Why are students criminalized for sharing knowledge?

Over the last two years several organizations have been highlighting the situation of Colombian graduate student Diego Gomez, who is being criminally prosecuted for sharing a research article online. Gomez is a student in conservation and wildlife management, and for the most part has poor access to many of the resources and databases that would help him conduct his research. He shared an academic paper on Scribd so that he and others could access it for their work. If convicted, Diego could face a prison term of 4-8 years. Final court arguments are scheduled for January 25, 2017.

The prosecution of Diego is yet another example of copyright overreach, where rights holders can unfairly leverage the law so that even a minor violation leads to major negative repercussions for both the individual involved and society as a whole.

Take action now! Show your support for Diego and global open access to scientific research.

Many thanks to the Colombian digital rights organization Fundación Karisma, which has been providing legal assistance to Diego and has documented his story here.

The post Compartir no es delito: Sharing is not a crime appeared first on Creative Commons.

At the end of an intense process of expert hearings, thesaurus
discussions, translation sprints, legal language comparisons and several
rounds of fine-tuning the texts, the unified German translation of CC
licenses version 4.0 is finally here.

It is the first time that a CC tool is available in just one
consolidated text for all German-speaking users. The coordination
necessary happened between the CC teams in Germany, Austria and
Switzerland. Although the language variants between these main
German-speaking countries are considered relatively small, consolidating
legal texts that are equally aimed at lay people and professionals
proved considerably harder than expected.

We would like to thank the open content experts and commons activists
involved:
Annette Kaufmann
Alexander Baratsits
Armin Talke
Christoph Endell
Joachim Losehand
Klaus Graf
Leonhard Dobusch
Lukas Mezger
Magdalena Reiter
Matthias Schmid
Max von Grafenstein
Michela Vignoli
Nicole Lieger
Paul Klimpel
Roland Alton-Scheidl
Simon Schlauri
Till Jaeger
Till Kreutzer
several other commenters of the public commenting phase on co-ment.com
and John Weitzmann of CC Germany for leading the effort.

The post CC 4.0 German now live! appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

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The “Safe harbor” provisions of the DMCA have been critical to build the internet as we know it today. Provisions like this one have given space to intermediaries providing platforms to host and transmit user-generated content without being held responsible for third party acts. The above is the legal reason explaining innovation on user-generated platforms and ways to communicate and, as a consequence, enhance rights such as freedom of expression.

But the DMCA is U.S. law, not international law. Nevertheless, DMCA related provisions such as notice and takedown are spread worldwide, in part because of the significant role of the United States on the international trade agenda, forcing countries in the Global South to adapt their internal regulation—including copyright, of course—to U.S. based standards to do business together. In addition, the law is forced on these countries due to the widespread use of these platforms all over the world, the vast majority of them owned by Silicon Valley companies legally bound by U.S. federal law.

Connecting those two dots, the implementation of national DMCA oriented legislation at the local level because of international trade agreements, and the fact that media and communications today is based on platforms with legal obligations to U.S. law, the DMCA’s notice and takedown processes are known, used, and abused in countries outside the U.S. These processes are not used to enhance the exercise of rights—such as freedom of speech—but instead do exactly the opposite.

The case of Ecuador under president Correa is probably one of the finest examples of systematic practices of using the internet as a battleground to silent political dissent. Reports suggested the government of President Correa has invested millions of dollars of public funds hiring services to remove content using DMCA notices. These practices have been used to suppress content such as “unauthorized images” from the state-operated TV channel ECTV, used to take down a documentary about President Correa, or even asking for taking down the Fundamedios website—a well known freedom of expression and journalist non-profit organization critical to the government—for using an picture of President Correa. The DMCA has also been used to report Twitter accounts for using similar photos, as covered by activists in the field.

Those cases are not just limited to Ecuador. There are other documented cases which use DMCA notices to take down content in Mexico, such as asking YouTube to remove videos showing president Peña Nieto confusing some administrative departments of Mexico. Or in Brazil, where videos critical of the presidential candidate Aecio Neves were supposedly removed by Neves himself.

