How can equitable access to heritage help solve global challenges? That is the question we addressed during our Exploratory Dialogue, a major event we hosted on 29 April, 2026, at UNESCO House in Paris, France, to celebrate the Open Heritage Statement and explore its synergies with UNESCO’s priorities in tackling the most urgent problems facing the world today. 

In this blog post, we set the event in its wider context, look back at some of the highlights from the discussions, report on our key takeaways, and pave the way for what comes next. 

The Dialogue in Context

This Dialogue was the culmination of years of research and consultations, policy analysis, movement building, and community mobilization, as well as global advocacy efforts towards more equitable access to public domain heritage in the digital environment. You can read more about the journey that took us from shared vision to global action. A remarkable milestone, the Dialogue brought together over 100 participants, including UNESCO staff, Permanent Delegation representatives, National Commissions, cultural heritage practitioners, funders, and open heritage advocates and enthusiasts from around the world.

Our aim by convening this Dialogue was twofold. It was an opportune moment to recognize the joint efforts of the Open Heritage Coalition and its global network of ambassadors in elaborating the Open Heritage Statement, a declaration of principles anchored in our shared belief in the positive potential of equitable access to heritage. This event was dedicated to the hard work, energy, and collaborative spirit that turned shared ideals into a tangible plea to fill an enormous international policy gap. Indeed, despite open heritage’s clear potential for achieving UNESCO’s key policy objectives, there are still multiple undue, unfair barriers to access to heritage in the public domain, and the Coalition was convinced that greater awareness, mobilization, and political will were needed among UNESCO Member States. 

Hence the Dialogue was also a favorable occasion to explore how access to heritage in all its forms can make a significant contribution to achieving UNESCO’s mandate of addressing global challenges. Specifically, it was a critical opportunity to sensitize UNESCO stakeholders to the relevance of the Open Heritage Statement as a foundation for further discussions across diverse areas of UNESCO’s mandate and in a cross-sectoral, transversal approach, spanning areas of heritage protection, preservation, and sharing, of course, but also access to education, to the fight against climate change, all the way to artistic creativity and cultural diversity, social inclusion, ethical artificial intelligence, and more. 

Key Takeaways

The discussion brought together diverse experts from across the world and showcased various real-life examples in which equitable access to public domain heritage can make a positive impact in many of UNESCO’s priorities, in line with its mandate and in support of the fundamental right to participate in cultural life. Their perspectives helped us understand how access to heritage is vital in the digital environment as well as how unfair barriers keep impeding such access.

For more information, you can see the full program, read the detailed summary of each session, and watch the recordings in English and French.

A resounding message united these interventions into a coherent narrative: there is an urgent need to lower the barriers that unfairly hamper access and prevent us from sustaining resilient and connected societies. Open heritage is a means to advance cultural policy goals aiming to remove unfair socio-economic barriers to access to heritage in the digital environment, in accordance, notably, with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Global collective action is now more important than ever, because without global policy alignment, the full potential of open heritage remains largely unrealized.

Future Outlook: From Dialogue to Recommendation 

Sign the Open Heritage Statement

We are very proud of what the Open Heritage Coalition has accomplished. Well before its deadline, it reached its objectives of developing the Open Heritage Statement alongside a comprehensive advocacy strategy and campaign. As our movement evolves into its next phase, the Coalition is no longer accepting new members. As the new anchor point in this dynamic initiative, we encourage organizations and institutions to sign the Open Heritage Statement and join the momentum built by close to 100 signatories to date in order to show broad alignment and global support. To add your voice to the call, visit openheritagestatement.org and sign the Statement today. 

Explore the Feasibility of an Open Heritage Recommendation

We call on UNESCO Member States to join the dialogue towards additional action by UNESCO to ensure equitable access to public domain heritage in the digital environment, possibly even by co-creating a new normative instrument, in accordance with UNESCO’s existing normative framework. Recently, UNESCO has demonstrated a strong commitment to open through the 2019 Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) and the 2021 Recommendation on Open Science. These recommendations were game changers. A UNESCO Recommendation on Open Heritage would be the next logical step.

