Jessamyn West is a famous librarian, a former Metafilter admin, and a Vermont information technologist with a passion for open knowledge.

West has been blogging about library technology since 1999 at librarian.net and on her blog jessamyn.com since 1999. She also has a prolific Medium presence and an entertaining and informative newsletter about libraries and information access, called TILT. In addition to moderating the online Metafilter community, West has worked with Open Library, Harvard University, and the Rutland Free Library. An inspiring library activist, she designed the library “warrant canary,” and last year, she spearheaded the Librarian of Progress campaign, which encouraged the Library of Congress to modernize for the 21st Century.

You made a website during the nomination process of the Librarian of Congress called “The Librarian of Progress.” Can you talk about Carla Hayden’s nomination and then appointment as the Librarian of Congress? What do you think is going to happen with the new LOC and how do you think it’s going to affect copyright in the future?

I think there’s a couple things that pile in together, right? Number one, I feel like the Library of Congress has been a little bit of a ghost ship for the last five, maybe even 10 years. James Billington, who’s this eminent historian, headed the institution as if it were like a history center. But not quite a library and certainly not a public institution that is the world’s largest library. I think when a lot of us were looking at “Gosh, he’s retiring. Thank God. Who’s going to come in?” We were just hoping there would be somebody who was from this century, number one, and number two, somebody who was friendly, progressive, and forward-thinking. A lot of people don’t really know that the copyright office sits within the Library of Congress. The Librarian of Congress is nominally in charge of the copyright office.

She’s said copyright reform needs to happen – she’s definitely a sharing advocate, and a true public librarian who understands that culture is advanced when people are allowed to be creative with things. Hayden believes that libraries can be an institution that can help people do that—safely is maybe not the right word, but fairly.

Librarians don’t want copyright to go out the window. They just want it to be fair, they want it to be something that people can understand, and they want it to be something that people can use.

We hope that Dr. Hayden is really going to be the first Librarian of Congress who maybe gets that and can create an institution that can work with that.

Do you think that library values can be particularly important when it comes to the challenges facing the copyright office in the Library of Congress?

I think so. Libraries work for everyone, they don’t necessarily just work for their customers, they don’t necessarily just work for the people with money, and they don’t necessarily just work for the people in charge. There’s a democratizing factor with what they do. You realize that certain things about the way copyright works, the way copyright protection extends way, way back into history, some things seems to never enter the public domain, especially lately. Authors write that things can get locked up forever, things could be in an orphan work state where you have no idea who owns it and it’s just presumed that it’s not available to be used, unless you can prove it’s available to be used. I feel like libraries can have a mitigating factor on that because they can accept some of the risk. They can say, “We feel it’s probably okay to share this.”
 
The MPAA and RIAA work for the rights holders—who maybe be different than the actual creators—but in general the behavior of industry organizations is understandable. It’s not necessarily in their best interest to be crystal clear about what the law does and doesn’t allow. It’s a lot more in their interest to be slightly scary and to make you afraid so that if you’re making a video in your kid’s house, and your kids appear in a video, and you know the music in the background is an artist that’s notoriously litigious, maybe you’re not going to do that. As far as the RIAA is concerned, that’s fine with them. Don’t play Metallica in the background. Don’t paint Mickey Mouse on the wall of your daycare. All the rights holders want you to worry and second guess your use of their content, and what the library would like you to do is share legally as much as you can. They can help people and I think their values of working for everybody push forward that goal.

How do you feel about the concept of the commons and knowledge of licensing, like Creative Commons? Do you feel that CC can help in these kinds of situations?

I feel like it’s a great tool for cultural heritage organizations. Not just libraries, but museums and archives too, because then they also use it for sharing their own resources—to a certain extent. I use Creative Commons to license the content that I put online. I like it because it essentially says, “Look, I’m making this freely available, but I don’t want other people making money for it.” I can dial in how I want people to be able to use my work. Maybe someone else just want to give away all the rights and they can dial that in too. I think the only thing really standing in the way of Creative Commons is that some people aren’t clear what the enforcement mechanisms are.

I think we’ve seen people who share their content as freely as possible, but then other people sell it and they say, “What? That’s not in the spirit of it.” We’re not talking about the spirit. We’re talking about an actual license, which means you have to read the fine print and everything else. I think we’re seeing a ton of libraries using tools like Flickr, for instance, online photo archiving, and it’s awesome for them to be able to assign Creative Commons licensing to it to expand their options beyond either only public domain or only all rights reserved.

CC gives them options that are more true to their values, and I think that act facilitates sharing and reusing, repurposing, remixing, and all that wonderful stuff that helps culture move along. It’s joyful, honestly.

