FIR #470: Creative Commons Proposes an AI Copyright Solution

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Copyright challenges and intellectual property issues are consistently recognized as a serious, top-tier concern when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI). It may not be the top concern — that’s usually related to fake news and the trustworthiness of content, followed by privacy concerns — but many creators are upset and worried about the integrity of their work when it’s used as fodder for new training models. The courts will inevitably weigh in — in fact, one already has, with a federal court ruling in Anthropic’s favor, asserting that its use of authors’ books without compensation constitutes fair use due to the transformative nature of what Claude, Anthropic’s LLM, does with them.

More lawsuits and more rulings are indeed coming, and legislation and regulation are also likely. However, Creative Commons has always preferred a voluntary compliance approach, grounded in a logical framework. In 2004, Creative Commons (under the guidance of Lawrence Lessig, a prominent American academic, attorney, and political activist known for his work on intellectual property law, campaign finance reform, and the social and legal implications of technology) developed such a framework that allowed people publishing on the web to designage how others could use their content. (This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution/share-alike license.)

Now, Creative Commons is proposing a similar approach to AI, with a framework that would empower creators to signal their preferences for how their content is used and reused. The nascent framework is currently open for public comment. In this brief, midweek episode, Neville and Shel examine the proposal and the role communicators can play in shaping its final form.

Links from this episode:

• CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI – Creative Commons
• Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI – Creative Commons
• Creative Commons debuts CC signals, a framework for an open AI ecosystem | TechCrunch
• CC Signals on GitHub
• The Venice Pledge from the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management
• “Human Authored Certification” from the Author’s Guild
• Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, from the U.S. Copyright Office
• Authors Call on Publishers to Limit Their Use of AI
• AI Watch: Global Regulatory Tracker

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 28.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz (00:01)
Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 470 of Four Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

@nevillehobson (00:08)
And I’m Neville Hobson. In this short form episode of For Immediate Release, we’re looking at a new development from Creative Commons that’s aimed squarely at the intersection of AI, copyright and open knowledge. It’s called CC Signals, and it could become a defining tool for how content is treated in the AI era. Creative Commons is the nonprofit behind the well-known Creative Commons copyright licenses.

that enable creators to share their work and use that of others legally and openly. This new project is their response to the rise of AI and the vast amount of public web data being used to train AI models, often without clear rules or consent. We’ll explore CC signals in lay terms and what it means for communicators right after this.

For more than 20 years, Creative Commons has enabled millions of creators to share their work while retaining rights through open licenses. But now with AI models scraping the internet at scale, there’s a new challenge. How can content owners set clear expectations for whether and how their work should be reused by algorithms training AI models? That’s where CC signals comes in. It’s a proposed framework that lets data set holders express preferences

for how their content can be reused, for example, in training AI based on legal, technical, and ethical guidelines. In simple terms, dataset holders means any individual organization or platform that owns, manages, or has control over a collection of data that could be used to train AI models. Rather than locking everything down behind paywalls or blocking bots entirely, CC Signals offers a middle path, a way to sustain the open web

by encouraging responsible AI use. It’s built on values like recognition, reciprocity, and sustainability, echoing the same ethos that shaped creative comments copyright licenses two decades ago. For communicators, this matters. First, it’s a story about the governance of knowledge, how it’s shared, who benefits, and what kind of AI future we want to support. Second, it’s an opportunity to engage with new norms to advise organizations on data sharing policies

and to help shape a framework that could become foundational in the age of machine learning. CC signals is not just a technical tool, it’s also a social contract built on fairness and the shared benefit of respect for creators, clearer norms for AI developers, and more sustainable access to open data for all. The framework is currently in very early development. Creative Commons is gathering public feedback and input now, aiming for an alpha launch in November 2025.

We’ll have a link to the website in the show notes. So, Shell, I think this is worth taking part in shaping and developing new tools, new norms, and new forms of cooperation for the age of AI.

Shel Holtz (03:07)
As long as there’s something like an open comment period, think anybody who has an interest in this should certainly participate. Creative Commons has the credentials to undertake this. I’ve been using Creative Commons licenses since they first became available. My blog is on a Creative Commons license. Virtually every presentation I deliver uses an attribution license. This podcast.

is licensed under Creative Commons. So I think they do really good work. Remember, the core principle behind the Creative Commons concept was that it has to be a defensible case in court. You can’t just say this is a thing and then have somebody violate your license, take them to court and have it thrown out. This is valid legal underpinnings that they have.

with the work that they do. So I’m really happy to see them doing this. Of course, it’s not the only initiative of its kind out there right now. The Authors Guild has one called Human Authored Certification. It’s supposedly a certification system for authors and publishers to label books and other written works as human authored. There’s a U.S. Copyright Office initiative on AI. There’s an open letter from authors to publishers.

and various licensing and regulation proposals, probably the most interesting recent development in all of this is Barts versus Anthropic. This was a case in the US where a judge granted summary judgment in favor of Anthropic over the question about whether using copyrighted books to train its large language model constitutes fair use. And the court said, yup, it does. It’s quintessentially transformative.

offering a potential shield for AI companies facing similar copyright challenges. So the legal system is already weighing in and how owners of content in a system. And I think it’s really fascinating that Creative Commons acknowledges that AI needs this content, that AI needs access to all of this material in the open web and copyright.

needs rethinking in order to accommodate this. What did they say? think I wrote it down. Ideas, facts and other building blocks of knowledge cannot be owned. Expanding copyright to control AI training risks stifling innovation and access to knowledge. The future depends on shared expectations and responsible use. And then they go on to say, of course, that any viable solution needs to be legally grounded, technically interoperable and backed by the collective action of humans.

