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In November 2025, we had the privilege of supporting and participating in Semana de la Cultura Libre (Open Culture Week) in Montevideo, Uruguay: a week-long celebration of open culture organized by CC Uruguay. Through panels, workshops, concerts, and conversations, the week offered a powerful reminder that free culture is not an abstract idea but a living practice shaped by local communities, histories, and needs.

• Read CC Uruguay’s recap on our We Like To Share community blog.

What stood out most was not only the richness of the programming but how clearly this event illustrated both the strengths and the challenges of open culture work today, especially in a rapidly enclosing digital environment.

Free Culture Is Alive—Even When the Licenses Aren’t

One of the most striking takeaways from conversations with Illeana Silva and Jorge Gemetto, who lead the CC Uruguay chapter, was how deeply DIY culture thrives in Uruguay. Artists and organizers share freely, collaborate generously, and remix constantly, often without explicitly using CC licenses.

This speaks to something important: openness as a cultural instinct often precedes openness as a legal or technical practice. At the same time, the chapter shared a recurring challenge they face in outreach: many people conflate content that is merely available online with content that is truly free and open. For example, a common response to projects like Musicalibre.uy, which curates openly licensed music, is: “Why would I need openly licensed music? I already use Spotify.” 

This points to a growing need to remind people why the commons matters, even before getting into how to use CC licenses.  As platforms become increasingly proprietary and extractive, user convenience can obscure a loss of agency, access, and collective ownership underneath. These topics, such as the political economy of the internet, feel especially important to continue to surface in the face of AI. 

Opening the Week: Free Culture in a Time of Extraction

The opening panel, “What do we talk about when we talk about free culture? Practices and challenges,” set the tone for the week. Speakers addressed themes including:

• Cultural and data extractivism, particularly from the Global South to the Global North
• The ways AI complicates and challenges long-standing commitments to openness
• The need to defend cultural participation as a collective right

We were thrilled to use this space to introduce attendees to the Open Heritage Statement and the work of the Open Heritage Coalition (formerly TAROCH), and look forward to more engagement from Uruguay! 

Watch the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2prAjdbiHLQ

Tools, Practices, and New Generations of Makers

It was great to see workshops throughout the week showing the many ways people use open source tools for creative practices and for aiding research as well as demonstrating how art has always been a practice of inspiration and remixing. 

One notable observation: some of the most active participants in these sessions were younger creators who used open source tools in their creative process that were not CC licenses. This raised compelling questions about how CC might further support open resources for design, publishing, and artistic production to encourage the use of digital technology in the creative process outside the scope of what AI has to offer. 

Technology, Power, and Accountability

Content warning: discussions included references to genocide and mass surveillance.

One of the most powerful moments of the week came during the panel on Apartheid-Free Technology. 

Panelists shared their experiences and perspectives on technologies and AI tools being used in systems of surveillance, repression, and genocide. These conversations underscored the importance of allowing CC chapters the autonomy to convene discussions that reflect their political viewpoints as they intersect with today’s technology and all of its uses.

Music, Radio, and the Commons in Practice

Live music programming brought joy and immediacy to the week. Local bands who release their music under Creative Commons licenses performed for free, demonstrating that openness is not a theoretical commitment but a practical, sustaining choice.

The relaunch of Radio Común, a CC-licensed online radio station, offers an enduring home for this work—extending the spirit of Semana de la Cultura Libre well beyond the week itself.

Watch a clip from the performance: Cultura Libre_2025_1.MOV

Small Investments, Big Impact

We supported Semana de la Cultura Libre with a small grant—an approach we are piloting to engage more with regional events in the community.  With the help of these funds, the chapter was able to:

• Compensate local spaces and collaborators
• Pay a graphic designer
• Provide speaker stipends
• Support local musicians releasing work under CC licenses

We were thrilled to be invited to attend the event as a participant rather than a host. This allowed the chapter to center the issues that matter most to their community, while highlighting their work to CC HQ.

Looking Ahead

In the coming months:

• We will soon be sharing a framework for selecting a couple more regional events to support with a small stipend as a part of our 25th anniversary celebrations.
• The Uruguay chapter has expressed interest in making Open Culture Week a global phenomenon next year. If you are interested in participating please be in touch with them at contacto@creativecommons.uy. 

We’re grateful to CC Uruguay for their leadership, care, and vision, and we look forward to building what comes next together.