I really am happy that CC exists, but I’m always surprised how many people I talk to who either don’t quite understand it or they don’t see that it’s actually a tool of facilitation, not a tool of restriction.

It sounds like a lot of the different examples we’ve been talking about have to do with fear and confusion. This culture of fear around people using and sharing material and using and sharing licenses. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that has influenced your work, both as a librarian and also as a MetaFilter moderator, and the other work that you’ve done over your career as an advocate for free and open information.

I spend a lot of time trying to talk people through some worst case scenarios, because I think one of the problems is chilling effects of unclear rules. People aren’t sure what the rules are, and so they over-censor themselves or over-restrict, or they try to shame other people into doing that. For 10 years, I ran MetaFilter, which is a big online community. There are lot of people interacting and talking to one another. You would occasionally get someone who would write, “There’s this scientific paper that I think is super interesting,” and they would link to an abstract or a news article about the paper. Then in the comments, someone would tell them, “Here is a PDF, or contact me to get a PDF of that paper.” Maybe the PDF is available, but it’s only in a commercial journal, you have to pay 50 bucks to get it. They’d share it out. Then other people would say, “That’s so illegal,” and freak out.

As a moderator on the site, we have to be a mitigating influence and tell people, “Look, it’s up to the rights holder to determine if there’s a problem. Sharing a PDF among 30 people is maybe technically a copyright infringement, but it’s probably not going put you in jail.” I think the MPAA and the RIAA really like to blur that line. I don’t think it’s nice to pirate all music because it’s no good for struggling artists, but I don’t think sharing a Metallica song is really the same thing as stealing the records from somebody’s house. I think the entertainment industry tries to obscure that boundary because their revenue stream depends on it.

In terms of sharing information in online communities, the risk is so low and the value of people having better information about medicine, for example, is so valuable that it’s worth approaching the outlines of that envelope and trying to figure out how you can maximize sharing. I think for some libraries, they worry a lot about risk assessment because they’re government institutions. Not so much “We’re the government,” but if the library gets sued by the MPAA, that’s a town getting sued by the MPAA, and it’s expensive. I like it when non-profit institutions are willing to go to bat for better interpretations of copyright laws. We saw the Hathi Trust lawsuit and the Google Books lawsuit. The Internet Archive is always willing to stand up for sharing as much as possible. These public interest institutions can really help model appropriate risk assessment.

For example, the Internet Archive shares thousands of video games from the 1990s that nobody was playing anymore and the original companies have probably abandoned, but if someone comes along and says, “Hey, that belongs to me and I own the rights, will you take it down?” they will. In the meantime, the Archive provides access to games that people can play and share and talk about, and it surfaces culture in a way that if they were concerned only about chilling effects and “maybe this isn’t technically legal,” they never would. I’m happy that those organizations are out there, and I’m always advocating for libraries to join in the sharing as much as is possible. And I think for libraries this type of sharing is usually practical because they can shoulder a little bit more risk than one individual patron might be able to.

You work and live in Vermont, and in your library, the internet and having access to cultural works online can open up the world to a lot of people. I’m wondering while the culture of commoning can open up new frontiers for students and educators, how are you and your organization branching that digital divide? Are you or how are you using tools such as Creative Commons to help cultural heritage organizations bridge that gap?

One of the things I try to do all the time when I’m educating users about Creative Commons and the other things is just showing people where these deep archives of content are already available to them. One of the aspects of the digital divide is that people only have ideas about content, archives, and information that they read about in the paper. If you ask somebody what they know about Wikipedia when all they have is access to a newspaper and don’t use the internet that much, they’ll ask me “That’s that place where everybody yells at each other and people vandalize it all the time,” and they have all these weird ideas. I was like, “Okay, that happens, but did you know that every picture you see on Wikipedia you can have for free?” A lot of them don’t know that.

Part of how Wikipedia works is the content that’s available is freely licensed so that people can have it and use it. Somebody wants to make a YouTube video or maybe they got in trouble because they put up a YouTube video of something and it had a copyrighted song on in the background, and I let them know, “You know the Creative Commons has a search engine where you can search for music that you can use as a background to your video and it’s all licensed for you to use, reuse, mix, and share.” A lot of times they don’t. A lot of times what I’m talking to people about is ways to help transplant things maybe they want, but they can’t have, with things that they can have that are equivalent.