To achieve this, UNESCO Member States should explore the feasibility of elaborating a standard-setting instrument (a Recommendation) that would proactively promote and encourage open solutions to removing barriers to accessing heritage in the public domain, being mindful of the various governance frameworks that determine the ways in which heritage is shared and used. 

We believe this Dialogue, and new initiatives to be taken in its wake, will further strengthen cooperation between UNESCO and Creative Commons, harnessing the obvious synergies and setting the stage for international discussions aiming to consolidate best practices and enshrine our common aspiration: ensuring equitable access to heritage.

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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.

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Open Heritage’s Untapped Potential

From sparking creativity to fueling education and scientific research, open heritage generates positive ripple effects across society. Yet, only about 1% of cultural heritage institutions openly share their heritage collections. Incorrect copyright claims over digital reproductions, technological locks, prohibitive access fees, lack of sustainable infrastructure, and inconsistent legal frameworks are just some of the barriers that stand in the way of equitable access to heritage. The result is fragmented and fragile access that prevents people from engaging with heritage, our shared resource. 

A Momentous Contribution to UNESCO’s Efforts

This launch builds on Creative Commons’ long-standing collaboration with UNESCO, as formalized by our recent recognition as an official partner to UNESCO (consultative status). It is also an answer to the call made by UNESCO at MONDIACULT 2025 — the world’s largest conference on cultural policies — for culture to be treated as a global priority amid mounting geopolitical divides and multiple crises.

Why Sign the Statement?

Signing the Open Heritage Statement is more than symbolic; it is a way for signatories to demonstrate shared commitment, signal broad sectoral consensus to policymakers, and strengthen a global, community-driven movement. Each signature helps build momentum toward an international framework to ensure equitable access to heritage in the digital environment.

Open Heritage Statement Launch Webinar

Creative Commons will host a webinar to mark the launch of the Statement and brief participants on its objectives, impact, and opportunities for engagement. 

Date: 14 October 2025
Time: 14:00 UTC
Register here 

Take Action

By signing the Open Heritage Statement today, you add your voice to a global call for equitable access to heritage, helping to lower barriers, stimulate creativity, and preserve our cultural memory for future generations.

Learn more about the Open Heritage Statement.

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With new publications, events, and the launch of a new coalition, the CC Open Culture Program accomplished a lot! Here are some highlights:

1. At the Open Culture Strategic Workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, we gathered nearly 50 experts from every continent to co-create a strategic roadmap for future action, charting a course for UNESCO Member States to draft an agreement (otherwise referred to as a legal instrument). This would promote open solutions to enable equitable access to cultural heritage worldwide. Read our blog post and full report for more: CC strategic workshop reveals big opportunities for open access to cultural heritage.  
2. In the wake of the Lisbon workshop, we launched the Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage( TAROCH) Coalition, a collaborative effort to achieve the adoption of a UNESCO standard-setting instrument to improve open access to cultural heritage. Read our blog post Creative Commons Launches TAROCH Coalition for Open Access to Cultural Heritage and TAROCH information brief and apply to join the Coalition now! 
3. We published Don’t be a Dinosaur; or, The Benefits of Open Culture, which distills the views expressed in our Open Culture Voices (OCV) series about the ways in which so many people can benefit from open culture. Read more in this blog post: What are the Benefits of Open Culture? A new CC Publication.
4. We released guidelines for open culture that offer a fresh and innovative approach to prompting users to reference the institution when using public domain materials: Nudging Users to Reference Institutions when Using Public Domain Materials. Read more on our blog: Where in the world is… this public domain material? Helping users refer to host institutions.
5. We published Open Culture Capsules, a video series that addresses some of the most frequently asked questions about our work in the Open Culture Program. Our blog has more details and links to all the episodes: Top Questions about Open Culture Answered in Five Short Videos.  

In addition, we published even more blog posts on a wide range of topics (check out this one for example: Moving Institutions Toward Open—Building on 6 Years of the Open GLAM Survey). We also organized training activities (watch this webinar we organized with Connecticut Humanities: Open Access Made Easy: How to Open Your Collections for Greater and Better Sharing) and offered the CC Certificate on Open Culture. We collaborated with Europeana to review their Public Domain Charter. 

