Our Global Summit is three short months away, and today I am delighted to provide some exciting updates to our program: two keynotes (more to come), five tracks, and a one week extension for submissions (now due on Friday, February 3).

Keynotes

Our first keynote will be international copyright and intellectual property expert Ruth Okediji, William L. Prosser professor of law at the University of Minnesota. Professor Okediji is the author of several books on copyright and intellectual property and is regularly cited for her work on IP in developing countries. She is an editor and reviewer of the Journal of World Intellectual Property, and has chaired the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Committee on Law and Computers, its Committee on Intellectual Property, and its Nominating Committee for Officers and Members of the Executive Committee. In 2011-2012, she was a member of the National Academies Board on Science, Technology and Policy Committee on the Impact of Copyright Policy on Innovation in the Digital Era. In 2016, she received the prestigious McKnight presidential professorship and was a visiting professor at Harvard from 2015-2016. Ruth was also part of the process of negotiating the recently approved Marrakesh treaty; she joined the Nigerian delegation and helped lead the African Group. She has an upcoming book, Copyright Law in an Age of Limitations and Exceptions. Ruth will be speaking to our first summit goal: “To define sharing and the Commons for our generation.”

Our second keynote will be journalist and lawyer Sarah Jeong, a
contributing editor at Vice Motherboard who writes about technology, policy, and law. She is the author of The Internet of Garbage, and has bylines at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Verge, Forbes, the Guardian, and other publications. In 2017, she was named as one of Forbes’s 30 under 30 in the category of Media. Jeong graduated from Harvard Law School in 2014. As a law student, she edited the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, and worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She was a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale for 2016, and also currently a fellow at the Internet Law & Policy Foundry. Sarah will be speaking to our third summit goal: “To discuss the future of the Creative Commons network and grow the CC movement.”

Tracks and track leads

The CC Global Summit will be organized around five tracks:

1. Policy & advocacy (Copyright reform, advocacy strategies, OER policies, etc)
2. Community & movement (CC network strategy, appreciation culture, stronger ties for the community in different domains, mentoring, strong diversity, etc)
3. Spheres of Open (GLAM, Open Education, OER impact, open data, open design, open hardware, open agriculture/farming, etc)
4. The Future of the Commons (Future of the digital commons, future of digital archives, how does CC fit in the broader Commons movement, Commons and economy, open innovation, Open business models, etc.)
5. Usable Commons (health data, 3D printing, legal infrastructure, open infrastructures for collaboration, patent data, etc)

I would also like to congratulate the track leaders, a diverse group of experts from around the world who will be assisting in programming and curating the tracks.

Track	Track Leader	Contributors
Policy & advocacy	Lisette Kalshoven, Europeana, CC Netherlands	Claudio Ruiz, Timothy Vollmer, Cable Green, Delia Browne
Community & movement	Kelsey Wiens, CC Canada	Claudia Cristiani, Batbold Zagdragchaa, Simeon Oriko, María Juliana Soto, SooHyun Pae
Spheres of open	Scann, CC Argentina	André Rocha, Mahmoud Wardeh, Cable Green, Delia Browne
The Future of the Commons	Alek Tarkowski, CC Poland	Claudia Cristiani, Jane Park, Alexandros Nousias, Paul Stacey
Usable Commons	Jane Park, CC HQ	Ryan Merkley, André Rocha, Alexandros Nousias

If you want to get in touch with any of the track leaders, please email us at summit@creativecommons.org

Call for Submissions extended

Finally, we’re extending the call for submissions to Friday, February 3rd, so that everyone can have an opportunity to submit their proposals. You can find the Call for Submissions here.

As always, we’re available for questions, discussions, or feedback on our Slack, on social media, or at summit@creativecommons.org.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in this process, and we look forward to seeing you all in Toronto in April.

The post Announcing first Keynotes, Tracks, and an Extended Call for Submissions appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Library of Congress in an incredible institution in the United States, serving as the research library for Congress, and stewarding an unparalleled collection of books and cultural works of all types. Over the last several years, groups have called on the library to make technology and policy changes to remain relevant in the 21st century, in order to meet its mission “to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.”