Our public library is digitally divided enough that it’s actually fairly difficult to even have a program about Wikipedia and have people show up, because people say, “I don’t understand why that would work.” If you hang out in a library with a scanner and help people take their photographs and put them online, or even show them other people’s photographs and then put them on the internet, you have to find what makes this stuff a genuine option for people. You have to figure out what the hook is that’s going to bring them in and be like, “That’s also a problem for me and I’d like to solve it.” In this region, a lot of it is family history books that are freely searchable via the internet archives. Or music that you can find through the Creative Commons searches that you can use on YouTube videos. Or historical photos on Wikipedia that you might use to illustrate a book report.

What kinds of random things do people want to go look up? YouTube videos about tractor engines running. Never would’ve known that’s a thing, but apparently there’s a ton of them, and a lot of them are available, shareable, embeddable, because even Youtube licensing strictly, videos can often can at least be shared around. I encourage people when they’re using the internet to think about the benefits of having that be shareable for everyone, and try to educate them appropriately about the downsides to it as well. I think a lot of people are under the misapprehension that if you share a picture on the internet then everybody just steals it, or takes it and draws a mustache on your baby’s face, or worse. Realistically, there’s so much information out there, most of the time people aren’t going to focus on harassing individual users, but if you do find the right user who can use that tractor engine video, of all the things, that’s really made a connection, and that’s, again, helped cultural progress, which is really I think what we’re all about in a library.

I think maybe some of this is the about first taste of recognition. I was having a conversation with someone at the bank and they saw who I worked for, and they said, “You know that my photo is the photo for challah on Wikipedia? It’s the best. I just love it.”

My mom is a huge sharer of photos using Flickr. She does some of them public domain and some of them not. She has a ton of those stories and she is a 70-ish-year-old lady living in rural Massachusetts, and she’s connected with a ton of people like that. She takes pictures of cats at the cat shelter to help cats get adopted. It’s enriched her life just doing her own things that she would basically be doing normally, but she sticks a sharing license on them and I think part of that also, she sticks a sharing license on them, and Flickr has mechanisms where you can search for stuff that’s shareable. It’s not just the power of Creative Commons, which I’m already jazzed about, but the fact that that’s built in now to search engines.

Have you seen a significant change in your own community in the last few years with smartphones really becoming a much more viable option for a larger group of people?

A little bit. I think smartphones are a lot more about instant connectivity, Instagram and Snapchat, and to look stuff up on the internet. We haven’t seen, at least in my community, too many people using smartphones to be creators of content. I taught an HTML class last fall at the local community college, and we spent a day talking about alternative licensing, we talked about Creative Commons licensing. I got to test and quiz kids on what does BY-NC mean and stuff. They didn’t quite see it as totally relevant to themselves because they didn’t see themselves as content creators. The couple kids who were musicians or web designers, they believed that this served them. Out of about 30 kids, I probably had four or five who really viewed themselves as creators. The makerspace communities that have taken root in bigger cities is only slowly getting here. These may be kids who build their own tractors, build their own cars. Literally building physically out of things, but the digital maker way hasn’t quite hit here yet.

Do you think that there’s anything that apps or that the people who are making apps, particularly people who are making apps for the cultural heritage sphere for libraries could do to make to help people feel more like makers on the web?

I think about Wikipedia, right, and Wikipedia really, really wants people to upload and share images. All sorts of content, but images especially because it’s easy.

I think the missing sharing point is unless you’re a cultural heritage institution who can bulk upload a bunch of stuff because you’ve been in touch with the Wikipedia organization and you know how to do it, it’s not going work very well. The average person doesn’t know they can get free storage for their content on Wikipedia. I feel like we still could have sharing tools that work better than the ones we have now that facilitated accurate licensing, but for people affected by the digital divide, the fact that they don’t have access to computers or the web means they don’t have access to a lot of other tools.
 
Can you talk a little bit about how you teach the ethos of sharing within your community, particularly with social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, when a lot of folks are coming online and that’s the first world that they’re encountering?

A lot of what I do is teach people how to use things. I teach people what some of the normative expectations of the space are, which can be challenging because there’s a lot of ways to be “normal” on Facebook. You can use it in a million different ways and nothing’s totally correct, but there are normative ways to use it. If you take a picture of someone else’s kids, for example, maybe you don’t make that picture public or maybe you don’t use that kid’s name. Maybe you do, depending on your community. That’s the thing that people need to put some thought into.

If I’m looking at Twitter, there are accounts like the History in Pics account, and it posts all these really interesting historical photos, but sometimes with semi-questionable captions. There’s whole other accounts dedicated to telling them, “Hey, I don’t actually think that caption is what that picture is really about. I actually did five minutes of research and realized that that thing that you pulled from that other random site wasn’t the thing you said it was.” I show people what the back and forth is that if there’s questions about where something came from, there are actually ways to figure it out. It’s not like, “It’s the internet. Nobody can figure anything out.” I teach them about research. I teach them about Google’s reverse image search. I teach them about how you can ask any librarian anywhere on the internet if you have a question. I think people think they can only talk to their own librarian.

