Yesterday we learned that the Tribunal de Bogotá—the Colombian appellate court—has affirmed the lower court’s acquittal of Diego Gómez.

Gómez is a scientist from Colombia who has been criminally prosecuted for the last three years for sharing an academic paper online. When Diego was a student in conservation biology in Colombia, he had poor access to many of the resources and databases that would help him conduct his research. He found and shared an academic paper online so that others could read and learn from it. Gómez didn’t get permission to reshare the article, and subsequently was prosecuted for copyright infringement. He faced up to eight years in prison, along with a substantial monetary fine.

In May 2017 Gómez was acquitted of criminal charges. But within days of the ruling, the article author’s lawyer appealed the decision, meaning that even after several years of criminal proceedings, Diego’s case continued to the appellate court.

Yesterday’s decision confirms the lower court’s ruling.

A global campaign—Compartir no es Delito (Sharing is not a Crime)—has been supporting Diego since 2014. The action was spearheaded by Colombian digital rights organisation Fundación Karisma.

Instead of prosecuting students for sharing knowledge, governments and communities should be encouraging the free exchange of scientific information by reinforcing positive norms around scholarship and collaboration, promoting open access to research, and eliminating out of control copyright remedies that serve no reasonable public interest purpose. Furthermore, we should encourage our governments to boost national legislation that promotes the release of public funded research results as open access.

You can read more about Diego’s case here, and learn about open access here.

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The “journey to open” looks different for all of us. For some, it’s the realization that we can access, modify and share educational resources for free; for others it’s about fundamentally changing the way we think about student learning, pedagogy, and ownership and control of the resources we use in schools, colleges and universities. For many of us, the choice to go open is a reflection of our principles, politics and values.

My journey to open was an actual journey. When I started as the Director of eLearning for the Washington State Community Colleges, I toured the state listening to students’ stories about their journeys to a degree and a better life. In my travels, I discovered that many students had to make difficult decisions related to the cost of their education. Students told me were forced to decide between buying a textbook and taking one more class, paying for their child’s doctor’s appointment, or fixing a broken car. The students I met were falling behind because of the high cost of textbooks; they asked me “how can I succeed in my class if I can’t afford the required resources?” I made it my mission to change how we use public funds to build, license, maintain and share educational resources to ensure equal opportunity for all students, no matter their economic situation.

Education is a fundamental human right and essential for the exercise of all other human rights. Because we can share digital open educational resources (OER) for near $0, I believe we have a moral and ethical obligation to do so.

Will you chip in at $5 per month to ensure all students have the opportunity to learn?

As a taxpayer, I expect my government to ensure all publicly funded educational resources be openly licensed. People around the world expect the same – the public should have open access to the educational and research resources it funds.

This year, Creative Commons helped:

• Bangladesh national government draft an open licensing policy
• European Union Erasmus+ program update to its open licensing policy
• US Department of Education adopt an open license rule
• Global Book Alliance integrate open licensing policies into its funding proposals
• 30 national ministries of education adopt the 2017 Ljubljana OER Action Plan at the 2nd World OER Congress
• UN Environment Program draft an open licensing policy on research and educational resources.
• US State Department publish its Open Licensing Playbook for Federal Agencies
• The Commonwealth publish an “OER Policy Brief” for its ministers of education.

Only $5 per month will help us ensure that all publicly funded educational resources are publicly accessible.

At CC, we’re leading the charge for Open Education together with our mighty group of 62015+ CC Open Education Platform members. We’re growing the number of open education leaders globally through training, mentorship and projects. For us, that means mainstreaming open education content, practices and policies, working with governments to make all publicly funded education resources openly licensed, co-leading the open education movement, and creating new production and procurement models that scale OER adoption.

I’m passionate about changing the education landscape – can you contribute?

Governments, public education institutions, educators and students need to fight for universal, inclusive and equitable education opportunities for all.

Help us lead the charge.

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What are the values that resonate the most for you in the Commons? Transparency? Innovation? Sharing? Gratitude? In today’s polarized political environment, how can we come together to champion values that we share, and make the world a better place?

I’ve repeated three truths to guide CC’s message, and I’d like to share them with you as this year comes to a close:

• Everything is political
• Pick big fights with your enemies, not small fights with your friends
• Collective acts are our collective power

These three concepts guide my work at CC – they’re how we build our communities through organized political action and how we pick our battles, from copyright and policy reform to open access to universal access to research and education.
But CC’s work is not only copyright policy and free content on the internet. Our community is where the real power of CC lives, and this year has shown that our work is only possible in collaboration with our Global Network of lawyers, academics, creators, copyfighters, librarians, educators, and makers of all types, in every sector. We’ve developed a brand new collaborative strategy to unleash that community, and we hope you’ll join us.
To build that momentum, we announced a number of incredible partnerships this year, from our landmark release of over 400,000 images with the Met Museum to the unveiling of #NEWPALMYRA, a tribute to our late friend Bassel Khartabil. In August, we joined with Wikimedia and Mozilla to fund a fellowship in his honor.