We’ve already mentioned a fews ways the Library of Congress could better support public access to information and cultural heritage materials, including opening up the Congressional Research Service so that the useful and timely reports are publicly shared with everyone (in addition to members of Congress), and developing a “digitization swat team” to ensure that all relevant government information and resources are accessible and discoverable online.

Now that Carla Hayden is the new Librarian of Congress, there’s been significant interest and hope that she will re-infuse the institution with excitement and digital vitality, and help address some of the technological challenges faced by the Library for many years.

One of the key roles overseen by Hayden is the director of the U.S. Copyright Office; this position is called the Register of Copyrights. Upon the departure of the most recent register Maria Pallante, Hayden initiated a public consultation to solicit information on the knowledge, skills, and expertise necessary for the next Register.

Creative Commons submitted answers to the survey questions (reproduced below). You can share your thoughts to the questionnaire through January 31, 2017.

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What are the knowledge, skills, and abilities you believe are the most important for the Register of Copyrights?

The Register of Copyrights should put the public at the center of the Copyright Office’s strategy and work plan. The Register should support and uphold key principles such as evidence-based policy analysis and development, nimble and user-focused technological improvements, open-minded public information gathering, and transparent decision making.

The Register should also have a firm grasp of technology and understanding of how creators and users share over the internet, and be willing to reconsider policies that impede the sharing of content in the digital era. The Register should also be able to engage with the broader community in ways other than a formal request for information and comments. The register should talk with and understand the challenges and opportunities of creators of all types, and listen to feedback and ideas from those who are generating new types of creative works.

What should be the top three priorities for the Register of Copyrights?

Regarding authors’ rights, copyright policymaking should uphold a principle of “copyright neutrality”. This means that when copyright policy is made, it needs to treat all stakeholders (authors) equally and take all authorial needs into consideration, not just those who wish to maximize their protection under the law, or who have an outsized ability to influence the policy-making process. Some authors are interested in commercialization, while others wish to share widely under permissive terms. The Register and the Office should develop and implement processes to make it inexpensive and simple to declare authorship and public license status, and for authors to dedicate works to the public domain. Copyright Office policy and practice should contain features that address the needs of all types of authors, whatever their choices along the copyright spectrum.

Regarding users and the public, the Register and Office should redouble its strategic priority to “make copyright records easily searchable and widely available to authors, entrepreneurs, and all who need them”. The Register should prioritize making collection metadata freely available in digital form, preferably by releasing an API or a similar approach so the public can build tools and interesting applications around the content. The public’s interaction with the copyright registration, recordation, and other systems should operate as 21st century users expect.

The Register and the Office should focus on overhauling the DMCA 1201 exemption-granting process by committing to reforms in the public interest. Changes should make the process less complex, less expensive, and less burdensome to those parties seeking an exemption. These could include—but are not limited to—a presumed renewal where no opposition exists, making particular exemptions permanent, and refusing to consider concerns not focused specifically on copyright. In addition to positive changes that can be made from within the Copyright Office, the Register should call for Congressional action to address these and related problems.

The post New Register of Copyrights should put public at the center of technology and policy goals appeared first on Creative Commons.

Hoy, la comunidad de Creative Commons está abriendo el proceso de consulta sobre el borrador de su estrategia para apoyar un movimiento global fuerte y en crecimiento. La propuesta es parte de un proceso liderado por la propia comunidad que comenzó en la Cumbre Global en Seúl, Corea del Sur, en octubre de 2015. Hoy estamos abriendo un período de consulta de dos meses con la comunidad más amplia de CC. La propuesta final será revisada y finalizada en la Cumbre Global en Toronto, del 28 al 30 de abril de 2017.

La propuesta recomienda cambios significativos pero necesarios al actual modelo de afiliados de CC, que originalmente se desarrolló para apoyar el proceso de adopción de las licencias a las estructuras legales de cada país. Hoy, el movimiento de CC es amplio y diverso, involucrado en educación abierta, reforma al derecho de autor, acceso abierto, datos abiertos y más. El nuevo modelo está diseñado para empoderar a los individuos y a las organizaciones que quieran contribuir a nuestros valores compartidos, construir equipos más fuertes y flexibles y coordinar objetivos y actividades para tener mayor impacto. Los colaboradores de CC y los afiliados serán parte del núcleo de esta nueva estructura, que esperamos crecerá y florecerá en un nuevo modelo liderado por la comunidad.

