Creative Commons is proud to announce the launch of “Open Educational Resources for Librarians and Educators,” our first professional development microcredential course and partnership with the University of Nebraska Omaha, commencing on 31 May.

This microcredential pilot started with one CC Certificate alumnus’s enthusiasm for open education. Craig Finlay, OER and STEM Librarian at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) Libraries, took the CC Certificate course for Academic Librarians in September, 2021. Since then, he’s advocated for open education in a variety of capacities: managing UNO’s biannual campus Affordable Content Grants, which largely fund converting courses from using all traditional textbooks to using at least one open educational resource; hosting regular CC workshops for faculty on campus; and co-authoring a white paper exploring OER’s positive impact on student success. Co-creating the microcredential course offered the next step in applying his CC Certificate expertise and passion for open education. Craig was intent on bringing CC licensing expertise to more learners, seeking professional development, and UNO granted a pathway for this.

Over the course of the last several months, CC and UNO have developed the “Open Educational Resources for Librarians and Educators.” The course remixes Certificate lessons in open licensing, open education and open access.  Content targets the ecosystem of scholarly and academic publishing; copyright and Creative Commons; Open Education and Open Access; as well as starting, growing and managing these sorts of initiatives. Learners enrolling in this 9-week course will engage asynchronously, but should expect to work five hours per week to complete course work; successful completion will result in a microcredential for non-credit and professional education. 

What are the next steps? Registration will open on 31 May, 2024. Once the class roster is full, UNO will announce a start date for the course. 

Outside of the actual course content, we wanted to share a few crucial elements that made this partnership successful: 

• A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which outlined the goal, key roles, responsibilities and timeline for our work. 
• A mutually viable financial model, which ensures this work can be sustainable for both institutions. 
• Adaptability. Because this project involved multiple stakeholders, we needed to remain flexible to meet differing needs. 
• Trust. Working together has been easy because of our basis in trust.

We share these key ingredients to this microcredential pilot because we expect the partnership can be replicated for a number of new communities. If you work at an institution and are interested in partnering with CC on a microcredential course related to CC Certificate course content, please contact certificates [at] creativecommons.org.

Note: The CC Certificate program was created as an investment in our open advocates around the world. CC built the training to strengthen the global communities’ work engaging in open movements in education, access and more recently, cultural heritage. 

CC Certificate courses develop peoples’ practical expertise in open licensing, copyright, and ways to engage in open knowledge and culture movements. The program has certified over 1700 people in 65 countries with open licensing expertise. Through open licensing course content, CC supports communities making derivatives of the course, from Masters level courses, faculty workshops, an audio recording, to nine language translations, and more. 

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The Board of Directors of Creative Commons (CC) is pleased to announce the appointment of Anna Tumadóttir as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CC. 

“The CC Board universally supported Anna’s appointment as CEO,” says CC’s Board Chair Delia Browne. “Anna has been a source of stability as well as a catalyst for CC’s future direction throughout her time at CC. The Board is looking forward to her leading the team with her experience, thoughtfulness, and commitment to removing barriers, improving workflows and effectiveness, and sharing openly as part of a robust knowledge commons,” continues Delia.

Anna’s longstanding leadership at CC has been a pillar of CC’s success since she joined in September 2019 as Director of Product. Anna was promoted to Chief Operating Officer (COO) in 2021 after her successful time leading product strategy. In 2023, she also held the role of Deputy CEO, ensuring ongoing effective operations and stewardship of organizational priorities.

During her tenure as Interim CEO, Anna articulated an innovative and sustainable future for CC. As CC continues to define its role within the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), Anna is positioned to guide this exploration with an unwavering commitment to knowledge sharing within the broader commons. Cementing CC’s role as the stewards of the legal infrastructure of the open web, in collaboration with the CC Global Network and community, is a key priority.