The post Semana de la Cultura Libre with CC Uruguay appeared first on Creative Commons.

This month, CC will be represented at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, an international gathering shaping the future of AI policy and practice. The 2026 Summit follows the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, where CC underscored a simple but essential truth: without civil society, there can be no public interest.

Last year, our interventions focused on why civil society participation matters, the importance of openness in AI, and the need for local solutions grounded in local contexts. This year, we aim to build on those foundations with a clearer, stronger position on data governance and data sovereignty as prerequisites for a thriving commons. Specifically, we want to talk about building shared governance infrastructure that centers on a democratic and participatory approach, with the ultimate goal of rebalancing power in the ecosystem. 

The Commons in the Age of AI

The commons is not an abstract theory or merely a set of values. It is tangible and woven into everyday life. When you read an article not locked behind a paywall, consult Wikipedia, use openly licensed images or music, explore public domain artworks online, or rely on open mapping tools, you are benefiting from the commons.

Today, the commons increasingly takes the form of datasets that train and shape AI systems. These datasets embed human knowledge, creativity, language, and culture. Where this data comes from, who created and stewarded it, and the contexts that give it meaning all matter. These questions are at the heart of data governance and data sovereignty.

For communities in the Global South, these issues are especially urgent. Too often, local knowledge, languages, and cultural expression are extracted, abstracted, and redeployed without meaningful agency, recognition, or benefit flowing back to the people who created them. Addressing AI’s impacts without confronting historical and ongoing asymmetries in power, infrastructure, and representation risks reproducing old patterns of extraction in new technical forms. It is with this in mind that we shape our contribution to AI governance. 

CC’s Core Interventions at the AI Impact Summit

As we build our schedule for the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, CC is focused on a set of concrete interventions—areas where our experience, infrastructure, and global community position us to make a distinctive contribution to AI governance in the public interest.

Filling Gaps in Shared Governance Infrastructure

Asserting preferences to communicate how data holders wish their data to be used in AI is at its core a data governance mechanism. Data governance relies on a shared set of rules (formally or informally enforced), as well as a shared vocabulary, both of which require a collective and cohesive approach to be successfully implemented at scale. With decades of experience developing globally recognized, machine-readable licenses, CC is uniquely positioned to help translate expressions of intent into collective, interoperable governance tools that can function at scale.

Participatory and Democratic Approaches to Data Governance

The process of practicing data governance is often as important as the tools used to express it. CC’s licensing frameworks did not emerge from closed rooms; they were shaped through open, global, and deliberative processes involving creators, institutions, and policymakers.

At the Summit, CC will advance the idea that participatory governance is not a luxury but a requirement for legitimacy—especially in AI systems that affect billions of people. We will explore how CC can continue to evolve its own processes to be more democratic and inclusive as we develop frameworks or legal tools that balance the needs of those sharing and those reusing. 

Enabling Counter-Power for Creators and Communities

Many current data practices in AI are extractive by design: opaque scraping, unilateral terms of service, and consent frameworks that offer little meaningful choice. CC’s intervention is not to block AI, nor to litigate its development, but to equip creators and data-holding communities with legible, scalable forms of agency.

By supporting collective norms, shared infrastructure, and visible expressions of creator intent, CC can help rebalance power between AI developers and the communities whose work and knowledge underpin these systems. This form of counter-power is especially vital for creators, cultural institutions, and knowledge communities in the Global South, where legal and economic leverage is often limited but cultural contribution is immense.

Choice, Agency, and Human Flourishing

And how do we tackle these issues while keeping the internet human? How do we preserve trust in information? How do we ensure that guardrails for machines do not create undue barriers in access to knowledge or stifle innovation and scientific discovery? In other words, how do we build an AI ecosystem that operates in the public interest, that is standardized when possible and contextual when required? 

At its most fundamental level, data governance is about making decisions, about choice. This is where CC has always lived: not in blunt binaries of open versus closed but in enabling choices that empower human creators and the communities they belong to, alongside the machines they choose to use.

We share the view that the promotion of human flourishing should be the overarching principle guiding data governance. We also believe that a flourishing commons is a prerequisite for human flourishing. The knowledge commons made available through the internet is deeply interconnected with shared resources in the physical world, and both require care, stewardship, and collective responsibility.

If you share our belief that AI governance must center the public interest, respect data sovereignty, and strengthen rather than diminish the global commons, we invite you to connect with us at the AI Impact Summit. Let’s work together to build the future of sharing—open, equitable, and grounded in human flourishing.

