We are proud to announce that the 2018 CC Summit will be in Toronto, Canada from April 13-15. This is a return to Toronto, which allows us to build on last year’s successful sold-out event. As part of our new strategy, CC has moved to annual summits to help build our community capacity and momentum, and we’re thrilled to be bringing people together again to support global collaboration and action.

For the 2017 Summit, CC selected Toronto as our location, and underscored a strong commitment to presenting a community-driven event. We divided up the work: CC provided the “container” — venue, catering, audio-visual, website, promotion, travel support, and other logistics — and the community “filled it” with the program, people, activities, and discussions that make our movement vibrant and engaging. It’s a busy season for conferences, but we’ve been able to fit into the timeline between other key community events like RightsCon and the Open Knowledge Festival.

Based on what we learned at the CC Summit in Seoul in 2015, we hired a full-time events manager to run logistics and ensure we had a world-class event. We also re-focused our scholarship funds to ensure we helped as many community members as possible to join us.

The improvements were noticeable and profound:

• 42 community members led the development of the program, and selected over 100 sessions, with a mix of long standing community members and brand new participants
• The conference sold out well in advance, with nearly 400 registered participants — our largest summit ever
• We had five incredible international women scheduled as keynotes (4 in the end due to a late-cancelled flight), and not a single all-male panel
• Nearly 60 percent of our scholarship funding supported African and Latin American region participants. We doubled the number of participants from Africa

As we plan for 2018, we have decided to return to Toronto. There are a variety of factors that make it a great destination along with some additional factors to consider. We expect Summit 2018 will exceed 500 participants, and also host the first meeting of the new Global Network Council. We want to build and iterate on what we learned in Toronto about running a great and inclusive event. The Canadian dollar continues to be low, which increases our purchasing power. The Delta Hotel, which did a spectacular job for us, is available to host us again. Many of the participants who got visas have them for terms long enough to permit a return next year. Finally, in this year of transition, there are very few teams that have the capacity to deliver an event of this size in just 11 months without significant support from CC HQ — most teams are (rightly) focused on their core work, not event planning.

With all of these considerations, we are very excited to return to Toronto, Canada for the CC Summit, scheduled for April 13-15, 2018.

Historically, CC has located the Summit at various venues around the world — Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Dubrovnik, Sapporo, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Seoul. There are advantages and challenges of this solution. I’m excited about the opportunity to build on what we learned in 2017 — to iterate and remix the city for an even better event.

That said, this year’s decision to return to Toronto does not preclude the idea of future Summits being hosted in other locations. We expect the Global Network Council to help us think through our options for future summits. Many of you provided helpful criticism and feedback based on Toronto’s event. We’ll make a strong effort to incorporate those comments in our planning as we iterate and improve for the next event. In particular, several of you asked for more affordable hotel options. We’ll be adding a second conference hotel to ensure you have more choices.

As with 2017, CC will provide the “container” and the community will “fill it” with its energy, activities, and momentum. We’ll be opening a call for the planning committee in the coming months, and welcome your ideas for an even bigger, better, inclusive event. We can’t wait.

Photo: Sebastiaan ter Burg, CC BY 2.0

The post Join us in Toronto: Creative Commons Global Summit 2018 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Imposing a mandatory and unwaivable compensation scheme violates the letter and spirit of open licensing.

Copyright policymakers in Europe and South America have proposed legislation that would impose an unwaivable right to financial remuneration for authors and performers on copyrighted works. The laws attempt to ensure that creators receive payment for their work, but they would interfere with the operation of Creative Commons licensing by adding a special and separate economic right above and beyond the intention of some authors who wish to share their creative works with the world for free.

In short, these unwaivable rights would damage or break the global standard mechanism for sharing content freely and openly online.

Copyright automatically extends to every work of original authorship fixed in some tangible medium of expression—from paint on canvas, a digital photo on a smartphone, or a mindless scribble on a napkin. Copyright attaches to a work whether or not the creator wants it, and protection extends to literary, musical, and dramatic works, as well as photographs and graphics, audio and visual recordings, and software.

We know that many creators feel that the default rules of copyright are too restrictive. The Creative Commons licenses are a standardized and legally sound tool for creators to grant permission in advance for the public to use works in ways that the law otherwise forbids. When creators choose to share, it is a gift to the world, allowing anyone to build and create on top of their works. To date the CC licenses have been used to share more than 1.2 billion works, which are downloaded and reused tens of millions of times a day, creating an expansive digital commons of works that anyone can view, use, and enjoy.