We took the stage at several events to promote open culture, such as:

• WIPO SCCR meeting in Geneva, to promote exceptions and limitations for cultural heritage institutions worldwide
• AI Sauna in Helsinki
• Communia Salon: The hollowing of the Public Domain 
• Wikimania in Katowice (watch the full recording of our TAROCH presentation and panel)
• Living Heritage workshop in Brussels
• Communia’s Digital Knowledge Act event in Brussels
• UNESCO International Conference on the Memory of the World in Paris
• Towards a National Collection Conference in Manchester
• EUScreen Symposium in Barcelona
• and much more!

We also supported our community through the OC platform and its working groups and community-led activities. 

The Open Culture team is thrilled that we will once again be offering the CC Certificate on Open Culture in 2025. Learn more and register! We look forward to building on those achievements and continuing to ensure we can all access heritage to connect to our past and imagine our futures. Contact us at info@creativecommons.org for more information.

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We are excited to share a new video series titled Open Culture Capsules. In this multi-series video collection, we address some of the most frequently asked questions about our work in Creative Commons’ (CC) Open Culture Program. You can preview the series below and find each episode in full on the the CC YouTube channel.

The series features insights from CC staff and facilitators from the CC Certificate Course on Open Culture. Thank you for your participation in making this series a success! 

Keep reading to find previews and overview of all five episodes: 

Episode 1 (parts 1 and 2) —  What does Creative Commons do for Open Culture? Brigitte Vézina, CC’s Director of Policy and Open Culture, talks about how the Open Culture Program is driving policy change for fair and equitable open access to cultural heritage. In this episode, Brigitte shares how capacity building and the Open Culture Platform are empowering a global network of people passionate about open culture.

Episode 2 (parts 1 and 2) —  What is open culture? Shanna Hollich, CC’s Learning and Training Manager, explains that Open Culture at CCencompasses open access to both contemporary creativity and cultural heritage, promoting sharing under permissive terms with CC licenses and tools as well as other labels and statements. 

Episode 3 (parts 1 and 2) — What are the main benefits of open culture? Revekka Kefalea, CC Certificate facilitator, shows how, by embracing open access, cultural heritage institutions (like museums, libraries and archives) can boost their digital relevance, how researchers and educators can gain new opportunities for collaboration, and how creators have increased access to resources that drive creativity.

Episode 4 (parts 1 and 2) — How do you open up a collection? Sionan Guenther, CC Certificate facilitator, walks through the first steps of opening up cultural heritage and highlights what is important to consider from the get-go. 

Episode 5 (parts 1, 2 and 3) — How to mark open heritage? Evelin (scann) Heidel, CC Certificate facilitator, explains the basics of marking heritage materials with CC licenses and public domain tools,  where to place the license or tool, and how these help ensure cultural heritage is accessible, with clear conditions for use, allowing everyone to freely engage, remix, and keep cultural heritage alive.

If you would like to watch more video content from CC’s Open Culture Program, check out Open Culture Voices and the Open Culture Live webinar series.

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Creative Commons (CC) is proud to launch the TAROCH Coalition (Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage), a collaborative effort to achieve the adoption of a UNESCO standard-setting instrument to improve open access to cultural heritage. We are grateful to the Arcadia Fund for supporting this initiative. Below we share an overview of TAROCH and invite mission-aligned organizations and institutions to apply to join. 

TAROCH At A Glance

• TAROCH stands for Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage.
• TAROCH is a community initiative led by Creative Commons.
• The mission is to encourage UNESCO Member States to draft and adopt a Recommendation (or other standard-setting instrument) promoting open solutions to enhance access to cultural heritage in the public domain.
• The ultimate goal of the TAROCH Coalition is that cultural heritage is equitably accessible to all, in line with UNESCO’s broader mission and cultural and information policy, in particular intercultural dialog and cultural exchanges, thereby contributing to building more connected, resilient, and sustainable societies.

Who Drives TAROCH?

CC is the organization steering and funding TAROCH. The Coalition is led by representatives of a global, diverse community of organizations and institutions involved in cultural heritage and with an interest in open cultural heritage. While our individual missions differ, we all believe in the transformative power of open solutions and share a vision of fair and equitable access to cultural heritage. Meet the initial members of the TAROCH Coalition!