If you’ll be in Delhi, you can connect with the CC team, represented by Rebecca Ross and Anna Tumadóttir, at the following places:

• CivicSabha 2.0 
• PAIRS India 
• OpenMined Community Meetup 
• Strengthening Data and AI Collaboratives for Economic Growth and Social Good as part of the main Impact Summit Sessions 
• And many more!

The post CC at the AI Impact Summit: Core Interventions for the Public Interest appeared first on Creative Commons.

In 2026, Creative Commons will continue to ensure that technological change strengthens, not erodes, the commons and improves the acts of sharing and access that are part of our everyday lives. We do this by applying first principles, practical strategies, and lessons learned from decades of advancing the commons. Sharing of research, educational materials, heritage, and creative works are acts of generosity—these are the gifts people give to the commons. Access to these same shared resources enables collaboration, innovation, and understanding. Together, this is how we improve access to knowledge and build a more equitable future.  

But as we’ve been discussing over the last year, the conditions under which sharing happens have changed. 

Advances in AI and shifts in the technological environment have unsettled long-standing motivations to share openly. Some creators who once shared willingly now question whether openness leads to exploitation. Those who are contractually required to share may feel their contributions are being extracted without recognition or reciprocity. Communities working to preserve culture and ensure representation are often forced into an impossible choice: allow extraction or accept exclusion. At the same time, all of us who depend on access to trustworthy, verified information may find it harder than ever to know what to trust.

If no one shares, the commons has no hope of thriving. The public good that we all benefit from atrophies and eventually disappears. Yet it is equally clear that we cannot simply maintain the status quo. We must negotiate a new balance, one where access to knowledge is protected, communities retain agency, and conditional access may be a necessary countermeasure to unchecked commodification.

These tensions are real, and they demand leadership. 

Our Focus in 2026

We recently reflected on our work in 2025—the achievements and the road ahead. That reflection reaffirmed our purpose and sharpened our priorities in this age of AI. In 2026, we’ll continue to work in service of our three strategic goals:

• Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing: In the long term future, we will know we’ve been successful when a strong and resilient open infrastructure empowers sharing and access in the public interest.
• Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons: In the long term future, we will know we’ve been successful when a thriving creative commons exists to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
• Center community: In the long term future, we will know we’ve been successful when communities leverage CC’s open infrastructure to share knowledge in the public interest.

Strengthening the Open Infrastructure

The tools we steward, like the CC licenses and public domain tools, and new frameworks we’re developing, like CC signals, do not exist in isolation. They operate within complex legal, technical, and data governance environments. As those environments evolve, so must we. 

In 2026, we will engage deeply in defining attribution in the context of AI. Attribution is not a nice-to-have; it is foundational to the commons and the sustainability of our information ecosystem. Creators deserve credit, and users deserve to know where their knowledge is coming from. We will also explore strategies for mandating credit and, where appropriate, compensation, working carefully to minimize any unintended consequences. This means thoroughly understanding the legislative and regulatory environments that impact the use of tools, and meaningfully engaging with stakeholders on what acceptable tradeoffs might be.

As we address these challenges head-on, we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the public good. Doing nothing isn’t an option for Creative Commons.

Bringing some agency and nuance back to sharing is what led to the development of CC signals. Like any intervention in a rapidly evolving ecosystem, CC signals and any other AI intervention must be approached with an R&D mindset. We have to test, evaluate, and refine to see what works. We will bring this same mindset to explore if new licenses are warranted, or if we need to consider versioning existing licenses. 

This work has to be thoughtful and intentional, even when the world demands speed. The commons moves at human pace and human work is messy. This is a feature, not a flaw, and allows us to counter the need for speed with values-driven design decisions.

Defending a Thriving Creative Commons

For over two decades, CC has been at the forefront of the global movement for access to knowledge. Through policy, advocacy, institutional partnerships, and license adoption, we have helped the commons grow.

This work continues today with even higher stakes. People all over the world participate within the commons daily. It has become so commonplace that we often don’t notice it as something that needs protecting. But it is one of our most valuable human assets—and while it belongs to all of us—it needs guardians, stewards, patrons. Without a healthy commons, knowledge becomes privatized and creativity stalls. In this era of AI, users are one or several steps removed from the original source. We are entering a period of humanity where content is reduced to its lowest common denominator and divorced from context and community. This is where our sector-specific interventions make the greatest impact. By focusing on increasing access to education, science, and culture, we contribute to a thriving creative commons for all of us.    