CC nunca emprendió una revisión semejante de nuestra red, pero mientras celebramos nuestro 15avo aniversario, llegó el momento de renovar el foco sobre la comunidad y la colaboración. Con un empuje fuerte de nuestra comunidad y con el apoyo del Directorio para renovar el movimiento, iniciamos un proyecto con un comité voluntario de afiliados de todo el mundo. Este proceso requirió investigaciones nuevas, análisis y horas de contribuciones de este diversos grupo de líderes globales. Trabajamos por consenso y todos contribuyeron activamente. Estoy orgulloso de lo que escribimos juntos y entusiasmado de apoyar al movimiento de CC a construir esta red juntos.

Los elementos claves de la propuesta incluyen:

• Una estructura de membresía para los miembros individuales de la red y las organizaciones partner o aliadas para tomar el liderazgo en el movimiento y participar en la gobernanza y en los procesos de configurar los objetivos de manera comunitaria.
• Habrá un Consejo Global de la Red (GNC, Global Network Council), implementado con representantes locales para proveer gobernanza al movimiento, localizar recursos financieros y definir áreas de interés y posicionamientos políticos globales.
• Los colaboradores, los miembros de la red y las organizaciones partner o aliadas estarán organizadas en equipos nacionales, con un coordinador nacional y un representante electo para el Consejo Global de la Red (GNC).
• El desarrollo de nuevos fondos para proveer recursos a los equipos de la comunidad para aquellos proyectos que hagan avanzar los objetivos del movimiento.
• La creación de áreas definidas de trabajo, llamadas Plataformas, para las actividades globales de CC, como reforma al derecho de autor, educación abierta y administración de las licencias. Cada plataforma incluirá objetivos, posiciones y un coordinador.

La consulta a la comunidad estará abierta hasta el 24 de marzo de 2017. Necesitamos escuchar comentarios por parte de la comunidad más amplia de CC para asegurarnos de que haya un amplio apoyo a los cambios propuestos. Nuestra investigación nos recomendó que trabajemos en múltiples idiomas, por lo que hemos traducido las propuestas al español, árabe y francés (versión en inglés). Posteamos una página en nuestro sitio con la información de contexto, la investigación, la propuesta y abrimos la oportunidad para hacer y compartir comentarios. Abrimos un canal de Slack (#network-consultation), y vamos a estar moderando discusiones en línea y reuniones presenciales. Se puede averiguar más aquí.

Para finalizar, quiero terminar este post con una expresión de gratitud. Mucha gente ha contribuido a este trabajo y quiero agradecerles. Aún queda mucho por hacer, pero no podríamos haber llegado tan lejos sin todas estas personas:
* La comunidad de afiliados de CC, el directorio, el consejo consultivo, los coordinadores regionales y el staff de CC
* El Comité de Estrategia y su vice-presidente, Alek Tarkowski
* Anna Mazgal y los investigadores detrás de los reportes de “Los rostros de los comunes”
* Paul Stacey y Kamil Sliwowski, nuestros talentosos facilitadores
* La Fundación Hewlett por su aporte generoso y su profundo compromiso con la comunidad de Creative Commons alrededor del mundo
* Nuestros donantes y seguidores, que eligen financiar el trabajo vital de CC

The post La comunidad de CC lanza consulta acerca de la estrategia del movimiento appeared first on Creative Commons.

