In a unique joint translation process, community members from Creative Commons Portugal and Brazil came together to release a single Portuguese translation of the CC 4.0 license suite. Portuguese is the sixth most spoken language in the world, and the translation will reach over 220 million Portuguese speakers around the world.

Thank you to our translation team: Teresa Nobre, CC Portugal; Mariana Valente, CC Brazil; Pedro Mizukami, CC Brazil; Luiz Moncau, CC Brazil; and Eduardo Magrani, CC Brazil.

The first draft of the license translation was submitted in July 2014, with a public comment period from November 2014 to January 2015. This month’s translation represents years of work by the Creative Commons Portuguese and Brazilian communities, and marks the 18th translation of 4.0 (with many more to come!)

Parabéns pela tradução, CC Brasil e CC Portugal!

View the translation

Veja a tradução

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Today, the European Parliament the Legal Affairs Committee voted in favor of the most harmful provisions of the proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market.

The outcome reflects a disturbing path toward increasing control of the web to benefit powerful rights holders at the expense of the open internet, freedom of expression, and the rights of users and the public interest in the digital environment.

The committee voted 13-12 in favor of Article 11, the provision known as the “link tax,” which grants an additional right to press publishers requiring anyone using snippets of journalistic content to first get a license or pay a fee to the publisher for its use online. Article 11 is ill-suited to address the challenges in supporting quality journalism, and it will further decrease competition and innovation in news delivery. Similar efforts have already failed miserably in Germany and Spain.

The committee voted 15-10 in favor of Article 13, the provision that would require online platforms to monitor their users’ uploads and try to prevent copyright infringement through automated filtering. Article 13 will limit freedom of expression, as the required upload filters won’t be able to tell the difference between copyright infringement and permitted uses of copyrighted works under limitations and exceptions. It puts into jeopardy the sharing of video remixes, memes, parody, and code, even works that include openly licensed content.

As Communia reports, the committee voted against nearly all measures that would attempt to grant more rights to users, such as commonsense proposals for limitations and exceptions for freedom of panorama and user generated content. The committee adopted some positive improvements to the provisions having to do with education, access to works in the cultural heritage sector, and in research, but many of the changes are superficial, leaving the underlying effect of the article quite restrained.

Over the last months we contributed to massive online campaigns to #SaveTheLink, stop the #CensorshipMachines, protect education, and promote innovation in research and text and data mining. These efforts were organised by dozens of civil society and digital rights organizations, and hundreds of thousands of people made their voices heard in calling for a more progressive and balanced copyright in the EU.

The fight is not over. EDRi notes that there are several additional steps before the Directive can be fully adopted. In the vote today, the Parliament gave itself a mandate to negotiate a final deal with the EU Council (the EU Member States). But this decision can be challenged in the next plenary meeting (all 751 MEPs), where the Parliament could decide to reopen the copyright reform for debate within the larger forum, thus potentially offering an opportunity to make other changes to the text. This vote would likely happen on July 4.

The work to #FixCopyright in the EU is far from complete. We’ll be there advocating for copyright rules that protects and promotes the commons and the open web. We need your help to make sure that our voice is heard even louder this time.

The post European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee Gives Green Light to Harmful Link Tax and Pervasive Platform Censorship appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today, CC is pleased to announce the appointment of two new members of the Board of Directors, both prominent leaders and advocates in their fields. Congratulations to Amy Brand, Director of the MIT Press, and Delia Browne, National Copyright Director for the Council of Australian Government’s (COAG) Education Council and Copyright Advisory Group.

Amy Brand is Director of the MIT Press, one of the largest university presses in the world, and an important figure in open access publishing. The MIT Press is well-known for its publications in emerging fields of scholarship and its pioneering use of technology. Brand’s career spans a wide array of experiences in academia and scholarly communications. She received her doctorate in cognitive science from MIT and has held a number of positions in scholarly communications, publishing, and open information access at MIT, Digital Science, and Harvard before returning to the press in 2015 to serve as director. She is an Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and serves on the boards of Crossref, Duraspace, Altmetric, and Board on Research Data and Information of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. She’s currently working on her first documentary film, on women in science.