In open science, we will continue to support the rapid, open dissemination of scientific outputs. As research moves beyond traditional publications toward preprints, modular outputs, and digital-first formats, open access infrastructure must evolve alongside it. We will accelerate adoption of CC BY for preprints and deepen our work on modular science with the Continuous Science Foundation, exploring how licensing can function as foundational infrastructure that incentivizes reuse and collaboration.

In open culture, we will be building on the launch of the Open Heritage Statement, with plans to host an event in Paris at UNESCO headquarters to encourage support from UNESCO member states to carry forward this work through formal channels.

For almost five years, our work in open culture has been made possible by support from Arcadia, but this funding concludes later this year. We’re actively seeking grants to continue building on the gains we’ve made and realizing the goal of open heritage becoming the norm, and a shared asset we can all benefit from.

We’ll continue deep engagements in sectors where we’ve historically had great impact with adoption of the CC licenses and driving forth the ideals of openness. Building on expertise and relationships, we’ll help think about what the best tools and frameworks are for sharing and access today and how needs might be changing alongside technology. We’re here to help those who create or steward content make the best possible choices, and we acknowledge that needs will differ by sector and region. Our prototyping work for CC signals will be explored within the education, science, and culture sectors as well.

Centering Community

We’re excited to tackle all of the big, open questions (pun intended!) alongside our community. This year we celebrate our 25th anniversary. We’ll be hosting public conversations with experts, advocates, and dissenters (yes!) and developing resources on the basis of these learnings that are available to anyone who wants to further educate themselves across the full spectrum of our work. We’ll be throwing in some celebrations along the way, too.

Our motto for the year: “If nothing else, credit.”

Historically, sharing and access have reinforced one another. The tools we developed to enable sharing expanded access, and vice versa. In the age of AI, that relationship is under strain—but the core principle remains unchanged.

At Creative Commons, it comes back to choice and credit.

If you choose to share knowledge, you should always be attributed. If you access knowledge, you are entitled to know where your information is coming from. 

As Creative Commons enters its 25th year, I’m hopeful we can work together, in community, to advocate for CC’s core values in a changing world. Come find us on Zulip or sign up for our newsletter to hear all about what we’re up to as we celebrate our 25th anniversary.

The post Building the Future in 2026 appeared first on Creative Commons.

This year marked the first year of a new strategic cycle for Creative Commons, and it began amid profound change.

The ground beneath the open internet continues to shift. Powerful technologies, driven largely by multibillion-dollar companies, are reshaping how knowledge and creativity are shared online, concentrating power in the hands of a few and testing long-standing assumptions about openness and access. To call this a David vs. Goliath moment would be an understatement. Yet, buoyed by a global community of advocates, creators, and partners, our small but determined team of 20 continues to stand up for the public interest and for access to knowledge worldwide. 

This year, our three strategic goals served as anchors in this rapidly evolving environment:

• Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing: We will know we’ve been successful when a strong and resilient open infrastructure empowers sharing and access in the public interest.
• Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons: We will know we’ve been successful when a thriving creative commons exists to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
• Center community: We will know we’ve been successful when communities leverage CC’s open infrastructure to share knowledge in the public interest.

As we begin shaping our plans for 2026, we want to pause and reflect on what we’ve accomplished in this first year of our new strategy.

Strengthening the Open Infrastructure of Sharing

Introducing CC Signals

2025 will go down in history as the year we kicked off CC signals. 

Building new open infrastructure is complex—and expensive—and these challenges are magnified by the rapid advancement and scale of AI. But in many ways, this is familiar territory. By applying first principles, practical strategies, and lessons learned from decades of advancing the sharing of knowledge and creativity, we are well positioned to help ensure that technological change strengthens, rather than erodes, the commons. 

AI systems depend on vast amounts of human-created content, often collected without the knowledge or participation of those who made it. This dynamic has concentrated power and undermined trust in the social contract of the commons. CC signals responds by supporting community agency while preserving Creative Commons’ core commitment to access and openness.

CC signals is a framework that helps creators and custodians of collections of content or data express how they want their works to be used in AI development. Its goal is to uphold reciprocity, recognition, and sustainability in the way human creativity fuels machine learning.

