The Create Refresh campaign is a new project to highlight the concerns of creators regarding the EU’s proposed changes to copyright law. Supporting organisations include Creative Commons, Kennisland, La Quadrature du Net, and others. Create Refresh is “calling on creators to be part of a movement to defend their right to create. [The] ultimate aim is to inspire a new solution for digital copyright that protects all creators and their careers.”
The initiative focuses on Article 13 of the European Commission’s copyright proposal, which would require all online services that permit user-generated uploads to install filters that can automatically detect, flag, and censor copyrighted material before the content even hits the web. The provision would apply to websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, and even noncommercial sites like Wikipedia.
Such a problematic requirement could be in conflict with other fundamental rights enshrined in existing EU law, such as the provision in the E-Commerce Directive that prohibits general monitoring obligations for internet platforms. Second, the content filtering mechanism would likely be unable to take into account other user rights, such as current limitations and exceptions to copyright. The proposal fails to establish rules that protect the ability of EU citizens to use copyright-protected works in transformative ways—such as video remixes. Or, as OpenMedia puts it, “automated systems are incapable of making sophisticated judgements and will inevitably err on the side of censoring creativity and speech that is perfectly legal.”
In the next few months the remaining European Parliament committees responsible for the reform will hold their votes on potential amendments to the Commission’s original plan. This includes the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), and the Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI). In addition, the Council of the European Union—essentially, the EU Member State governments led by the Estonian Presidency—has been floating proposed changes.
Create Refresh comes to the same conclusion as CC and dozens of other civil society organisations calling for a progressive copyright that protects both users and the public interest in the digital environment: Article 13 should be removed from the proposal.
Creators interested in contributing to the campaign can apply for a small grant to develop videos, artwork, or other creative works relating to Article 13 and freedom of expression. Check out Create Refresh on their website, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Civil society organisations including Creative Commons helped deliver a win against the restrictive IP terms of the TPP, which were developed secret and would have locked down content and restricted user rights.
For the last five years the Creative Commons community has been organising against the restrictive copyright provisions put forth in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). We’ve written letters demanding increased transparency, contributed to public events such as the Rock Against the TPP concerts, and drafted an analysis of the copyright-related aspects of the TPP. In that document we said, “there is no logical reason to increase the term of copyright: an extension would create a tiny private benefit at a great cost to the public.”
According to a statement released Saturday, the ministers of the remaining countries negotiating the TPP have “agreed on the core elements” of the deal. Of particular interest are about 20 “suspended provisions” outlined in an annex to the ministerial statement. Most of the provisions in the chapter on intellectual property have been “suspended,” meaning they likely will be excluded from future negotiations. This includes the proposed 20 year increase in copyright term and the introduction of criminal penalties for circumventing technological protection measures.
Ryan Merkley, CEO of Creative Commons, said, “The suspension of the IP section of TPP is a huge win for the public, delivered in large part because of activists around the world who opposed the secret agreement. They exposed the terms and ensured there were national debates and public debate.”
The U.S. has been out of the picture since January 2017, when President Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement three days into his administration. Since that time, the name of the trade pact has been changed from TPP to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The gigantic agreement still contains sweeping provisions regarding environmental regulation, pharmaceutical procurement, labor standards, food safety, and many other things. For nearly the last decade, it has been developed and negotiated completely in secret.
The news about the CPTPP comes during an active time of trade agreement talks, particularly in light of the re-negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), now being “modernized” by Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Concerning those talks, we argued, “the NAFTA provisions having to do with copyright would do more harm than good if there’s not a significant shift in the balance in favor of the rights for users and the public to reflect the reality of today’s digital users.” A fundamental flaw with CPTPP, NAFTA, and nearly all other trade agreement negotiations is that they are entirely opaque to the population governed by them. In a letter to NAFTA negotiators, we demanded reforms to make the proceedings more transparent, inclusive and accountable. 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.
All trade negotiations should be made through procedures that are transparent to the public and which include all stakeholders. Increased transparency and meaningful public participation will lead to better outcomes.
The negotiations of the CPTPP seem far from over, and it’s important to note that the provisions mentioned in the annex are only suspended, not removed entirely. Civil society organisations and consumer watchdog groups should continue to monitor the negotiations. But for now, the freezing of the worst parts of the IP chapter is a breath of fresh air in the otherwise dark, dank cave of trade policymaking.