It’s clear that digital technologies and the web have dramatically altered—and continue to change—the ways creative content is produced and shared. The proliferation of new content distribution mechanisms, social media platforms, and crowdfunding services have fueled innovation in the way authors, artists, and performers connect with fans and are paid for their creative work.

Recently, there has been an increasing call by rightsholders and intermediaries to use copyright as the means to ensure that authors and performers can earn adequate compensation for their creative works, even after those creators have transferred their rights to publishers, or film or music producers. For example, in the context of the EU copyright reform legislation, the ITRE Committee of the European Parliament has introduced amendments that would impose an unwaivable right to remuneration for authors and performers. This right would apply to all works, even those published voluntarily under an open license. Last year Chile passed a similar law that applies to authors of audiovisual works.

Unfortunately, these solutions are ill-suited to address the core business and labor issues at hand. Instead, they seek to use copyright as the mechanism to remedy the inequity in the bargaining position of creators in relation to rightsholders. These unwaivable remuneration schemes may be well-intentioned, but they have significant unintended consequences because they reduce the overall flexibility of how copyright can be exercised. An unwaivable right to compensation would interfere with the operation of open licensing by reserving a special and separate economic right above and beyond the intention of some authors.

Creative Commons has taken the position that these types of regulations would create unnecessary complexity for those who wish to share their works under our licenses because they would deny creators the choice to share as they wish. All Creative Commons licensors permit their works to be used for at least non-commercial purposes. When an author applies a CC license to her work, she grants to the public a worldwide, royalty-free license to use the work under certain terms. And many authors simply want to share their creativity freely under open terms to benefit the public good. For example, educators and scholarly researchers create and share works primarily to advance education and to contribute to their field of study—not necessarily for financial remuneration.

We support authors and creators, and we firmly believe in their right to choose to share, or to seek compensation for all or some uses of their works. At the same time, we must find solutions that also honor those authors who choose to share with few or no restrictions. Mandatory and unwaivable compensation schemes violate the letter and spirit of Creative Commons licensing, and they’re a poor substitute for more meaningful and lasting change in service of fair remuneration for those working in the creative industries today.

The post Should copyright law deny creators the right to share freely? Let the authors choose. appeared first on Creative Commons.

Tell the FCC to protect net neutrality today

Creative Commons and dozens of the world’s largest web platforms are joining countless internet users and online communities to take action in support of net neutrality. Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers should treat all online data the same, and not discriminate or charge different amounts for different audiences.

There are over 1 billion CC-licensed works online, shared freely with anyone with access to the internet. The majority of these works are hosted on content platforms such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Internet Archive, Flickr, and Vimeo. What if you couldn’t access your favorite works because your ISP wants you to see instead content they’re getting paid to promote? What if the video that you created and uploaded online is slowed so others can’t watch it? We know that Creative Commons licensing is only one factor in a healthy open internet ecosystem. A strong digital commons requires universal access to basic digital infrastructure, and enforceable rules that promote fair competition and freedom of information.

In the United States net neutrality is under attack. Even with massive public pushback, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai wants to reel in the net neutrality rules put in place in 2015. If Pai’s proposed changes are adopted, the FCC will give companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T increased control over what users can see and do on the internet, with the power to slow down or block websites and charge apps and sites extra fees to reach an audience.

Today the internet comes together to support and protect net neutrality. Learn more and join the action here: https://www.battleforthenet.com/.  

The post Battle For the Net: A Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today is the annual #DayAgainstDRM, a global campaign to raise awareness about the harms of digital rights management (DRM). DRM consists of access control technologies or restrictive licensing agreements that attempt to restrict the use, modification, and distribution of legally-acquired works.

There are serious problems with attaching DRM to creative works: not only does it frustrate legitimate users in enjoying the content they’ve paid for in the ways they wish, it also limits access and interaction with these works for educational and socially beneficial purposes. For example, DRM applied to a software program would likely prevent researchers from conducting an independent security audit on it. Alongside the DRM applied to products and services in the private sector, laws have been adopted around the world that criminalize most workarounds. These regulations are quite broad, and usually prohibit the act of breaking the DRM, telling others how to circumvent, or creating and sharing technical tools that assist in the workarounds. These restriction apply even if a user has lawful access to a work.