I don’t think people know that the library system is there for them, and if I have a question about Colorado College, I can go ask the librarian at Colorado College and they will help me. They don’t do a ton of in depth research for me, but they can definitely help me. I try to teach people how there are humans you can talk to who can help you figure out some of this stuff, even though Facebook themselves doesn’t really have tech support, but you may have a buddy who understands it. The most powerful thing I teach people is that if you have a problem with a thing that you’re using, you’re not the first one.

It’s hard because the meta message is that you’re not special, but a lot of times if you Google an error message you’re seeing on your computer, you can find people discussing the exact problem that you also have. The thing I hear again and again from people is why doesn’t ‘X’ have a manual. The thing I have to keep telling people is the collective group of people on the internet are your manual. It’s not awesome because a lot of times people feel like that doesn’t work for them, they don’t understand it, they feel out of their element. It feels weird, but realistically, when you try it, it does work. Part of what I try to do is model good behavior with my own social media behavior.

Also I try to model not being frustrated. When people say, “Their pictures are stupid. They upload too many pictures. I don’t care about that person’s baby. Too much Trump.” I’m like, “Okay. Let me show you how to limit pictures of that person’s baby or ban the word ‘Trump’ from your front page of your Facebook.” There’s a lot of tools that we can use to empower us, but I think a lot of people presume the default role of technology is to be disempowered, which is not how I see it, but I can see how they see it that way. I try to get them turn that around and show them that there are tools that can help them. I’m part of the help manual for this system basically.

Just walk the talk. If you’re interested enough in Creative Commons to be reading this, share your stuff, put your content online, help other people do it, and spread the word. I think that’s the most important thing that super fans can be doing at this point.

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Unsplash, a photo sharing startup, has launched their own branded license and updated their terms to add new restrictions and remove CC0 from their platform. As a result of the changes, Unsplash images are no longer in the public domain. The permissions offered can be revoked at any time, and Unsplash now has the right to pursue infringement on behalf of their users. Also, in some cases, attribution is now required. The terms of the new Unsplash-branded copyright license may create issues for users who hope to re-use the images, and for those who shared using the service and wanted their works available under unrestricted terms.

Background

We feel it’s important to inform the CC community, as many have been supporters of Unsplash and we have been receiving questions from users in the open content and free software movements. We reached out to Unsplash and then also, with their consent, spoke to their legal counsel to understand the new license and terms.

Our intention is to ensure that CC community members understand what has happened to a service they have been using that incorporated CC tools, and to protect the content that was dedicated to the public domain. We don’t want to oppose a startup’s business and marketing decisions, nor deny them the IP they might now want to claim to protect their business model.

We understand from Unsplash that they felt that copycat services were detracting from their offering and upsetting their users. We are sympathetic to that challenge — the predominant players in photo sharing like Flickr, 500px, and Wikimedia Commons all use CC0 in their platforms, and have faced those issues with their users. But it’s also clear that Unsplash wanted to extend their brand to have their name incorporated into the license. That’s a perfectly valid business and marketing decision.

We’ve outlined some issues for consideration in more detail below for the benefit of contributors to Unsplash, and those who wish to re-use their images:

Revokability

The new Unsplash-branded license is revocable. This means that Unsplash or the author could, at any time, change their mind about how people can use the images they have previously downloaded. This is a significant change from CC0.

Irrevocability is a fundamental feature of CC tools, designed to ensure that anyone who uses the image can do so with the confidence that the author can’t withdraw the permissions they’ve previously granted. We believe that is essential to building a commons that people can rely on, and use permissively.

Attribution

CC0 does not require attribution, though we encourage users to do so because it gives gratitude to the creator, and can support further re-use by linking to the original work and its license. The new Unsplash-branded license doesn’t require attribution, but the Unsplash API guidelines do require attribution. So depending on how a user, a developer, or their app retrieves the image from the Unsplash service, they are subject to different terms.

Copyright and sub-licensing

The new Unsplash terms of service require users who share to grant a copyright license to Unsplash, which permits them to sub-license their work. Unsplash also requires users to grant them the authority to enforce copyright on their behalf. Beyond the compilation of photos in a competing service, it is not clear if there are other scenarios under which Unsplash would enforce copyright against reusers.