@nevillehobson (05:44)
Thank

Shel Holtz (05:58)
So I think this is a great initiative. I hope it goes somewhere. Even the original Creative Commons never really took off the way I was hoping it would. It works for those who use it, but I don’t know how many people out there creating content even know it exists. Yet we need these conversations, we need these options, and you never know, given their track record in producing a quality product.

This might be the answer for a lot of people. We’ll have to see how it shakes out. But you’re absolutely right. Way in.

@nevillehobson (06:33)
Yeah, I mean, they are soliciting ⁓ feedback from anyone and everyone who has an opinion. OK, as I mentioned earlier, this is very early stage development. So much of the feedback I’m seeing on the GitHub and there’s a link to that in the show notes ⁓ is early stage feedback from very technical people. It’s focused a lot on that. So persevere. The point of, I guess, talking about this in the way we are is this is look beyond the technicalities. ⁓

they, Creative Commons has published a project page that summarizes it all. They say for the technical detail, click here, as it were, and you can then go to some and really get down a rabbit hole in the technical aspects of this. But for us normal folk, communicators, we need to understand it more simply. And this is why it’s worth having this conversation today about this, I think, to kind of say, you said something interesting because this might be in my view throughout too. I started using Creative Commons myself back in 2004.

literally when they started. And like you, everything I share publicly with anyone that I’ve added my intellectual property to carries a Creative Commons license. One of the beauties of CC licenses is that the thing you normally confront straight away when you come across one is written in plain English, literally no legalese. It’s at pains to point out quite clearly that that’s not the contract. You need to read the legal one.

And they have published a variety of different types of contract back by legal definitions of the terms they’re using and how it all is supposed to work that are valid in different legal jurisdictions. So it’s not limited to one jurisdiction. Like you mentioned, what’s going on in the US, that’s US law only. This is valid in many other countries. In fact, the one I use is an international license that is valid in multiple countries. So if…

This leads to something like that. That, I think, would make it very attractive. But the simpler it is to understand and use, the more likely it is that it will get pick up. Like you, I’m disappointed that Creative Commons copyright licenses never really rocketed into the stratosphere as it seemed they might. There were some notable lawsuits, legal challenges, 2000s.

that ⁓ didn’t really kind of gain the headlines that it might have done, I suppose. But it showed that these test cases that you could, it did have the legal teeth behind it all. So this though, like I said, this is ⁓ in the development stage and it does present, I believe, a great opportunity for communicators to help shape the development of this. So not all the techies are in there, it needs that.

And that’s where we step into the thing too, because you can help shape the framework that could become that foundation that I mentioned earlier. So it’s a great opportunity.

Shel Holtz (09:34)
It is. And a couple of thoughts. One is ⁓ one of those test cases with the Creative Commons involved Adam Curry. In fact, I think it was the first one, the pod father. Yeah, he had a photo that was ⁓ licensed under Creative Commons. Somebody used it in a way that violated that license. He took them to court. I believe it was in the Netherlands and won. ⁓ He won. So that was the first test case. The.

@nevillehobson (09:42)
the famous one actually the famous one.

Yeah, that’s right.

In Amsterdam, yeah. He won it.

Shel Holtz (10:03)
The plain language behind the Creative Commons, think, is important. And they also use visual cues. They have different icons for the different licenses. So they go to great pains to make it easy to understand these things at various tiers. In terms of communicators getting involved, I absolutely agree that we should. The question is how? ⁓

beyond commenting, is it possible to band together? I’m thinking of the Venice pledge that came out of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communications. This is the umbrella organization that represents most of the communication associations in the world, IEBC, PRSA, CIPR, CPRS.

all of those ⁓ organizations belong to the Global Alliance. And they just a couple of weeks ago released the Venice Pledge, is there, and they’re asking communications professionals and companies in fact, to sign onto the pledge. And it’s a set of principles around ethical use of AI. So I’m wondering, is it possible for the Global Alliance to weigh in on this representing?

⁓ all of the communicators out there as opposed to or in addition to everybody going in and sharing their own comments.

@nevillehobson (11:28)
In addition to in addition

to so so so they totally could do that. Someone representing that global alliance goes there, clicks that link, starts a conversation there. But I think you’re absolutely right. And that bring it back to the Creative Commons Copyright Alliance is maybe that was one of the issues behind its lack of mega stardom, as it were, that there wasn’t this kind of thing going on at the time. But that was a different era here. Everything’s online and everywhere. When this is huge about what the

pros and cons are of all this. So ⁓ they would be a good candidate in light of the Venice principles, which I think you discussed that in a previous episode, A monthly, I think you raised that. So, right. So ⁓ that must be relevant to this. ⁓ So this is definitely the moment for this because it’s early stage. They’re looking for feedback. They want suggestions. They want input from anyone who cares to suggest these things.

Shel Holtz (12:08)
I think the Venice Pledge, yeah, and the principles in the pledge.

@nevillehobson (12:28)
This is the time for this.

Shel Holtz (12:29)
Well, I happen to know a couple of members of the Global Alliance Board, so I think I’ll pass this along to them. Well, I think a couple of them listen anyway. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

@nevillehobson (12:33)
Give them the link to the podcast.

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