“I am honored to formally step into the role of CEO, and bring my experience with and understanding of CC’s global contributions, and ongoing need for sustainability and world-class operations, into this role,” says Anna. “I wish to thank the Board of Directors for their support during this transition period, as well as give my thanks to the CC team who are co-creating a shared vision of the future that I’m excited to implement alongside them,” continues Anna. 

Anna’s appointment is effective immediately and will begin with a strategic refresh for the organization with more details and opportunities to engage with this process to come. Please join us in congratulating Anna and wishing her well in this new role. 

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Our work on copyright has long focused on supporting libraries and archives in the service of their missions to preserve and ensure access to culture. Our 2022 copyright reform agenda centers those sorts of institutions (and more generally GLAMs) and the critical role they play in society. Among other things, that agenda calls attention to the ways in which copyright might impede libraries and archives who wish to make their collections available for research uses, including use for AI training in order to fulfill their public interest missions.

That issue – AI training – has become ever more relevant. The concept of mass digitization of books, including to support text and data mining, of which AI training is a subset, is not new. But AI training is newly of the zeitgeist, and its transformative use makes questions about how we digitize, preserve, and make accessible knowledge and cultural heritage salient in a distinct way.

In 2023, multiple news publications reported on the availability and use of a dataset of books called “Books3” to train large language models (LLMs), a form of generative AI tool.  The Books3 dataset contains text from over 170,000 books, which are a mix of in-copyright and out-of-copyright works. It is believed to have been originally sourced from a website that was not authorized to distribute all of the works therein. In lawsuits brought against OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Bloomberg related to their LLMs, the use of Books3 as training data was specifically cited. 

The Books3 controversy highlights a critical question at the heart of generative AI: what role do books play in training AI models, and how might digitized books be made widely accessible for the purposes of training AI for the public good? What dataset of books could be constructed and under what circumstances? 

Earlier this year, we collaborated with Open Future and Proteus Strategies on a series of workshops to explore these questions and more. We brought together practitioners on the front lines of building next-generation AI models, as well as legal and policy scholars with expertise in the copyright and licensing challenges surrounding digitized books. Our goal was also to bridge the perspective of stewards of content repositories, like libraries, with that of AI developers. A “books data commons” needs to be both responsibly managed, and useful for developers of AI models. Today, we’re releasing a paper based on those workshops and additional research. 

While this paper does not prescribe a particular path forward, we do think it’s important to move beyond the status quo. Today, large swaths of knowledge contained in books are effectively locked up and inaccessible to most everyone. Large companies have huge advantages when it comes to access to books for AI training (and access to data in general). At the same time, as the paper highlights, there are already relevant examples of nonprofit and library-led efforts to provide responsible, fair access to books for many more people, not just the privileged few. We hope this paper can support further research, collaboration and investment in this space.

Read the full paper. 

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What are the EMFA’s objectives?

The proliferation of digital services has exponentially changed the way in which we engage with information, bringing both opportunities and challenges. In an increasingly digital world, the dual threats of mis- and disinformation are a huge challenge for democratic societies, especially at a time when almost half of the world will hold elections in 2024. And as we look at how media consumption evolves over time, many more citizens are now consuming their information online. In this context, the primary objectives of the EMFA are to ensure media plurality, as well as editorial and functional independence of public media, and to protect journalists across the EU. 

Misinformation is the sharing of inaccurate information. Disinformation is the sharing of inaccurate information, with the intention to mislead.

CC’s support for journalists 

Access to verified information is a basic human right and an issue we care deeply about at CC, especially as part of our work on Open Journalism. In 2023, we published A Journalist’s Guide to Creative Commons, which offers practical advice on how to make the most out of CC licenses in journalism and encourages journalists to openly license their outputs.

We find that CC-licensed news articles can dramatically increase their spread. The Conversation, a nonprofit network of eight international news sites publishing hundreds of useful articles of news and analysis each week under CC licenses, reports that around 60% of their readership comes from republished articles. Furthermore, small news outlets, lacking budgets for image subscriptions, turn to CC-licensed images on platforms like Flickr for free access to media.