En Español

Today, the Creative Commons community is opening consultation on its draft strategy to support a strong and growing global movement. The proposal is part of a community-led process that began at the Global Summit in Seoul, South Korea in October 2015. Today we are opening a two-month consultation period with the broader CC community. The final proposal will be revised and finalized at the Global Summit in Toronto from April 28-30, 2017

The proposal recommends significant but necessary changes to the current CC affiliate structure, which was originally developed to support the porting of licenses to national legal structures. Today, the CC movement is broad and diverse, engaging in issues of open education, copyright reform, open access, open data, and more. The new model is designed to empower individuals and organizations that want to contribute towards our shared values, to build stronger, more resilient teams, and to co-ordinate goals and activities for greater impact. Today’s CC contributors and affiliates will form the core of this new structure, which we hope will grow and flourish in a new community-led model.

CC has never undertaken such a review of our network, but as we celebrate our 15th anniversary, it’s time for a renewed focus on community and collaboration. With a strong push from our community, and support from the board to renew the movement, we initiated the project with a volunteer committee of affiliates from around the world. This process has required new research, analysis, and hundreds of hours of contributions from this group of diverse global leaders. We worked by consensus, and everyone contributed actively. I’m proud of what we’ve drafted together, and excited to help the CC movement build this network together.

Key elements of the proposal include:

• Membership structure for individual network member and partner organizations to take leadership in the movement and participate in governance and community goal-setting
• There will be a Global Network Council established with national representatives to provide movement governance, allocate fund resources, and define areas of focus and global policy positions
• Contributors, network members and partners will be organized under national teams, with a national lead and an elected representative to the Global Network Council
• Development of new fund to provide resources to community teams for projects that advance the movement’s goals
• Establishment of defined areas of work, called platforms, for CC’s global activities, such as copyright reform, open education, and license stewardship. Each platform will include goals, positions, and a co-ordinator

The community consultation will be open until March 24, 2017. We need to hear from the CC community to ensure broad support for these proposed changes. Our research recommended we work in multiple languages, so we have translated the proposals into Spanish, Arabic, and French. We have posted a page on our website with the background information, the research, the proposal, and opportunities to share comments. We have opened a Slack channel (#network-consultation), and will be conducting online discussions and in-person sessions. Find out more here.

Finally, I want to end this post with gratitude. So many people have contributed to this work, and I want to offer my thanks. We have much more to do, but we couldn’t have come this far without:

• The CC community of affiliates, board, advisory board, regional coordinators, and staff
• The steering committee, and committee co-chair Alek Tarkowski
• Anna Mazgal and the researchers behind Faces of the Commons reports
• Paul Stacey and Kamil Sliwowski, our talented facilitators
• The Hewlett Foundation for their generous support and deep commitment to the Creative Commons community around the world
• Our donors and supporters, who choose to fund CC’s vital work

The post CC Community releases movement strategy for consultation appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Creative Commons upcoming Global Summit is the first major opportunity to introduce our community to the newly-born Platform Cooperatives Consortium and to look for ways our two movements, which share many core values, can collaborate.

We have just entered a time of potentially enormous social turmoil. Like the 1960’s, it could also set the stage for some unexpectedly positive outcomes, this time, in ways that transform labor markets and business ownership structures. A powerful backlash to unchecked corporate power is gaining momentum. As it unfolds, Creative Commons, the Platform Cooperatives Consortium, and our allies around the world can play decisive roles in these labor market transformations. In fact, as 2017 dawns, there are at least two big reasons to be optimistic about the opportunities ahead for grassroots actions that lead to large-scale constructive social change. What’s more, everyone can help.

The first is the five-year “Lighting up the Commons” vision crystallized last year by Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley. This vision has already helped generate remarkable progress including more collaborative approaches to federally-funded scientific research in the U.S. and smarter government policies around the world. The three central pillars of the Lighting up the Commons strategy are discovery, collaboration, and advocacy. The strength of this inclusive strategy? It’s entirely community-driven and features an explicit focus on empowering changemakers with the substantial support and scaffolding of Creative Commons.

The advent of the nascent “Platform Cooperatives Movement,” reminiscent of Creative Commons during its salad days, is the second reason for optimism. Through this movement, a thing of beauty is being born.

Platform cooperatives rely on shared governance guidelines known as the Rochdale Principles that provide for democratic governance and profit-sharing and are generally designed to reinforce non-exploitative, mutually beneficial commercial relationships.