For a complete and up-to-date list of coalition members, please refer to the Statement of Commitment.

Why Is Promoting Open Access to Cultural Heritage Important?

We believe that culture, including cultural heritage, is the foundation of humanity and that open access can contribute to helping people around the world to:

• Exercise their fundamental rights to participate in cultural life and enjoy the arts, as enshrined in Article 27(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and Article 15 of the United Nations (UN) International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966).
• Preserve and access documentary heritage including in digital form, as enshrined in the 2015 UNESCO Recommendation.
• Benefit from a more prosperous, inclusive, and resilient world by advancing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and leaving no one behind, including the recognition of culture as a Sustainable Development Goal in and of itself.Honor, promote, and preserve cultural and linguistic diversity and cultural heritage as per the 2024 UN Pact for the Future.
• Activate the 2022 Mondiacult Declaration and enjoy culture, including cultural heritage, as well as the digital commons (in keeping with the Global Digital Compact) as global public goods.

What are TAROCH’s Key Deliverables?

We aim to achieve the following by May 2026:

• Develop and adopt a Statement on Open Access to Cultural Heritage for signature by civil society organizations and institutions.
• Widely implement an advocacy strategy and disseminate advocacy tools and materials to promote the wider recognition of open access to cultural heritage.

The delivery of these two milestones will set the stage for on-the-ground advocacy efforts by a network of local ambassadors encouraging UNESCO member states to develop and adopt a UNESCO standard-setting instrument by 2029.

For More Information about TAROCH and to Read About Our Work To Date:

• Read our 2024 report CC Strategic Workshop Reveals Big Opportunities for Open Access to Cultural Heritage.
• Read our Open Culture webpage
• Read our Resources page

Join the TAROCH Coalition

Any organization or institution supporting the mission statement of the Coalition can apply for membership in the Coalition.

• Read the Statement of Commitment.
• Submit your application through the membership application form.

For more information, contact us at info@creativecommons.org.

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Last May, a diverse group of nearly 50 experts from every continent took part in Creative Commons’ Open Culture Strategic Workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, to advance our TAROCH initiative — Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage. Over the course of two days, participants collaborated to co-create a strategic roadmap for future action, charting a course towards the elaboration by UNESCO Member States of an international legal instrument that would promote open solutions to enable equitable access to cultural heritage worldwide, in line with UNESCO’s broader mission on openness and heritage-related policy goals.

Today, we’re excited to share the workshop’s report, capturing the event’s highlights. Here are two of the main outcomes:

• A narrower focus from “open culture” to “open cultural heritage in the public domain” — moving from TAROC to TAROCH.
• Flexibility regarding the nature of the legal instrument: recommendation, declaration, or other type of UNESCO instrument.

The report also outlines anticipated developments, highlighting key milestones on the horizon. It concludes with a set of recommended actions to build on the momentum gained in Lisbon.

We are now in the process of building an architecture to organize future work and establish ladders of engagement. Watch this space!

Read the full report 

If you’d like to learn more, please reach out to us at info@creativecommons.org.

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With CC considering new ways to engage with generative AI, we are excited to share highlights from the conversation that demonstrate some of the complex considerations regarding open sharing, cultural heritage, and contemporary creativity.

Suzanne Duncan, Chief Operating Officer at Te Hiku Media, New Zealand, said that her organization was born out of the Māori rights movement. It is collecting an archive of Māori language samples on its own platform to maintain data sovereignty. Te Hiku Media is now working to use AI tools to teach the language to heritage language reclaimers. Suzanne recommended that the best way to ensure diverse representation in AI outputs is to have communities involved in the building and testing of AI models, ideally by communities, for communities.

Minne Atairu, interdisciplinary artist and doctoral student in the Art and Art Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA, shared examples of her works using the Benin Bronzes, artworks from Nigeria stolen by the British in the 19th century, and the changes that happened in the visual representation of art after the looting took place. Using images of the stolen items, she used models to explore visuals and materials and convert text to 3D models. Minne hopes that better ways of attribution and compensation can be re-envisioned, and that the wealth generated by AI and other technologies should be spread among creators, not just tech executives.