We’re still in the pilot stages of this work. After kicking off a public feedback period in July, we’ve been identifying early adopters who’ll work with us to shape this framework so that it is responsible, adaptable, and grounded in community context. Is that you? If so, please get in touch. We’re also exploring where elements of the broader CC signals framework could be integrated into emerging standards.

The Enduring Value of the CC Licenses and Legal Tools

We are able to do this work because of the reach and enduring relevance of the CC licenses and legal infrastructure of sharing—a digital public good dedicated to the public domain, powering the digital commons, built by you for you.

The CC licenses and legal tools continue to serve as critical infrastructure that must be actively maintained. Copyright law is not uniform around the world, nor are clear global standards emerging that clarify the application of copyright law to AI training. 

This year, we released guidance on using CC-licensed works for AI training, which we’ll continue to update and enhance as we conduct further research and track legislative developments globally.

We believe the CC licenses are more important than ever as a tool to increase human-to-human sharing. At the same time, we have a responsibility to navigate the tensions between openness for humans and legitimate machine use (like text and data mining for archiving and research purposes), and unchecked extraction by AI companies, who are taking without giving back to the ecosystem from which they derive value. 

Defending a Thriving Creative Commons

While everything we do involves not only defending, but growing, a thriving creative commons, we’ve been fortunate to be able to invest in two critical sectors in 2025: scientific research and cultural heritage.

Open Science

In the field of open science, we’ve focused on two primary interventions:

• Advocating for CC BY as the default licensing option for preprints.
• Advocating for the adoption of CC’s recommendations for better sharing of climate data.

Our work with preprints, initially supported by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, will continue into 2026 with the generous support of the Gates Foundation. The project has run the spectrum from hands-on implementation of licensing options in preprint servers (like openRxiv), to deep dives with funders of scientific research to ensure alignment with their funding policies, to knowledge sharing through Wikipedia. We believe CC BY is the right choice for preprints. The sooner scientific findings are shared and open to interrogation and reuse, the more progress humanity can make.

Barring new support, our work on climate data will wind down at the end of the year, after three years of funding from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. This project began with deep community engagement to develop recommendations for sharing climate data, followed by focused efforts to support partners in implementing them. We’ve worked closely with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and most recently we’ve formalized our consultation with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). 

If there is a funder out there who wants to continue a targeted intervention for improved, uniform sharing of climate data from global entities, please reach out to us. We believe this work is absolutely critical so that all scientists and researchers have unfettered access to current climate data!

Open Culture

In the field of open culture, we’ve continued to advocate for, and show the need for, a global standard for open cultural heritage at the international level, through a community-driven coalition. This work culminated in the launch of the Open Heritage Statement in October of this year. 

Too many barriers still limit access to our shared heritage. Removing these barriers through open solutions is essential not only for cultural rights, but also for scientific discovery and the enrichment of learning materials. This work is a necessary precondition for UNESCO to adopt an international instrument, as they did with the Recommendation on Open Science in 2021 and Recommendation on Open Education Resources in 2019. Our shared commons of education, science, and culture are inextricably linked. We remain grateful to the Arcadia Fund for their multi-year support of our work in open culture.

Across sectors, our approach to growing a thriving commons remains consistent: building shared resources and developing best practices for open sharing, working directly with institutions to adopt open access policies, and emphasizing not only licensing but also provenance of data. Where we get our information has always mattered, but never more than it does today.

Centering Community

We’ve spent 2025 thinking about how best to understand, coordinate, and align existing efforts on community engagement. This includes the governance of CC’s global network, the sector-specific community groups we host in education and culture, and making progress on the virtual engagement spaces we host (join us on Zulip!), all to facilitate connections and knowledge sharing. 

All of this work is based on insights and input from you. This year, we brought hundreds of folks together for our CC signals kickoff and the launch of the Open Heritage Statement, and very much look forward to creating spaces for dialogue in 2026 as we enter our 25th anniversary year. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed.

Outside the legal tools we develop and host and the specific sectors we work in, we continue to keep track of key developments in the policy space and share our work each quarter. We advocate for a balanced copyright system, where noncommercial and research entities can continue to benefit from the commons without restriction. Through making comments at WIPO, to having discussions with the World Economic Forum, and working with UNESCO as a newly minted official NGO partner, at their Mondiacult conference, and in direct engagements, we’re carrying our message far and wide.