CC0 Collection and Archive

Following the switch to the new Unsplash-branded license, there is no marking of works that were previously shared in the public domain using CC0. The Unsplash API restricts/obscures the full CC0 collection, which we believe to be about 200,000 images, but it isn’t possible to access the complete archive. In order to ensure that the commons is maintained, we hope that Unsplash will either a) properly mark all the works shared using CC0 and/or b) make available a full archive of the CC0 works so they can be shared on a platform that supports open licensing and public domain tools. Previous platforms that have gone under or abandoned open license tools have shared their CC archives for this purpose. We hope Unsplash will follow the same path.

The post Community update: Unsplash branded license and ToS changes appeared first on Creative Commons.

What does it mean to exhibit prosocial behavior? For our purposes, we mean behavior that leads to healthy collaboration and meaningful interactions online. Specifically, we are interested in prosocial behavior around online content sharing. How can we help people make the human connections that make sharing meaningful?

In this post, we distill learnings from the “How to encourage prosocial behavior” session at the recent CC Global Summit in Toronto, and outline the next steps for CC in this space. Specifically, Creative Commons will launch an investigative series into the values and behaviors that make online collaboration thrive, in order to embed them more deeply into the experience of sharing with CC.

Read on for all of the glorious details, or skip to the end for next steps.

Creative Commons: Remix by Creative Commons / CC BY-SA

When we launched our new strategy in 2016, we focused our work with user-generated content platforms on increasing discovery and reporting of CC-licensed works. Since the majority of the 1.2 billion CC-licensed works on the web are hosted by third parties, re-establishing relationships with them (e.g. Flickr, Wikipedia) was important, as was establishing relationships with newer platforms like Medium.

In year 2 of our strategy, we are broadening our focus to look more holistically at sharing and collaboration online. We are investigating the values and behaviors associated with successful collaboration, in the hopes that we might apply them to content platforms where CC licensing is taking place.

As a first step, we asked the question — How can we help people make the human connections that make sharing meaningful? — at this year’s CC Global Summit in Toronto. (This question is also central to our 2016-2020 Organizational Strategy, where we refocused our work to build a vibrant, usable commons, powered by collaboration and gratitude.) In a session entitled, “How to encourage prosocial behavior,” our peers at Medium, Wikimedia, Thingiverse, Música Libre Uruguay, and Unsplash shared the design factors they use to incentivize prosocial behavior around CC content, particularly behavior that helps people give credit for works they use and make connections with others. Programming diversity expert Ashe Dryden shared additional insights into how current platforms often approach design from a position of privilege, unwittingly excluding marginalized groups and potential new members.

We structured the discussion into three parts:

Part 1 – The Dark Side, or defining the problem. We asked our peers to detail examples of negative behaviors around content sharing and reuse.

Part 2 – What Works, or identifying solutions. We asked for technical and social design nudges that platforms have implemented that work to increase sharing and remix. We also discussed community-driven norms and behavior “in the wild.”

Part 3 – What can we do? We wrapped by discussing what we might do together to design and cultivate online environments conducive to healthy and vibrant collaboration.

Part 1 – The Dark Side

In part 1, we heard the standard issues one might expect around CC licensing, and also negative behaviors that occur with online content sharing more generally, regardless of the © status of such content. Specific to CC were issues such as: users claiming CC0 public domain works as their own and monetizing them; misunderstanding what it means to share under a CC license vs. just posting it online; and lack of clarity on when or how a CC license applies. More generally, negative behaviors around online content sharing included harassment based on gender, ethnicity, and other identities, which discourage potential new members from joining a community.

The behavioral tendencies and tensions we surfaced that were most relevant to the question — How can we help people make the human connections that make sharing meaningful? — were:

1. Users prefer real people (user identities with a history of credible content contributions) to automated accounts. CC users are smart and can quickly recognize the difference between a real user and a bot.
   • Example: On Thingiverse, a 3D design sharing platform, a bot called Shiv Integer crawled the platform and automated bizarre remixes of users 3D designs, which were posted automatically to the site as remixes. Though the bot’s remixes respected the CC license conditions, the community still felt it was an inappropriate use of their content.

1. Harassment marginalized groups face is more subtle than one might expect, and often serves to reinforce norms previously set in a space that does not account for diversity of gender, ethnicity, or geography. Overreliance on data or AI may also serve to reinforce these norms (that unintentionally discriminate) because data on which design is based is faulty or not representative of marginalized groups. Ultimately, this prevents the community from obtaining new members, particularly those from more diverse backgrounds, and from evolving into a truly open, inclusive environment inviting to “creators across sectors, disciplines, and geographies, to work together to share open content and create new works.”
   • Example: 80-85% of current Wikipedia editors are males from North America and Western Europe. 38% of Wikimedia users reported some level of harassment, including stalking, doxing, attacking off the wiki on other platforms, such as Facebook, based on gender, ethnicity, and other identities.
2. On platforms, users enter into legal contracts and social contracts that are separate and often in direct tension with one another. This plays out specifically in the world of copyright, where people’s desires and expectations about how content will be used are often different from the rules dictated by copyright law (which are therefore, embedded with CC licenses).

