It’s the end of the line for the EU’s proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. The dramatic negative effects of upload filters would be disastrous to the vision Creative Commons cares about as an organisation and global community. The continued inclusion of Article 13 makes the directive impossible to support as-is.

Last month the Parliament, Council, and Commission completed their trilogue negotiations and reached a final compromise on the copyright directive text. Soon thereafter the EU Member State Ambassadors and the Parliament’s legal affairs committee gave a green light, now leading to a final vote in the plenary session of the Parliament scheduled for March 26.

Next week all 751 MEPs will get a chance vote on whether to adopt the copyright directive, or send it back to the drawing board.

Upload filters will turn the web upside down

From a copyright perspective, Article 13 turns how the web works on its head. It will require nearly all for-profit web platforms that permit user generated content uploads to either get a license for all user uploads or otherwise install copyright filters and censor content. If the platforms don’t comply, they could become liable for massive copyright infringement damages. The logical outcome is that this will harm existing platforms and prevent the creation and flourishing of new and innovative services in Europe because those new players don’t have the money, pull, or expertise to conclude licensing deals or build (or pay for) the necessary filtering technologies. Instead, the established companies will simply become more entrenched and dominant, as services like YouTube have a headstart on both of these fronts. We cannot support a copyright ecosystem that will simply entrench the extensive market power of incumbent players and, at the same time, create unnecessary roadblocks for new platforms and services that stimulate creativity and sharing.

This reversal of the liability regime that all but ensures upload filters will need to be implemented has another disconcerting consequence: user rights are thrown out the window because filtering technologies can’t possibly know when a work is infringing and when a work is being legally used under an exception to copyright. Such a system will almost surely curtail freedom of expression, as platforms will mitigate any risk by simply blocking content regardless of whether the use is sanctioned under the exceptions to copyright, such as for criticism, quotation, and parody.

The road to here

Over the last several years, Creative Commons has been working to support copyright changes in Europe that champion the commons and the public interest. We’ve done this as part of the Communia Association, civil society organisations, research groups, user rights activists, and open web advocates. CC submitted comments to the initial consultation from the Commission, made a joint analysis and suggestions for improvement with our network in Europe, advocated to protect scientific research, and offered voting recommendations on many provisions within the sweeping copyright directive.

Communia and other NGOs on the ground in Europe have supported positive changes to key aspects of the reform that would benefit research, education, and the public good, particularly working to improve the exceptions for text and data mining and education, as well changes to support the public domain and improve the ability of cultural heritage institutions to make content available online. The tireless efforts of organisations and individuals who stepped up to defend the commons and improve various parts of the directive that supports robust user rights should be celebrated. Their detailed research, writing, and advocacy has done so much to improve many parts not-so-well covered yet incredibly important pieces of the directive.

What you can do now

CC believes that our vision of universal access to research and education and full participation in culture will only be achieved when we all have copyright policies that truly promote creativity and protect users rights in the digital age. With Article 13, it’s no exaggeration to say that it’ll fundamentally change the way people are able to use the internet and share online. Even with some of the minor improvements to other aspects of the copyright reform package, on balance a directive that contains Article 13 will do more harm than good.

If you’re in Europe go to https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/ to tell your MEPs you don’t support a copyright reform that turns how we create and share on the web upside down. If Article 13 can’t be removed, then policymakers should reject the reform outright and begin again.

The post Europeans should tell Parliament to vote NO to copyright filters appeared first on Creative Commons.

At A Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain at the Internet Archive, I teased a new product vision for CC Search that gets more specific than our ultimate goal of providing access to all 1.4 billion CC licensed and public domain works on the web. I’m pleased to present that refined vision, which is focused on building a product that promotes not just discovery, but reuse of openly-licensed and public domain works. We want your feedback in making it a reality. What kinds of images do you most need and desire to reuse when creating your own works? Along that vein, what organizational collections would you like to see us prioritizing for inclusion? Where can we make the biggest difference for you and your fellow creators?

Vision

Our 2019 vision is:

“CC Search is a leading tool for creators looking to discover and reuse free resources with greater ease and confidence.”

The vision centers on reuse — CC will prioritize and build for users who seek to not only discover free resources in the commons, but who seek to reuse these resources with greater ease and confidence, and for whom in particular the rights status of these works may be important. This approach means that CC will shift from its “quantity first” approach (front door to 1.4 billion works) to prioritizing content that is more relevant and engaging to creators.

We made our assumptions based on a combination of user research, whatever quantitative data we could get our hands on (e.g. analytics on previous iterations of search), and pure conjecture (based on anecdotal evidence from our community), or what in the lean start-up world is called a leap of faith.

