Earlier this year, Creative Commons joined forces with an international team of researchers, scientists, academics and lawyers to accelerate the development of diagnostics, vaccines, therapies, medical equipment and software solutions that can be used to help fight COVID-19. The result was the Open COVID-19 Pledge project. Creative Commons has explained that the project "offers a simple way for universities, companies and others to make their patents and copyrights available to the public free of charge in the current public health crisis".

Users of the CC license may suspect the direction of the initiative, as Open COVID-19 Pledge, like the CC itself, offers free and standard public licenses that anyone can use. In this way, barriers to private intellectual property that are not necessary for the dissemination of knowledge are removed.

“We will continue to work with big companies to unlock their intellectual property rights,” said the licence promoters. By the way, they also seek to meet smaller companies, universities and individual innovators that are emerging, “especially in some parts of the world where the lists of current donors and supporters of the project are not well represented and have patents in the fight against COVID-19 and other critical intellectual property.”

To this end, they will also talk to leading international organisations in intellectual property and copyright policies such as the WHO and other UN organisations working in the field of copyright. The experience and “deep relationships” with Creative Commons Global Network also provide for a project.

In his view, the project can have "a profound impact" beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, as they are convinced that the tools accumulated during this crisis can be an "example" to deal with other emergencies such as climate change.