A major negative feature of digital rights management is that the technology is agnostic as to the purpose a user would want to circumvent the restriction technology. These technologies are flying blind, and aren’t responsive to a particular user who would want to get around copy protection in order to exercise their fair use rights in the underlying content. Aside from a few enumerated exemptions published by the U.S. Copyright Office every three years, DRM continues to trump user rights, and in the process can limit educational activities, freedom of expression, and innovation.  

DRM has also been discussed in the context of the copyright reform in Europe. Some of the new provisions having to do with limitations to copyright tabled by the Parliament contain clauses that would forbid not only contractual restrictions, but also technological protection measures (another phrase for DRM) from overriding the exercise of the users’ rights. So, for example, this would mean that a researcher could freely conduct text and data mining on a collection of scholarly works to which she already has legal access, and the journal publisher or other rightsholder would be forbidden from enacting contractual barriers or DRM that would thwart the researcher’s work. These additional user protections are important to include so that the rightsholders cannot simply sidestep the law through the application of private contracts or technological restrictions.

CC has always attempted to minimize the negative effects of DRM. All the Creative Commons licenses forbid users of CC-licensed works from adding any DRM or other technological measures that would restrict others from using the work in the same way.

Last year we wrote about the troubling (and increasingly common) trend of including DRM provisions within international trade agreements. Negotiators of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pushed for anti-circumvention rules that would sit parallel to to the effective enforcement of copyright laws. That would mean that rightsholders could pursue criminal penalties against a user who attempts to circumvent DRM even when the purpose of the circumvention has nothing to do with copyright infringement. We can only assume that negotiators for NAFTA will be pressured by the entertainment and publishing industries to include a similar provision as a part of the “modernization” of the agreement.

DRM is an ongoing threat to users’ abilities to use and manipulate the technologies and products they legally own. We need to end DRM. Digital freedom depends on the right to tinker, the right to access information and knowledge, and the right to re-use our shared cultural commons.

The post Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad DRM appeared first on Creative Commons.

We launched our new CC Search tool in February with an amazing release from the Met Museum. Since then, over a million people have visited the site, searching for a wide variety of terms – many of which are related to the Met’s collection. Surprisingly popular searches include “Mackinac Island,” a 3.8 square mile island off the coast of Michigan. (Vacation on the mind, anyone?)

The tool is still in beta, but we’re making improvements to it every day, improving usability in the commons and providing a “front door” to help people access over 1.2 billion works, 9,994,327 of which are currently in CC Search.

Below, find some highlights from the last few months of searches. Be sure to sign up for our email list for more content like this.

Searchin’ Safari

• On average, people spend 4 minutes and 30 seconds on the search page.
• The most traffic was on February 7, the day of the launch, with more than 120,000 visits to the site.
• People have visited CC Search 1,780,000 times since launch.
• CC Search most recently added the Europeana Collection of 430,000 digital objects, bringing the total number of objects to almost 10,000,000.

CC Searchers <3 art:

Top ten museum objects, 2/1-7/7:

1. “Wheat Field with Cypresses” by Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, Zundert 1853–1890 Auvers-sur-Oise) via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

2. “Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (obverse: The Potato Peeler)” by Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, Zundert 1853–1890 Auvers-sur-Oise) via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

3. “Coronation of the Virgin” by Paris, France (?), France, probably Paris via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

4. “291 – Picasso-Braque Exhibition” by Alfred Stieglitz (American, Hoboken, New Jersey 1864–1946 New York) via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

5. “France” by Utagawa Yoshikazu (Japanese, active ca. 1850–1870), Japan via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

6. “Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies” by Claude Monet (French, Paris 1840–1926 Giverny) via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

7. “Cypresses” by Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, Zundert 1853–1890 Auvers-sur-Oise)via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

8. “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze (American, Schwäbisch Gmünd 1816–1868 Washington, D.C.) via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

9. “Camille Monet (1847–1879) on a Garden Bench” by Claude Monet (French, Paris 1840–1926 Giverny) via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

10. “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher” by Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, Delft 1632–1675 Delft) via The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC0 1.0

Top ten search keywords:

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