Last year’s Platform Cooperatives Consortium organizing meeting, hosted at the New School in New York by the activist scholar Trebor Scholz, was thrilling. One rapid-fire inspiring moment after another conveyed the sense of a world under repair.

This is from the platform co-op call to action: “The cooperative platform economy can become one of the counterforces to the defects of the on-demand economy. It is a strategy for reversing wealth inequality, gender inequity, environmental degradation, and systemic racial injustice. The experiments now already underway show that a global ecosystem of cooperatives can stand against the concentration of wealth and the insecurity of workers that yields Silicon Valley’s winner-takes-all economy. They show that the Internet can be owned and governed differently.”

At the conference, we learned that taxi drivers in cities including Denver, Colorado have organized themselves into worker-owned co-ops such as the Green Taxi Cooperative, an Uber-like service complete with a sleek smartphone app that is fully owned and run by the drivers themselves, whose rates of pay, job security and benefits have all increased. We also heard from feminist officials recently elected in Barcelona, Spain who are providing municipal support for the rollout of publicly-owned digital platform cooperatives, including an alternative to sites such as Airbnb. Barcelona residents who rent out their homes or apartments using the new platform cooperative will be rewarded with a share of revenue from other hosts, enjoy a more reliable income stream, and gain other benefits of platform ownership when they agree to pay taxes, operate transparently, and abide by local laws. We heard from workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk casual labor service who have organized themselves into a powerful new force online through TurkerNation.com, based in part on platform cooperative ideas after suffering appalling abuses, including instances when remote workers were asked to caption beheading videos posted to the site by the Islamic State.

Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler, a longtime friend of Creative Commons, did the math in his keynote address: there is enough slack in global production and distribution chains, Benkler calculates, to enable rising standards of income, living and municipal services around the world if we use technology to reduce or entirely eliminate those who play a primarily “extractive” role in markets, the players whose main or sometimes only function is to come between the producers or providers of goods and services and consumers.

We’re talking about nurturing a return to a more humane form of capitalism, to the way agricultural cooperatives used to work and still do in some regions where farmers take turns harvesting each other’s fields and share storage silos and other facilities and equipment. There is already a home healthcare service that is owned by the nurses it employs, and artist and photographer co-ops such as Stocksy that pool some expenses and revenues. One day there may even be search engines and social media firms that are owned by their users, who would then gain full control over the data they produce and who could as groups or individuals negotiate their own relationships with advertisers and news media services who seek their attention.

But perhaps the most important takeaway from last year’s Platform Cooperatives Consortium organizing meeting was the message it conveyed not to despair or lose hope.

When they’re able, people revolt against tyrants and the tools of oppression and exploitation are reworked in different hands into tools of liberation and freedom. People of good will and vision can put these tools—the Internet and information technologies—to far better use than we do now. Spain’s Mondragon Corporation, for example, is a network of worker-owned co-ops that has successfully resisted takeover by stateless multinational firms and now employs more than 70,000 people. In the U.S., approximately 30,000 co-ops presently contribute an estimated $154 billion to our national income, which provides a base on which more worker-owned businesses can be organized, constructed, and sustained. Imagine what might happen if government procurement policies here in the U.S. and around the world favor firms that are cooperatively owned by workers rather than controlled by global capital.

Platform cooperatives can put a brake on income inequality by making sure the voice of workers does not remain submerged in the digital age. They could also be the only way workers and Internet users can become masters—and owners—of powerful artificial intelligence systems that can’t be built without data we all produce.

That’s why I am delighted to report that Creative Commons’ organizers recently reached out to personally invite leaders of the Platform Cooperatives movement to participate in our upcoming Toronto Global Summit—and to also pitch ideas for panels and workshops. Together, we can look for ways to strengthen our ability to shape a better future.  

The Internet is not finished yet and the future is in our hands. I hope to see you in Toronto!

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Hal Plotkin is the Senior Open Policy Fellow at Creative Commons USA, the U.S. affiliate of Creative Commons. He served as a Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education during the administration of President Barack Obama (2009-2014). In 2002, Mr. Plotkin authored the first article ever published about Creative Commons.

 

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