Policy engagement with the EU

Starting with our Statement on the Introduction of the EU Media Freedom Act, we have provided context and input into the EU policy making process regarding the costs and risks of disinformation,  through parliamentary hearings and engagement on the EMFA text itself. We have outlined how our licenses and our community-based work can support free and fair access to pluralist media content as well as defend independence of information for citizens, whether they access their information through more traditional channels (TV, radio, newsprint) or more modern, digital channels. 

Our efforts centered on Article 17, which introduced the so-called “media exception,” thus creating special privileges for some incumbent, traditional media such as commercial newspapers and broadcasters. We argued that such a provision would disfavor smaller and independent creators, interfere with policies aimed at protecting users from harmful information, and have implications for how all people are able to share their creativity and knowledge online. 

EMFA: A positive step forward but not the end of the road

While we welcome adoption of the EMFA, we believe the EU must remain active and vigilant in the fight against disinformation, resolute in its defense of independent journalism, and tireless in its defense of media plurality. We remain concerned about several aspects of the EMFA, particularly around the “media exception,” including: 

• Public media should not get a lighter treatment than private media: We believe that public media do not inherently have lower risks of disinformation. So while we welcome the provisions on ownership transparency, we feel the text still falls short in providing lighter touch provisions for state-owned, state-funded media outlets which may hide behind domestic standards bodies and regulators.
• Traditional vs new media – same standards should apply to both: We remain unconvinced by the inferred assumption that public channels, which often tend to be “traditional” media outlets such as radio and TV, are more “reliable” than private media outlets, in particular digital ones. Citizens have a right to expect that all media, irrespective of ownership structure or interfaces used, should respect the same norms and standards. 
• Content moderation provisions risk exacerbating dis- and misinformation:  We support the premise that decisions on content moderation by all operators, including very large online platforms, do not per se negatively affect media freedom. However, we fear the 24-hour “must-carry” obligation could have the perverse effect of allowing dis- and misinformation to spread further and faster. The “going viral” nature of social media and platforms is a challenge to balancing content moderation vs. robust controls to limit arbitrary removal of information. Despite the EMFA’s creation of an appeals process, the final text still lacks appropriate checks and balances to ensure content moderation can be practically enforced in a robust, proportionate way across all platforms. We also fear this could risk undermining the Digital Services Act implementation and encourage other stakeholders to request similar privileges in content moderation policies, creating a patchwork of potentially inconsistent rules. 

In short, we strongly believe journalism provides a crucial public service. Access to verifiable information and stories that question the underlying terrain of power is critical to all democratic societies. Open-access information provides the strongest collective bulwark against the societally corrosive effects of mis/disinformation in the public arena. 

While the EMFA may not be applicable by the time EU citizens cast their votes in June this year, we applaud the EU’s efforts to strengthen its regime in this important area. CC will continue to engage with policymakers to enhance the sharing of knowledge and defend the basic rights and freedoms enshrined in the EU acquis. 

For more information on our work on policy and on open journalism, contact us at info@creativecommons.org.

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Over the last year, Creative Commons (CC) worked with other stakeholders to support open science and open source in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) and, specifically, the EU AI Act. This policy debate has now ratcheted up in the U.S. as well, after President Biden directed the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the Department of Commerce to start a public consultation process regarding “Dual Use Foundation Artificial Intelligence Models with Widely Available Model Weights.”

This week, we joined a broad coalition of civil society and leading academics urging a tailored, evidence-driven approach. The letter highlights the critical benefits that open models can provide, and encourages the government to consider carefully the best ways to address the marginal risks that openness can create. As the letter states, “We do not claim that openness is always beneficial, and there are some situations where openness may exacerbate risks from AI.” However, risk should be evaluated relative to alternatives (e.g., the use of closed models or other digital tools to accomplish the same ends) and may be addressed through less restrictive means than direct limits on openness.

Read the full letter.

For more information on CC’s works on AI, contact us at info@creativecommons.org

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