Delia Browne is a highly respected copyright lawyer and policy advocate who leads the National Copyright Unit (NCU) providing specialist copyright advice to Australian Schools and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutes with a focus on the rapidly changing digital teaching environment. A long time member of the Creative Commons Global Network, Delia is the Education Sector Lead of Creative Commons Australia and has attended every Creative Commons Global Summit since 2007 and she was an essential member of the community strategy team that authored CC’s Global Network Strategy. Delia is a strong advocate of the open education movement and has drafted a number of declarations and pieces of legislation including the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education and the Copyright Amendment on Disability Access and Other Measures Act 2017. She is a sought-after speaker and participates in many international conferences and think tanks on Copyright Law Reform and OER. She has represented Creative Commons at the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights and is dedicated to furthering the WIPO Limitations and Exception agenda particularly with regard to education. Delia is a co-founder and the President of Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) and a board director of the Australian Digital Alliance. She is also a member of the editorial board of Media and Arts Law Review and has taught Intellectual Property at the University of New Wales, Griffith University and the University of Auckland (her alma mater.)

These two women are excellent additions to our Board of Directors, joining with CC to fulfill our vision for open access to knowledge and a vibrant, usable Commons powered by collaboration and gratitude. We look forward to seeing all that they accomplish in their new appointments.

The post Creative Commons Announces New Board Members: Delia Browne and Amy Brand appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Lithuanian translation of the 4.0 CC licenses and CC0 is now completed. Both the licenses and CC0 translation can be viewed on the Creative Commons website.

The 4.0 translations are much anticipated by local heritage institutions as an online tool for evaluation of validity of rights and labelling content in the process of creation. The possibility to link the users directly to CC licenses and tools in Lithuanian is particularly welcome.

The Lithuanian translations were written by volunteer lawyers from the CC Lithuania team: Jurga Gradauskaitė; Rėda Pilipaitė, Paulius Jurčys, and Olegas Juška. The process was supervised by Prof. Vytautas Mizaras from the Faculty of Law at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania.

The CC Lithuania team will proceed with seminars and notifications to let potential users know of the possibility to use 4.0 in their local language and to reinforce the message of the benefits of labeling and sharing content.

The post Lithuanian translation of 4.0 available for use appeared first on Creative Commons.

As the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament is nearing a vote on the proposed reform of the EU copyright rules, time is running out to make your voice heard. The vote will take place on June 20.

The final copyright directive will have deep and lasting effects on the ability to create and share, to access and use education and research, and to support and grow diverse content platforms and information services. As it stands now, the copyright reform—especially Article 13—is a direct threat to the open web.  

Article 13 is the proposal that would require online platforms to monitor their users’ uploads and try to prevent copyright infringement through automated filtering.

If you’re in the EU go to https://saveyourinternet.eu/ and tell Members of the European Parliament to delete Article 13 from the copyright directive. From the website:

Article 13 will impose widespread censorship of all the content you share online, be it a parody video, a remix, a meme, a blog post, comments on Reddit, a piece of code, livestreaming your gaming experience, or even a link in a tweet.

The filtering requirement violates fundamental rights enshrined in existing EU law, such as the provision in the E-Commerce Directive that prohibits general monitoring obligations for internet platforms.

One example of the negative consequences of Article 13 is that it will limit freedom of expression, as the required upload filters won’t be able to tell the difference between copyright infringement and permitted uses of copyrighted works under limitations and exceptions. Article 13 fails to uphold rules that protect the ability of EU citizens to use copyright-protected works in transformative ways. And it puts into jeopardy the sharing of video remixes, memes, parody, and code, even works that include openly licensed content.

Now the European Parliament is the last line of defense that can put the copyright reform back on track—or at least remove the most harmful parts of the draft legislation, particularly Article 13.

To provide a little background, for the last several years the EU has been working on revising its rules on copyright. Ever since the European Commission released its lackluster draft Directive on copyright in 2016, Creative Commons and dozens of organisations have been engaging policymakers to make crucial changes in order to protect user rights and the commons, enable research and education, and promote creativity and business opportunities in the digital market.

A few weeks ago the ambassadors of the EU countries agreed to a version of Article 13 that fails to address the biggest shortcomings of the Commission’s original proposal, and in a number of ways actually makes it worse.

Contact Members of the European Parliament now!

Send your representatives an email, tweet, or phone call before June 20 and tell them you need copyright laws that protect an Internet where you can share news and culture with your friends and family, where you can expect to be treated fairly, and where your rights as EU citizens are protected. Tell them to delete Article 13.

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