2025 Reflections

Many questions remain. We need to dig deeper into the role and function of the CC licenses by legal jurisdiction with regards to text and data mining for AI training purposes. We need to consider if there is a way to imagine conditional access as a necessary and fair part of our modern digital commons. Not to mention overarching questions around what attribution should look like in AI systems.

Like many nonprofits today, securing funding for research and development of new open infrastructure is an ongoing challenge. We also rely on sustained investment to ensure that the CC licenses and legal tools remain stable and reliable as the backbone of the open movement. For CC signals to be a meaningful intervention in a world rapidly shaped by AI, we need to move quickly—but we can only do so at the pace our funding allows.

As we grapple with big open questions and wind down 2025, we’re taking time to consider even more nuanced positioning and actions for our work in the year ahead. If no one shares, we all stand to lose. Onwards we go in driving forth access to knowledge in uncertain times. 

We thank each and every one of you for your advocacy and support in the past year. If you have the means to become a sustaining donor through our Open Infrastructure Circle, we’d welcome you with gratitude and high fives.

The post What We Built Together in 2025 appeared first on Creative Commons.

As we look back on 2025, it’s clear that the internet as we know it is changing. Technology-enabled access to knowledge should be flourishing. Instead, information is being removed from the web or locked away in walled gardens. We are experiencing a crisis in the commons, driven in part by current AI development practices. New systems are emerging in response—from content monetization schemes and licensing agreements designed to protect large rightsholders, to the ongoing morass of lawsuits about how AI services are using content as data. We are in the midst of a major reconfiguration of how we share and reuse content on the web.

CC Signals: A Refresher

It is within this environment that we continue to develop CC signals. 

We introduced the CC signals concept last June during a live webinar, and further explored the motivation behind this work in our report From Human Content to Machine Data. We also shared the outcomes of our open feedback period following the CC signals kickoff. Since then, we’ve been experimenting in partnership with values-aligned stakeholders and developing pilot projects to test ideas raised by the community.

The goal of CC signals is to help creators and custodians of collections express how they want their content or data to be used in AI development in ways that uphold reciprocity, recognition, and sustainability. Today’s AI systems depend on vast amounts of human-created content, often collected without the awareness or involvement of those who made it. This has concentrated power and undermined trust in the social contract of the commons. 

CC signals responds by promoting community agency while preserving Creative Commons’ core commitment to access and openness. Ultimately, through CC signals and other interventions that infuse concepts of reciprocity in standards and practices, we envision an open internet where participation is equitable, creators are respected, and innovation advances the commons—not unchecked extraction.

CC Signals: Where Are We Now?

CC signals is an evolving, values-driven framework—currently being tested through a series of pilot efforts. Our strategy is to explore modular approaches across legal, technical, and normative dimensions to encourage responsible AI development practices. This allows CC signals to adapt as norms, technologies, and standards continue to evolve.  

At present, two key implementations are underway:

• Implementing CC signals on Mozilla Data Collective: We are working in partnership with our friends at Mozilla, looking at how implementation of CC signals would work on the Mozilla Data Collective platform, which is purpose-built to enable ethical dataset sharing and fair value exchange. Our plan is to test various ways of incorporating some measure of legal enforceability into CC signals. We also hope to use this as an opportunity to test which CC signal elements are most popular and impactful, and which ones have the biggest impact on AI developer behavior. 

• Adapting the CC signals contribution element in the RSL framework: Using the framework of the ecosystem contribution signal element, we are working with the RSL Collective to embed the notion of reciprocal contribution into this evolving standard. As a platform that will let rightsholders set machine-readable licensing terms for their content, integrating the contribution element ensures that standards such as RSL provide mechanisms for AI developers to contribute back to the commons at the collective or community level, not simply a one-to-one payment. 

Beyond CC signals itself, we are also exploring whether updates to CC’s license infrastructure could further strengthen and support the commons in the age of AI.  

Looking Ahead

We are actively seeking expressions of interest from dataset custodians who are interested in participating in the Mozilla Data Collective pilot project. If that’s you, we’d love to hear from you.  

We are also exploring sector-specific CC signals integrations, particularly within cultural heritage and science. 

Ultimately, CC signals are incarnations of what we want to see in the world—more recognition for authorship, sustainable commons communities, mutual commitments to shared resources. We are focused on building a vocabulary and vision for the values we think a successful commons needs to thrive. 

This work is resource-intensive. We need your support to ensure this work continues to be led by public interest organizations. Please donate today.

The post CC Signals: What We’ve Been Working On appeared first on Creative Commons.