Cases like those above illustrate that copyright regulation is not just about defending the right of creators or giving them the right incentives. Copyright during the last part of twentieth century and first part of the twenty-first century has been a powerful tool to control content and its distribution, understanding content and control in a broader sense, allowing governments, such in the case of Latin America, to also control discourses, narratives, and dissent.

The post Copyright as a tool to censor political dissent in Latin America appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today the U.S. Department of State released the Federal Open Licensing Playbook, a list of considerations, use cases, and recommendations for federal departments interested in developing and implementing open license requirements on federally-funded grant projects. It is designed to assist federal efforts to maximize the impact of grant funds, and create opportunities for innovation and collaborative practices using federally-funded resources.

Each of the nine “plays” contains common features, including a checklist, key questions, and examples of use.

Of particular interest is Play 1: Use widely accepted open licenses.

“Whenever possible, you should require grantees to use widely accepted and interoperable open licenses rather than create agency-specific or permit grantee-specific licenses. Customized licenses should only be considered if no existing open license meets the program’s needs. Custom licenses can inadvertently limit the usability of content, because they are often incompatible with each other and with common open licenses. By using widely accepted open licenses, agencies can ensure that their content can be remixed with content from many other sources, including other grant programs and other federal agencies. This also promotes consistency with existing standard practice outside of government. Common open licenses also enable attribution to content creators.

See also Play 3: Make resources adaptable and remixable.

“One of the goals of open licensing is to ensure members of the public are able to create derivatives of openly licensed resources, including by remixing content, translating content, localizing content, and creating accessible versions. There are two key factors for enabling adaptation: ensuring that the open license selected is broadly compatible, and ensuring that the openly licensed materials are in file formats that can be easily edited and tagged.

Creative Commons and other civil society organizations provided key input on the creation of this new open policy tool. The Federal Open Licensing Playbook draws inspiration from similar products developed by other federal agencies, such as the Digital Services Playbook.

The Federal Open Licensing Playbook has been released into the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, which means it can be freely reused, customized, and updated by anyone, anywhere in the world, with no restrictions. CC plans to repurpose the Playbook for use with other governments who also want to ensure publicly funded resources are openly licensed.

Open Licensing Playbook (.pdf)

Open Licensing Playbook (.doc)

The post State Department Publishes Open Licensing “Playbook” for Federal Agencies appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

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At her talk at this year’s Mozilla Festival, Maggie Vail made a strong case for artist-driven media, stating, “Artists create. Artists innovate. It’s what they do, even in business.” According to Vail, artist-driven media will help drive out the industry-backed corporations who seek to lock down the web, maintaining a stranglehold on the important projects that make creativity on the internet thrive. Democratizing creation in both platform-based and independent media means providing open licensing structures that support artists and promoting creativity and innovation. In the words of our mission statement, these structures will “realize the full potential of the internet.”

I feel lucky that I get to spend a good deal of my time seeking out and talking to brilliant 21st century creators, from Joost deCock, a self-proclaimed “sewcialist” who provides bespoke CC-licensed sewing patterns on his website to the Public Lab, which infuses science with art to inspire a generation of citizen scientists. I’ve spoken to fine artists, data scientists, journalists, and even actors, all of whom believe that through the power of sharing, another world is possible. For me, the commons represents this dream of another world. Our digital commons has now reached well over a billion works – the free exchange of knowledge is dependent on its growth and maintenance, but it takes creators and mission-driven projects to make that possible.

At the core of CC is our licenses, which makes sharing clear and simple across platforms, but I know that we are much more than just licenses – we’re a group of creators, scientists, lawyers, musicians, photographers, and sometimes all of these identities at once. We’re global, we’re multilingual, and most of all, we’re a community.

21st century creation means embracing the commons and the messy, collaborative form of open creativity that makes digital media so special. It means utilizing tools that question the status quo, and most of all, it means sharing and gratitude for the community that makes it all possible.

Our core of community is not a series of disparate projects, but instead a network of people driven by the desire to share their creativity with the world. What is creating in the 21st century? It’s remix, it’s reuse, and it’s collaboration, made possible by the dream of the global commons.

Read more of our commons profiles here.

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