because of the harm they cause. 

How do we catalyze a mutual commitment around prosocial boundaries in the current free-for-all environment? Open Future Foundation’s Paul Keller has written: “For any response to succeed in preserving a diverse and sustainable information ecosystem, collective action is required—both bottom-up, through coordinated action by information producers, and top-down, through political will to enable redistribution via fiscal interventions.” There is no single solution, and we need to tackle it from all directions. 

For the bottom-up efforts, we can leverage the tools we have. Norms and social pressure have a role to play, though it is hard to put full faith in voluntary action right now. We can also explore methods for legal control, including both contract and copyright law. As Nilay Patel has said, “Copyright is the only functioning regulation on the internet,” which makes it impossible to avoid considering it as one lever to employ.¹ Finally, there is the strategy of controlling access. This is the most uncomfortable tactic because of the collateral damage it risks, and it requires extreme care. But if AI companies will not pay attention voluntarily, technical controls around access look increasingly necessary. 

There are many in the open movement already experimenting with these efforts, including the Mozilla Data Collective, the differentiated access model proposed by Europeana and the Open Future Foundation, the NOODL license, and many more. Creative Commons is also actively thinking about how to build a framework that re-instills mutual commitment into the ecosystem. Many of you have been following along as we experiment with an AI preference signals framework we’ve been calling CC signals. While the path we will take is evolving, the goal is the same. We need to come together to define and sustain the boundaries that serve us all. 

I will end with the words of Ruha Benjamin: “We need to give the voice of the cynical, skeptical grouch that patrols the borders of our imagination a rest.” 

We can imagine a better way. 

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¹ While copyright law is ill-equipped to function as a method of control over machine reuse (and rightly so, considering the importance of not treating facts and ideas as private property), copyright law still has a role to play because of the uncertainty around its application on a global scale. Granting copyright permission in exchange for agreement to certain conditions could still be a valuable offer to some reusers. 

 

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