How we expect reuse to happen

The base catalog is the database of all CC works we are continuing to gather and grow. We envision users will be able to access this catalog in three ways:

1. Through CC Search — the default front end you see now.
2. Through some curation on CC Search — you could imagine different portals for different kinds of users, e.g. educators seeking open textbooks.
3. Through CC Search being integrated directly into other sites and software via a CC API, e.g. CC Search in Google Docs.

Once the user accesses the work, the user takes the next step to reuse the work. They download it, which means they make a copy. The user who is also a creator takes a step further; they attribute the author of the work in their new creation, ideally through the automatic and easy ways we provide for them to do this. Both download and attribution are ways a user reuses the work in a way that implicates copyright and thereby the Creative Commons license. And both are potential ways we can learn how that work is used in the wild.

Through learning about how CC works are reused, we will be able to validate our hypotheses and know we are on the right track (or not). We will also be better able to tell the story or journey of the works’ impact, which speaks to a key insight from our user research:

“People like seeing how their work is used, where it goes, and who it touches, but have no easy way to find this out.”

This learning is the hard part of our work, and what we still need to figure out. How do we track and learn about reuse in a way that is effective, but also aligns with our values and respects user privacy?

User research & usability testing

In 2019, we will focus on images and texts, with a stretch goal of including audio files. Accordingly, we will focus any user research and usability testing on groups of people that reuse these works in a meaningful way, specifically, “Creators making new works using existing free content.” A few we will start with are:

• Creators making designs, imagery and art works (commercial or independent)
• Creators illustrating a text or text-based resource (blog, journalistic articles, educational/academic texts or presentations)
• Creators making a video

We’ll also being doing some separate user research to add open texts, which is a different bucket of people than the creators above, because we think (but don’t know) that most people seeking open texts are really seeking access, and not reuse, when it comes to CC Search. For example, we think that community college faculty looking for open textbooks are mainly seeking to access all open textbooks in one place.

As we talk to users, collect user feedback, and conduct usability testing, we may learn differently.

Roadmap

Based on this new 2019 vision and strategy, here are some of our key deliverables for the year.

The complete roadmap is available here, which also includes a pipeline of ideas. The pipeline of ideas is the master list of ideas from the community that we will revisit at the end of each quarter to decide what makes it in the roadmap. The roadmap is an evolving document and we welcome your comments and feedback.

The Team

The current CC Search team is led by CC’s Director of Engineering, Kriti Godey, and myself, CC’s Director of Product and Research. The other members are Sophine Clachar (Data Engineer), Alden Page (Back End Engineer), Breno Ferreira (Front End Engineer) and Sarah Pearson (Product Counsel).

Get involved

We are growing a vibrant community of open source developers and users willing to test and provide feedback on CC Search.

If you’re a current or potential user of CC Search, join the #cc-usability channel at the Creative Commons Slack (https://slack-signup.creativecommons.org) where we regularly engage the group for feedback on new features.

If you’re a developer, check out Creative Commons Open Source, a hub for the CC developer community and the #cc-developers channel at the Creative Commons Slack.

The post CC Search: A New Vision, Strategy & Roadmap for 2019 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Yesterday, NBC News published a story about IBM’s work on improving diversity in facial recognition technology and the dataset that they gathered to further this work. The dataset includes links to one million photos from Flickr, many or all of which were apparently shared under a Creative Commons license. Some Flickr users were dismayed to learn that IBM had used their photos to train the AI, and had questions about the ethics, privacy implications, and fair use of such a dataset being used for algorithmic training. We are reaching out to IBM to understand their use of the images, and to share the concerns of our community.

CC is dedicated to facilitating greater openness for the common good. In general, we believe that the use of publicly available data on the Internet has led to greater innovation, collaboration, and creativity. But there are also real concerns that data can be used for negative activities or negative outcomes.

While we do not have all the facts regarding the IBM dataset, we are aware that fair use allows all types of content to be used freely, and that all types of content are collected and used every day to train and develop AI. CC licenses were designed to address a specific constraint, which they do very well: unlocking restrictive copyright. But copyright is not a good tool to protect individual privacy, to address research ethics in AI development, or to regulate the use of surveillance tools employed online. Those issues rightly belong in the public policy space, and good solutions will consider both the law and the community norms of CC licenses and content shared online in general.

I hope we will use this moment to build on the important principles and values of sharing, and engage in discussion with those using our content in objectionable ways, and to speak out on and help shape positive outcomes on the important issues of privacy, surveillance, and AI that impact the sharing of works on the web.

We are taking this opportunity to speak to this particular type of reuse – improving artificial intelligence tools designed for facial recognition through the reuse of content found on the web (not just CC-licensed content) – to help clarify how the licenses work in this context. We have published new FAQs here that we will continue to update.