The Creative Commons (CC) community has an ongoing interest in how traditional and new business models interact with, leverage, and give back to the commons. To address this topic, CC published its book “Made with Creative Commons” to show the full spectrum of open business models using CC licenses. The authors’ goal was to answer what many creators consider one of the most important questions of the digital age: how do creators make money to sustain what they do when they allow the world to freely reuse their work?
Aligned with this work, Instituto Educadigital, a partner with CC Brazil, recently published “Open Innovation in Education- Concepts and Business Models (Portuguese / English)”, a study authored by Priscila Gonsales and Débora Sebriam that explores how the open innovation movement can impact the educational marketplace. The study explores and addresses public policies that provide incentives for publicly funded digital resources, paths for companies to be financially sustainable, the role of private investment, and challenges for open innovation in education.
Open Innovation in Education explores how modern society – influenced by the digital revolution and widespread access to information – has often questioned the existing economic model. As opposed to the capitalist economy focused on competition for the sole purpose of profit, the concept of “economy of the common good” is based on collaboration, sharing and plurality. The term “open innovation” was first coined in the early 2000s by Professor Henry Chesbrough at Berkeley. The central idea behind open innovation is that innovation ceases to be something restricted to the private sphere of large corporations. Instead, it should be viewed as an action promoted by the engagement of multiple social actors, transparency and co-creation.
Open education shares common goals with open innovation. It has empowered educators and learners with increased access to knowledge, innovating pedagogical practices, and a culture of sharing. In order for open education to be adopted broadly in public education institutions, there needs to be engagement and dialogue between the State, the private sector, and civil society. To advance this mission, the world’s ministries of education and civil society education leaders recently met at the 2nd World OER Congress in Slovenia with the goal of mainstreaming open education to meet the education targets in the United Nations SDG4. The main output of the Congress – the 2017 Ljubljana OER Action Plan (English / French) called on governments to focus on five areas of action. #4 is “Developing sustainability models” – a call for governments to:
… analyse their goals and needs in education to support the development, adoption, maintenance, distribution, and evaluation of OER. This may include mechanisms to support that work financially and revisiting structures for mainstreaming OER, possibly including adjusting procurement models or the way teachers are incentivised to work on OER. Support and action in particular from governments and educational institutions, is important for the realization of these actions.
The challenge in the case of the private sector is to find viable business models that work with open education. Using reference cases of companies aligned with a collaborative economy, the study presents a viable model to evaluate financial sustainability under a different lens while examining more flexible and customizable products and services that generate value. As a result, more autonomy can be given to teachers when there is a better dialogue between public policies and social business initiatives resulting in innovative results.
This study shows the importance not only of thinking about innovative educational systems but also of considering innovation as something that goes beyond the technological device and that must be constructed in order to empower all actors in the education ecosystem.
We’ve been thinking about the role of Creative Commons in 2017, an era where much of digital sharing culture exists within walled garden platforms, with liking and commenting on insta-photos and sharing playlists that can only be streamed. In other words, the web has changed since CC initially launched in 2001, and we are grappling with what these changes mean for CC tools, originally intended to operate in spaces where download and remix were a given. The web is both open and closed, and CC-licensed content exists in both. In some spaces, like research and education, the value CC brings is still the same; CC tools are used to unlock knowledge and advance discovery and innovation. But what about when it comes to unlocking creativity in music, art, media, and emerging multimedia, such as VR, 3D, and software emulations? What value does CC provide in this changing landscape, and how can CC better provide this value?
We asked artists and researchers at the intersection of technology and social change to provide us with their insights last week at Rhizome, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting digital artists and fostering critical discussion about Internet culture. In a room full of artists, arts organizations, and open culture advocates, our featured speakers were:
Caroline Sinders, Digital Artist, BuzzFeed/Eyebeam Open Labs Fellow, Anti-harassment researcher at Wikipedia
Michael Mandiberg, Artist working at the intersection of technology and social change, Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, Co-founder of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia
Caroline Woolard, Artist and founder of cultural equity platforms BFAMFAPhD.com and StudyCollaboration.com, Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Hartford
We framed the conversation as an opportunity to gather fodder for CC’s next phase of work — CC is building a catalog of the commons and seeking to build services on top of this catalog via an API. As part of this project, we have the opportunity to build in features that simplify attribution, express gratitude, and perhaps most importantly, invite collaboration.