• Example: A user may post discriminatory, harassing, or violent speech on a platform under the guise of parody. As a copyright matter, parody is clearly a fair use. As an ethical matter, whether the parody constitutes harassment may not be so clear, since a parody, as a satirical imitation, essentially mocks or belittles some aspect of the original work, and possibly the author. As a result, parody can often generate confrontation and controversy in a community. With the legal and social contracts in tension, the platform must decide which to uphold for its users, with either decision potentially alienating one segment of its community. This example also raises the issue that many users expect a platform to be the enforcer of ethical norms, a position not all platforms hold.

1. When different values are in tension with each other, it is hard to design community rules that can be applied both consistently and fairly. Some rules may even serve to disproportionately affect one group of people over others.
   • Example: Medium has an “all-party consent” rule with respect to posting screenshots of personal 1:1 exchanges, such as text messages. This policy is designed to protect everyone’s expectation of privacy related to personal communications. It is also designed to apply to all users equally, with some exceptions for situations involving public figures or newsworthy events. In some cases, however, this policy can mean that a person with less power in an exchange is prevented from fully telling their story, since it is often when a powerful or privileged person behaves badly in private that the other person involved wants to publicly expose that behavior. As a result, this policy may allow some users to keep evidence of their private bad acts out of public exposure or scrutiny, while preventing users from a marginalized group (who may benefit from exposing the interaction or fostering public discussion of it) from being able to show the details of an exchange they think is important to show.

Part 2 – What Works, or identifying solutions.

In part 2, we learned about the different platform approaches to both incentivizing contributions of content to the commons and to incentivizing prosocial behavior around the content that made it personal and meaningful to users.

Platform approaches included:

• a prosocial frame to license selection, asking creators the kinds of uses they envision for their works, versus what license they might want to adopt
• a curated public space for licensed works, such as a radio channel, where the platform facilitates distribution to other users and potential fans

• collaborative education projects facilitated by the platform, such as an FAQ about music licensing and distribution built with the community
• foregrounding the reuse and remix aspect of CC content in a variety of ways, such as: featuring remixes on the platform’s home page, displaying an attribution ancestry tree on the work’s page, sending alerts when a creator’s content is reused, and reminding users of the license on a work upon download
• remix challenges and related competitions, run by the platform to foster reuse

We also learned about approaches to disincentivize the negative behaviors and tendencies we discussed in part 1. These included:

• crowdsourced tracking of misuses and misbehaviors
• redirecting license violations to the community to handle (e.g. community forums), utilizing community pressure to behave well
• a safe space for new users to practice contributing before moving into the actual project, especially for projects with contribution rules and norms that are difficult for new members to get right the first time, e.g. Teahouse space for Wikipedia

• follow-on events or projects to retain new members after initial engagement, such as face-to-face edit-a-thons
• allowing for flexibility with regards to many community rules, noting that some rules may disproportionately affect marginalized groups
• emphasizing a personal profile or identity for each user, so that other users recognize that these contributions were made by a real human being and not an anonymous internet entity
• adding friction into certain workflows, such as at the moment of publication of a post or comment, to discourage negative behaviors and remind the user that there is a real human being at the other end of the exchange
• making community rules more visible at the appropriate steps in the sharing process, so users are more likely to respond and adhere to them

Part 3 – What can we do?

In part 3, we discussed the importance of designing for good actors. Despite the examples of negative behaviors, the platforms in the room noted that the majority of CC uses have a positive outcome , and that people in content communities are passionate about Creative Commons as a symbol of certain values, and about sharing and remixing each others works. We shared positive examples that were completely community-driven, such as unexpected reuses of a particular 3D design that led to the creation of a prosthetic hand, and a sub-community of teachers that split off to bring 3D design to students in the classroom.

More importantly, we discussed what we could do next, together. Here is the short list of ideas that emerged in the last half hour of our discussion:

• Prosocial behavior toolkit for platforms, a “prosocial” version of the CC platform integration toolkit we created in year 1 of our new strategy
• Reinvesting in the tools that make it easier to comply with CC license conditions, e.g. one-click attribution in browsers, WordPress, and other platforms
• API partnerships that bring CC media into platforms more easily, e.g. Flickr + Medium or WordPress
• Supporting the good actors and amplifying their voices
• Explore areas like reputational algorithms, possibly community-driven, to discourage bad behaviors
• Explore the role of bots in trolling and antisocial behavior, and how that affects human behavior on a platform
• And more!

