The team here at Creative Commons was delighted to publicly release our new organizational strategy on January 22, after almost a year of intensive team, community, and board consultations. For the next several years, our focus will be to:
- Strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing
- Defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons
- Center community
These goals are high level, as they tend to be when packaged up as part of a multi-year strategy. These goals should also feel familiar, for an organization whose mission it is to empower individuals and communities around the world through technical, legal, and policy solutions that enable the sharing of education, culture, and science in the public interest. But there are important nuances included in these goals and subsequent short-, medium-, and long-term objectives that point to intentional and meaningful shifts in the ways we operate to meet this moment.
Of course the legal layer of the open infrastructure—the CC licenses and legal tools themselves—must be strengthened. But also, new sharing frameworks must be explored for changing times.
Of course we must ensure the ongoing survival of the commons. But strategies need to evolve from solely being a sensible argument around opening up access to information. We know that greater access facilitates advances in education, in the scientific arena, and in our ability to understand and appreciate the diversity of cultural heritage that exists. However, those who previously saw the obvious benefits to sharing may now be hesitant, uncertain about how their works will be used or contextualized, through advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
Finally, one might think that centering community goes without saying, but actually, it doesn’t. As an organization that has only achieved what it has because of a strong community of advocates bringing their expertise and passion to bear, we know we cannot continue to impact the social norms and legal frameworks of sharing without full participation.
So what does all of this mean for our work today, and throughout this year? Since we are currently operating in the age of AI, where all content also functions as data, we are focusing our work in two key areas:
- Data governance, shaped by legal and norms-based infrastructure to facilitate sharing.
- Sustaining open licensing in the age of AI, as high value contributions to the commons at scale that must be sustained through reciprocity.
This focus is guided by CC’s core principle: ideas and facts should not be commodified. As we reimagine sharing in the age of AI, we also draw on our history which reminds us to resist the reflex to expand copyright. Instead, we believe developing new norms, as part of a healthy data governance framework that prioritizes sharing in the age of AI, is the best approach to meeting our mission.
Data Governance
Our friends at Open Future define data governance as “how rules for data use are created and enforced. This includes laws, standards, and social norms that guide what people can and can’t do with data. Good governance ensures fair and responsible data sharing.”
CC plays a unique role within data governance across the open internet. The CC licenses provide a form of legal and social norms guidance that has facilitated sharing on the internet for the last 25 years. We think of CC’s role within data governance as providing critical infrastructure that enables community-driven, fair, and responsible data sharing. The challenge is that what is considered fair and responsible data sharing is not static; it evolves based on context. And while this has always been true, AI has brought issues of fairness, transparency, trust, accountability, and more to the forefront for CC and for our many collaborators and colleagues who are committed to human-centered approaches to data governance.
In 2025, we need to continue to explain how the CC licenses interact with AI training, and champion preference signals as a way to advance the data governance we need to meet this moment. You’ve heard from us on this subject in the past, and there is much more to come as we find partners to pilot this work with in the coming months. Policy and legal environments will also continue to play a significant role in both driving and influencing the data governance landscape of the future. CC’s role in advocating for balanced copyright and policies that drive access to knowledge, especially as new legislation, particularly around AI, is passed and implemented, is instrumental in representing civil society and advocating on behalf of the public interest.
Sustaining Open Licensing in the Age of AI
The use of the CC licenses has resulted in billions of items being released openly. Today, these items have also become parts of AI training sets—this is a significant shift that is influencing the norms around open licensing. Our priority is increasing sustainable sharing and access, but we now must consider “what about AI?”. We believe that openly licensed collections of content, which act as high-value contributions to the commons, must continue to be prioritized.
However, many creators (artists, researchers, educators, and everyone in between) are understandably concerned about their contributions to the commons being reduced to small pieces of data within huge datasets where they lose agency over how their works are being used. We believe that the antidote to this is reciprocity. We believe it is time for the open movement to ask for something in return when there is disproportionate benefit from use of open datasets. We aim to do this by developing relationships with AI model builders on behalf of those who contribute to the commons, ensuring that training datasets remain collectively owned, sustain the commons, and that data governance principles are respected.
We need more open educational, cultural, scientific, and research data to allow more rapid scientific discovery and collaboration. Sharing must continue in the age of AI and we are committed to supporting open licensing at scale, taking the context of AI into consideration.
There are new and layered complexities in the open sharing world, and we’re excited and determined to help clarify and address these challenges. We’d like to see open sharing grow as a collective strategy to advance the public interest. In 2025 (and beyond, I’m sure), we will be finding ways to facilitate agency for the movement and facilitating even more sharing and access, while ensuring that the commons remain resilient and sustainable.
If you’d like to support this work, consider joining the Creative Commons Open Infrastructure Circle. Our most dedicated supporters ensure that every day we can show up and do the valuable work of preserving and growing the global commons of knowledge and culture from which we all benefit.
Posted 03 March 2025