We invite you to provide your own thoughts to us in our Slack community and/or by email. We’ll be hosting additional conversations in 2018. What should those conversations explore and where should they be? Let us know, and read on for a recap of our conversation.
In your experience working with CC licensed media, or more broadly any kind of open content online, what factors have most influenced your participation and contributions?
Michael made an important (and surprising for us) distinction between his view of what it means to CC license his work and put it out into the world, versus using CC licenses in connection with contributions to a project. In his experience, he had treated these as two very different acts: CC licensing his own work as an individual experience, whereas editing Wikipedia (a CC-licensed project) was a community act. The factors catalyzing creators to CC license a work versus wanting to contribute to a community project are very different in his experience.
Resulting learning for us: How can we bring these experiences more closely together? How can we make it more apparent that CC licensing a work is also a community act because it is a contribution to the commons?
Caroline S. homed in immediately on the community incentive, responding that what motivates her is the community. For her, the community and how it’s governed factors into why and how she contributes. How welcoming is the community? How is it governed — by a community or by a proprietary platform? How safe do people feel in the space? Is the actual contribution part of an ongoing conversation, e.g. live editing? CC-licensing seems embedded in communities like Wikipedia as almost a political act, as users sign on to share and contribute according to a set of open values.
Caroline W. surfaced an incentive that was both individual and communal, with the community act enhancing the individual experience:
“I work collaboratively because thought happens in real time. I want to be in dialogue at all times with people I think are smart. You want to encounter difference at all times and encounter change slowly. It’s harder to work alone.”
What unexpected behavior or community norms have emerged “in the wild,” in spite of the best laid plans/designs? How have these instances informed your thinking and work going forward?
Caroline S. said one unexpected result of making data sets open was the treating and thinking of data sets as “art,” aka digital communication and literacy bringing in a new phase of data literacy. And then further if the data does not represent certain groups, the consequences of using that data set are multiplied.
Caroline W. agreed, saying, “No tool is better than the people,” and that any tool needs to be facilitated by a group of people in order to use the tool appropriately — and even then, one can’t fully control the results. One example of an unexpected result was the piloting of a barter network under the assumption that the community members would govern themselves as a commons. Ultimately, without any facilitation for the tool in place, members treated the network as a zero-sum game, reinforcing capitalist structures that had no original place in the design. To mitigate this, she believes that up front facilitation and a cultural shift that combines online with offline face-to-face meetings is key.
“No tool is better than the people.”
Michael said the more open and collaborative a project is, the more unexpected the outcomes, especially with the micro-relationships underneath the collaborations. For example, he highlighted the now infamous issue with the American Women Novelists subcategory that relegated women novelists to a different page than the main page featuring male writers.
Caroline S. said one way to mitigate such occurrences is to have a code of conduct, which would help to establish and articulate norms, and also help define bad behavior. Anytime you’re collaborating with people, this should be clearly defined (rather than simply presumed or implied), and it can be flexible, but still provide some sort of structure.
In response to the opportunity for CC generally, the room chimed in with ideas, such as an analog of CC for codes of conduct, e.g. a community license, or some set of standardized rules. Caroline W. suggested conceptualizing art and design as “open access,” where, like Wikipedia, one could fork and debate edits, and version work as a way to involve the community in the work itself.
We closed the night with a question about sustainability, with regards to both the financial and social life of a project.
Michael pointed out that opening up a work inherently makes it sustainable, giving the project a life of its own years later when unintended uses are made of it. For example, a project he developed that involved lampshades for bicycles wasn’t ever adopted by the big manufacturers at the time, but now a derivative is being used on the back of helmets. The important thing is for his version of the project to have been self-sustaining long enough for someone else to take it and build on it.
Caroline S. said that the question for a sustainable community isn’t so much economic as social; it isn’t whether you are saving people money, it is whether you are creating things that make people feel better and want to get involved. She brought us all back to the meta point about our own research and insights into this field of online communities and behavior, and how outside of this event, the day-to-day work of a designer/researcher in this space is challenging because they have no insight into their counterparts’ research and work at commercial platforms. As such, CC gathering researchers and platform representatives together in the same room is valuable in and of itself!