The need for collective action has never been greater and our work never more encompassing – that’s why I’m asking you to join us with a donation of any amount.

This year has been a year of record growth in the commons, but it’s also been a record year of growth for our movement. In April, we convened our biggest summit ever in Toronto. In collaboration with a 30 person volunteer program committee, we brought together 400 commoners from around the world, including 100 scholarship recipients. Five brilliant international women delivered memorable keynotes. In a time when good news feels hard to come by, our summit was a moment of hopefulness, gathering people from around the globe to share successes and discuss the future of our movement for equal access to knowledge. This year, we’ll be gathering from April 13-15, 2018, and we’d love to see you there.

Our movement is only growing stronger by the day, but we couldn’t have done it without your support.

I’m filled with gratitude for our community and hope that you step up to join in the next phase of our work, including updating our tools and licenses and launching our CC Certificates program to train librarians, educators, and others on CC, copyright, and open culture. We’ll be announcing new legal tools, new community empowerment programs, and even more partnerships in 2018. We can’t wait to share it all with you.

PS We’ll be launching even more ways to donate monthly to the commons. Only $5 per month will ensure our work continues. Can you join?

Donate now

 

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The Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary Government Data Act (OPEN Government Data Act) has passed the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill’s text was included as Title II in the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act (H.R. 4174). If ultimately enacted, the bill would require all government data to be made open by default: machine-readable and freely-reusable. Essentially, the legislation would codify the 2013 Executive Order on Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information.

According the bill text:

‘open Government data asset’ means a public data asset that is

(A) machine-readable;
(B) available (or could be made available) in an open format;
(C) not encumbered by restrictions that would impede the use or reuse of such asset; and
(D) based on an underlying open standard that is maintained by a standards organization;

[and]

‘open license’ means a legal guarantee that a data asset is made available

(A) at no cost to the public; and
(B) with no restrictions on copying, publishing, distributing, transmitting, citing, or adapting such asset.

Along with the Data Coalition, Sunlight Foundation, and dozens of other organisations, Creative Commons has been supportive of the push to make government data available under open licenses or in the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. In an earlier letter, we said this legislation will allow the United States to remain a world leader on open data, ensure the value of this public resource will continue to grow as the government unlocks and creates new data sets, and encourage businesses, nonprofits, and others to invest in innovative tools that make use of open government data.

H.R. 4174 was passed by a unanimous voice vote. Now the Senate will consider its counterpart to the House bill, S. 2046.

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Today over 70 international copyright experts released the Washington Principles on Copyright Balance in Trade Agreements. The document, endorsed by Creative Commons, urges trade negotiators “to support policies like fair use, safe harbor provisions, and other exceptions and limitations that permit and encourage access to knowledge, flourishing creativity, and innovation.”

The principles were collaboratively drafted at a meeting in Washington, D.C. last month, with input from a wide range of legal academics and public interest organisations from Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The principles are released to coincide with the fifth round of talks of the renegotiation of NAFTA, which takes place this week in Mexico City.

Signers lay out the following copyright principles to ensure consumers’ digital rights:

• Protect and promote copyright balance, including fair use
• Provide technology-enabling exceptions, such as for search engines and text- and data-mining
• Require safe harbor provisions to protect online platforms from users’ infringement
• Ensure legitimate exceptions for anti-circumvention, such as documentary filmmaking, cybersecurity research, and allowing assistive reading technologies for the blind
• Adhere to existing multilateral commitments on copyright term
• Guarantee proportionality and due process in copyright enforcement

In the lead up to the renegotiation of NAFTA, we urged negotiators not to expand the copyright provisions to create new (and likely more onerous) rules than those that already exist in the agreement. We said that if the copyright provisions must be reconsidered, a negotiating objective should at a minimum be to advocate for stronger protections for copyright limitations and exceptions; user rights should be granted a mandatory and enforceable standing alongside the rights of authors.

But no one (or more accurately, no one from any public interest or consumer rights organisation) knows what’s in the agreement. NAFTA, like TPP and other trade agreements before it, is being negotiated completely in the dark.

It’s safe to assume that copyright and other intellectual property rights will continue to be included in bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations, so it’s imperative that the negotiations be radically reformed to make the proceedings transparent, inclusive and accountable. We believe it is unacceptable that binding rules on intellectual property, access to medicines, and a variety of other trade-related sectors will be reworked within a process that is inaccessible and often hostile to input from members of the public.

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