What’s next

Asking the simple question — How can we help people make the human connections that make sharing meaningful? — elicited exciting discussion and surfacing of issues we had not considered before this summit session. Informed by the overwhelming response and interest from our platform partners and community, we will forge ahead with the next phase of our platform work, focusing on collaboration, in addition to discovery.

As a next step, Creative Commons is launching an investigative series into what really makes online collaboration work. What does it take to build a vibrant sharing community, powered by collaboration and gratitude? What are the design factors (both social and technical) that help people make connections and build relationships? How do we then take these factors and infuse them into communities within the digital commons?

The series will include:

1. A series of face-to-face conversations on how to build prosocial online communities with CC platforms, creators, and researchers. To kick off the series, we are hosting a private event in San Francisco this June; stay tuned for public follow-on events in the series in a city near you!
2. Research and storytelling of collaboration as it occurs over time through interviews and thought pieces.
3. A prosocial platform toolkit that distills all of the applicable design factors into one comprehensive guide.
4. Reporting of the most impactful stories in the next State of the Commons.

If any of this of interest to you, join the conversation on Slack.

If you would like to be invited to a future event, sign up for our events list.

The post Toward a Better Internet: Building Prosocial Behavior into the Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

For the first time, the CC movement has completed a comprehensive and collaborative effort to renew and grow its network, finalized at the recent Global Summit in Toronto. It’s important to acknowledge the hard work of all the people involved from the beginning, which included research (the Faces of the Commons is a 300 page multi region report with recommendations and insights), an open consultation with the broad CC community including Affiliates, partners, funders, and the CC Board, and 22 online and in-person meetings and more than the eighty percent of the active members of the network involved. This bottom-up process included discussions, proposals and specific edits and changes, reflecting the dynamic global community we have built together around Creative Commons during all this years. We all should be proud of all this process.

This new Strategy has a lot of benefits:

1. Global collaboration. Connected with the work of the Platforms, communities will work together to set priorities, goals, objectives and strategies.
2. Resilience. The previous model for Affiliate involvement was focused on institutional relationships. Today, we are focusing on individuals and supporting organizations instead. We are providing a path to create a network of trust and real collaboration for the future.
3. Growth and inclusion. The new strategy is meant to include new and diverse global voices in the conversation and to provide more capacity and agency for teams working locally. We are creating a strategy focused on supporting and activating people.
4. Shared decision-making, goal-setting, structure for collaboration. The new strategy creates new governance bodies to provide space for the community to identify priorities for the global work. This is a first for CC: the network takes care of the network.
5. Resource allocation. The strategy creates two funds specifically focused on the network to support community activities, actual project work and identified movement priorities.

It has been a long road, but now the strategy work is complete. For the transition period, we are planning to focus on Country Teams, Platforms and Governance.

Chapters (formerly Country teams). The local work is key for the new Network Strategy. To coordinate this efforts we will trust in Chapters as units for the governance and to coordinate local work. After concerns from several affiliate teams, we’ve decided to use Chapters instead of a reference of a “country” or “nation”. However, it will be those borders that we use to organize each team (with some exceptions, for example in Mainland China and Taiwan). These Chapters are made up of people, with individuals whose work is focused on the place where they live, have accepted the Creative Commons Charter and have been vouched by two actual members. The membership recruiting process is starting in the coming weeks. More details of this process will be published very soon.

We expect Country Teams to have their first team meeting no later than January 2018, primarily to appoint a coordinator (which will be the main point of contact for the movement), elect a representative to send to the Global Network Council, and draft a plan of work for the rest of the year.

Platforms. Platforms are areas of work, a collaborative space for individuals and institutions to organize and coordinate themselves across the broad network. Platforms will be the way we will create and communicate spaces of strategic collaboration to have worldwide impact. They will be the way our network will work collaboratively.

The conversation on platforms started at the Global Summit. So far, community members have organized around:

• Copyright Reform Platform
• Open Education Platform
• Open GLAM Platform
• Community development Platform

You can learn more about it and how to get involved and participate on our wiki and directly on Slack.

There may be more platforms in the future, but during this transition period -before the new Governance structure is set up by the next Global Summit on 2018- the work of the platforms will be oriented to fill a specific need and requirement from the network on each area, being particular activities, documentation or products.

These platforms will set specific priorities and plan of work in the coming months, to develop their plan of work until next Global Summit on 2018.

Governance. The main governance body for the new Strategy is the Global Network Council, and it’s important to us to focus on establishing the new Country Teams (or Chapters) as soon as we can, and to make that happen we will be opening the membership process in the coming weeks for anyone to join. For the transition period, during the coming days there will be an open call to constitute an Advisory Committee, to advise on this transition and provide support to the Country Teams, with global and diverse representation.

