In January we hosted a webinar titled “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution” discussing the intersection of indigenous knowledge and open sharing. Our conversation spanned a variety of topics regarding indigenous sovereignty over culture, respectful terminology, and the legacy of colonialism and how it still exists today.

2023 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin. In this blog post we look back on some of the year’s key achievements.

In November 2023, the Court of Appeal in THJ v Sheridan offered an important clarification of the originality requirement under UK copyright law, which clears a path for open culture to flourish in the UK.

On Wednesday, 17 January, 2024, at 3:00 pm UTC, CC’s Open Culture Program will be hosting a new webinar in our Open Culture Live series titled “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution.” As we observed a few years ago, there is growing awareness in the open culture movement about issues related to the acquisition, preservation, access, sharing, and reuse of cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples and local communities (including traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions), heritage in the context of colonization, and culturally-sensitive heritage.

On 22 November, we organized a webinar with a group of experts to discuss their unique approaches to reparative metadata practices: considering the ways that harmful histories and terminologies have made their way into collections labeling and categorization practices and finding ways to identify those terms, contextualize them, and/or replace them altogether. Jill Baron, a…