It’s Open Access Week, the yearly global event to raise broad awareness about the opportunities and benefits for open access to scientific and scholarly research. Open Access Week—now in its 10th year—also mobilises action for progressive policy changes so that researchers and the public get immediate online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and reuse those results.
This year’s theme is “Open In Order To…”—an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available.
I get inspired when I think about what we’d be capable of if we agree to work together without restriction. This is humanity at its most powerful.
Since I wrote that piece, CC’s international community has surged ahead as a worldwide network of advocates through our Global Network Strategy. We’ve launched the CC Certificates Beta, which will teach hundreds of librarians, educators, and more how to become expert advocates and practitioners for open licensing. We joined the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative at the White House, released a crucial new tool for authors to reclaim their rights, and collaborated with other leading organizations in the open movement, such as Wikimedia, Mozilla, Fundación Karisma, Communia Association, Authors Alliance, and SPARC (the organizers of OA Week).
At the center of our work, we always ask: How can we help global communities come together in service of collective goals? How do we unlock creativity and knowledge as public resources that everyone can use to advance the common good? How do we embed collaboration, inclusion, and equity into our approach?
If it wasn’t so well-established, the traditional model of academic publishing would be considered scandalous. Billions in research funding is provided by governments, foundations, and institutions to advance the public welfare, researchers and editors submit their work for free to journals, and still much of it is still locked behind paywalls. Much of the entrenched academic publishing system continues to withhold crucial access from the general public through embargos, paywalls, and excessive “processing fees” for open access licenses.
The moral case for open access is strong—scholarly publishing is going to have to change, and some of the most needed updates are already on the way—but I’m hopeful that publishers and the structures of academia that entrench their influence will pick up the pace. Some forward looking publishers are seeking new models, while a few holdouts are hanging on to lap up the last drops before the tap is turned off. Those who adapt and move with this rising tide can be tomorrow’s leaders. Those who don’t? Well, no one really misses Kodak.
Before I met with former VP Joe Biden’s team at the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, we asked community members to tell us what open access for cancer research would mean to them. I expected to hear from doctors and patients. What shocked me was how many parents, husbands, wives, and children I heard from, who are desperately seeking knowledge to help their loved ones who are sick. We shared some of their stories on Medium last year, and they remain a moving reminder as to why I do this work, why I lead Creative Commons in this question of access, the basis of which is a fundamental human right to know.
There is simply no moral case that justifies withholding access to knowledge that could advance discovery or alleviate suffering, especially when the public paid for it in the first place. The World Health Organization recognized the power of openness to create faster vaccines when it called for research sharing as Zika affected mothers and their newborn babies. But why not for all research done in the public interest? Nearly everyone has utilized the power of the internet to research an issue close to them—to learn more about their health or the health of a loved one, to prepare for a job interview, to receive and share news, or simply to learn something cool. There is amazing research happening all over the world—unlocking it is more than simply an issue of access, it is one of equality and human rights.
Movements have to be guided by their values, and while all too often, it becomes “us-versus-them”, sometimes it’s clear that change will require disruption, and the end of old empires. Creative Commons and other open access groups champion the “free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” I’ll work with anyone who steps forward to achieve this goal, but like the looming end of big oil, it’s only a matter of time until change arrives. The question is how long we will allow these old models to continue before we force new systems to come into the mainstream? Perhaps our greatest living physicist, Stephen Hawking, released his PhD thesis under open access just last Sunday, saying, “Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.”
At the Mozilla Festival this weekend, I’m going to be speaking with my colleagues and friends Katherine Maher from Wikimedia and Mark Surman from Mozilla about specific areas where we can work better together in service of our common goals. But we can’t do it without you — our power is collective. We need you to join the movement, whether with us and with our allies to collaborate for impact.
I’m amazed at what this big, open movement has already achieved together. This year, the CC Global Network has been instrumental in supporting Diego Gómez, the Colombian student facing up to 8 years of jail time for sharing a single paper online, we have been a strong voice for copyright reform in the European Union, and we have taken on sweeping issues like NAFTA and an expansion of the public domain. The work of open access needs to keep in clear view the ultimate goals of science and scholarship — a fundamental search for knowledge — that is now supercharged for sharing and collaboration to solve the world’s toughest scientific and social problems. I can’t wait to realize these goals together with you.