 

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Without a refocus on user rights, transparency, and meaningful public input, the agreement will become a bonanza for copyright maximalists

This week Creative Commons submitted comments to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) regarding negotiating objectives for the modernization of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

NAFTA is the controversial trade pact between Canada, Mexico, and the United States that went into effect in 1994. It aims to eliminate barriers to trade and investment in a variety of sectors including goods and textiles, agricultural products, and petrochemicals. NAFTA also attempts to protect intellectual property by including provisions to enforce copyrights, trademarks, patents, and similar rights. The Trump administration has officially notified Congress of its intent to negotiate changes to the agreement. Last month USTR opened a formal request for comments regarding the objectives for updating NAFTA.

Copyright is global, and held by nearly every single person in the world, enabled by today’s online services and the ubiquity of technology to create new works. With that in mind, copyright laws rightly belong in international agreements, negotiated and debated in public fora, and should consider everyday citizens’ needs and uses along with those of industry and professional creators. Still, governments never seem to miss an opportunity to add additional terms to individual side agreements, ratcheting up restrictions and making a confusing, secretive mess for users.

We urged USTR to ensure that the copyright provisions in NAFTA should not be expanded to create new (and likely more onerous) rules than those that already exist in the agreement. 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. In addition, the negotiations should be made through procedures that are transparent to the public and which include all stakeholders, especially the public.

Copyright

NAFTA uses as its baseline existing and widely agreed upon international copyright treaties, which already contain extensive requirements that ensure the protection and enforcement of copyright and related rights. Therefore, the NAFTA copyright provisions should not be expanded to create new rules than those that already exist in the agreement. The recent negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) showed that when intellectual property is put on the table, there’s a significant push to drastically increase enforcement measures for rights holders, lengthen copyright terms, and demand harsh infringement penalties. Despite the various international agreements that aim to harmonize copyright, individual nations continue to use multilateral trade pacts as an opportunity to add increasingly onerous requirements and further lock up copyrighted works. This kind of venue shopping harms the commons and users by creating a “ladder effect”: increased IP protections are negotiated between a few countries, and then used to pressure other nations to adopt, rather than conducting a fair, public, and international discussion. While the demands of rights holders are addressed, there’s little consideration given to the rights of the public. Limitations and exceptions to copyright are downplayed, or not present at all.

It’s crucial that these rights be recognized and protected, as digital technology and the web has turned everyone with a digital footprint into a copyright user (and content creator) on a daily basis. Protecting and promoting these user rights support not only freedom of speech and access to information, but also educational activities, creative remix, and innovation. Re-negotiating 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. If the copyright provisions will be reconsidered, a negotiating objective should be to advocate for stronger protections for copyright limitations and exceptions, and to endorse the expansion of a flexible exception such as fair use. User rights should be recognized as a legitimate and productive aspect of the copyright environment, and granted a mandatory and enforceable standing alongside the rights of authors.

Transparency and public participation in negotiations

It’s imperative that NAFTA negotiations be transparent and participatory. The secrecy demonstrated in the recent negotiation of the TPP left civil society organizations like Creative Commons and the broader public at an extreme disadvantage, as only a privileged few stakeholders invited into the closed negotiation circle have had their interests fully considered.

The NAFTA 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. We agree with the specific and actionable recommendations put forward by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and OpenTheGovernment.org to improve the transparency of U.S. trade negotiations and their accessibility to a diverse range of stakeholders. These recommendations urge USTR to:

1. Publish U.S. textual proposals on rules in ongoing international trade negotiations
2. Publish consolidated texts after each round of ongoing negotiations
3. Appoint a “transparency officer” who does not have structural conflicts of interest in promoting transparency at the agency
4. Open up textual proposals to a notice and comment and public hearing process
5. Make Trade Advisory Committees more broadly inclusive

Now USTR will evaluate the extensive feedback on NAFTA negotiating objectives (over 12,000 comments have been submitted). Canada has already opened a similar public consultation, and it’s expected that Mexico will do the same. It’s a fair question whether these sweeping agreements can actually promote trade and economic activity that is beneficial to a majority of citizens as opposed to a few powerful multinational corporations. But assuming we’re going down this path again, it’s important that negotiators rethink the copyright provisions to protect users and the public good. And it’s absolutely crucial that negotiators lift the un-democratic and counterproductive secrecy that has pervaded most of the recent discussions.

The post Is Re-negotiating NAFTA Opening Pandora’s Box? appeared first on Creative Commons.