Bartolomeo Meletti, Head of Knowledge Exchange at CREATe, University of Glasgow, Scotland, spoke about copyright law and copyright exceptions in the UK, EU and US, focusing on what one can do with AI and copyrighted works without permission from the copyright owner, especially for purposes of research and education. He works to create guidance about how to navigate those permissions with generative AI in mind.

Michael Trizna, Data Scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, has explored how generative AI can help to speed up processes like providing “alt text” (text descriptions of visual materials) to images, without compromising the accuracy of the audio or visual description of works. He has also worked on an AI values statement, including labeling AI generated content as such and mechanisms for the audience to provide feedback. Mike raised concerns about the fact that only a few large cultural heritage institutions are resourced to engage with generative AI responsibly.

Overall, panelists conveyed a need for greater AI literacy to enable people to interrogate AI and ensure it can be used for good.

Watch the recording here.

CC is a non-profit that relies on contributions to sustain our work. Support CC in our efforts to promote better sharing at creativecommons.org/donate.

What is Open Culture Live?

In this series, we tackle some of the more complex challenges that face the open culture movement, bringing in speakers with personal and professional expertise on the topic.

• Back to Basics: Open Culture for Beginners 
• Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject 
• Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution
• Maximizing the Value(s) of Open Access in Cultural Heritage Institutions

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Today we in the Open Culture Program are releasing a new publication: Don’t be a Dinosaur; or, The Benefits of Open Culture.

Following in the footsteps of open culture pioneers, many institutions are taking the leap to open their collections online, partly as a way to celebrate a sense of (re)connection with cultural heritage collections in the digital space. While the road to OC is strewn with barriers, its benefits are well worth the journey. 

This report distills the many views expressed in our Open Culture Voices (OCV) series about the ways in which so many people can benefit from open culture. In short: 

• Openly shared cultural heritage: 
  • is easier to find
  • reaches broader and more diverse audiences
  • can be preserved, safeguarded and refined in digital form
  • can be (re)used with more legal certainty
• Open cultural heritage leads to: 
  • More resilient and relevant collection holders
  • More vibrant research and more participatory education
  • More dynamic cultural creativity
  • More just, democratic, diverse, free, and equitable societies

To find out more:

• Read the full report
• Take a look at the one-page summary
• Watch the OCV series’ introduction video
• Check out each expert’s individual blog posts with links to their videos

→ To stay informed about our open culture work:

• Sign up for our open culture mailing list
• Join the open culture platform
• Visit our website on open culture
• Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter

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The J. Paul Getty Museum just released more than 88 thousand works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the digital images of items from its impressive collection squarely and unequivocally into the public domain. 

This is in line with our advocacy efforts at Creative Commons (CC): digital reproductions of public domain material must remain in the public domain. In other words, no new copyright should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.”

According to the museum’s press release, “users can download, edit, and repurpose high resolution images of their favorite Getty artworks without any legal restrictions.” The museum’s Open Content database is a wellspring of art that is bound to inspire myriad new creative reuses. It includes Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises and many more treasures waiting to be explored. Since opening up, Getty has seen “an uptick in image downloads on our site, averaging about 30,000 per month.”

This announcement is a huge cause for celebration for CC’s Open Culture efforts, which strive to promote open access and better sharing of cultural heritage held in cultural heritage institutions, such as museums, libraries and archives. It is also a testament to the stewardship of our open, public-interest infrastructure of Creative Commons licenses and tools. These are free, easy-to-use, and standardized open legal tools that enable worldwide open access to creative content.

We salute the Getty for supporting a thriving public domain and encourage other institutions to engage more deeply in the open culture movement and make the world’s vast collections of public domain materials openly accessible to everyone. We recently released guidelines promoting CCØ and the Public Domain Mark alongside best-practice norms incentivizing users to refer back to institutions. 

Get Involved

For additional guidance on using CCØ to release cultural heritage materials and tailored support in developing or implementing open access policies or to get involved in promoting open culture around the world:

• Join the CC Open Culture Platform
• Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter
• Support our policy initiative Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture (TAROC)
• Take our CC Certificate online training
• Contact us at info@creativecommons.org 

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