If you have comments or questions, please write CC at info@creativecommons.org. We will also be creating other opportunities to engage in public discussion in the coming weeks and months. We look forward to joining these discussions as we look for ways to resolve ethical public policy issues around data, AI, and machine learning as a community.

The post Use and Fair Use: Statement on shared images in facial recognition AI appeared first on Creative Commons.

I’m happy to share Flickr’s announcement today that all CC-licensed and public domain images on the platform will be protected and exempted from upload limits. This includes images uploaded in the past, as well as those yet to be shared. In effect, this means that CC-licensed images and public domain works will always be free on Flickr for any users to upload and share.

Flickr is one of the most important repositories of openly-licensed content on the web, with over 500M images in their collection, shared by millions of photographers, libraries, archives, and museums around the world. The company was an early adopter of CC licenses, and was bought by Yahoo! and later sold to Verizon. Last year, Flickr was sold again, this time to a family-owned photo service called SmugMug. Many were justifiably concerned about the future of Flickr, an essential component of the digital Commons.

Once the sale of Flickr was announced, CC began working closely with Don and Ben MacAskill of SmugMug, Flicker’s new owners, to protect the works that users have shared. Last November, Flickr posted that they were moving to a new paid service model that would restrict the number of free uploads to 1,000 images. Many, including Creative Commons, were concerned this could cause millions of works in the Commons to be deleted. We continued to work with Flickr, and a week later, they announced that CC-licensed images that had already been shared on the platform would be exempted from upload limits.

Today’s announcement takes that commitment one step further, and ensures that every CC-licensed or public domain image shared on Flickr is protected for all to use and re-use. It’s a significant commitment. Don and Ben MacAskill and the whole Flickr team have been supportive of CC and Flickr’s responsibility to steward the Commons from day one, and have been open and collaborative with Creative Commons all along.

For users of Flickr (and no doubt also for Flickr staff) it’s been a tumultuous time. Migrating to new business models is difficult, and will undoubtedly anger some users, especially those used to getting things for free. However, we’ve seen how unsustainable and exploitative free models can be, and I’m glad that Flickr hasn’t turned to surveillance capitalism as the business model for its sustainability plan – but that does mean they’ll have to explore other options.

Choosing to allow all CC-licensed and public domain works to be uploaded and shared without restrictions or limits comes at a real financial cost to Flickr, which is paid in part by their Pro users. We believe that it’s a valuable investment in the global community of free culture and open knowledge, and it’s a gift to everyone. We’re grateful for the ongoing investment and enthusiasm from the entire Flickr team, and their commitment to support users who choose to share their works. We will continue to work together to help educate Flickr’s users about their options when sharing works online, and to support the communities contributing to the growth and preservation of a vibrant collection of openly-licensed and public domain works.

The post Big Flickr Announcement: All CC-licensed images will be protected appeared first on Creative Commons.

We are proud to announce that Creative Commons has been accepted as a mentor organization for the 2019 Google Summer of Code program.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a annual global program through which Google awards stipends to university students who write code for free and open-source software projects during their school break. CC has been a mentor organization for GSoC on seven previous occasions, but our last participation was in 2013, so we are glad to be reviving the tradition and hosting students again.

We’ve compiled a list of project ideas for students to choose from when submitting their work proposal. There’s a lot of variety to choose from – adding features to CC Search, reviving older CC products, creating entirely new tools that increase the reach of CC licenses, figuring out ways to better present our legal and technical work, and more. There is definitely room for creativity – the project ideas are defined in broad terms, and students may also choose to submit a proposal for an original idea.

One of the goals of the CC engineering team this year is to build an active developer community around our projects. We’ve been writing free and open-source software for over a decade. Lately, we haven’t done the best job of enabling external developers to contribute to those projects. Hosting Google Summer of Code is our first step to change that for the better, and we’re also actively working on several other improvements to our code and processes, such as:

• Creative Commons Open Source, a hub for the CC developer community.
• Making CC Search’s development more transparent. Our current sprint workload is already public and we’ll be releasing a roadmap soon.
• General cleanup, documentation, and contribution guidelines for our projects.
• A technical blog.

If you want to stay updated on our work, join our brand new developer mailing list, the #creativecommons-dev IRC channel on freenode, or the #cc-developers and #cc-gsoc channels on our Slack community. And if you’re a student (or know a student), please consider submitting a Google Summer of Code proposal! It’s a great way to get an introduction to open-source, build real-world skills, work on interesting technical challenges, and help advance CC’s mission.

The post CC + Google Summer of Code 2019 appeared first on Creative Commons.