An interview with Dave Mitchell of Beautiful Trouble

After Occupy and the Arab Spring in 2011, the artist-activists of Beautiful Trouble burst on the scene with a number of seasoned professionals ready to change the dialogue by utilizing creative, radical protest. Since then, the organization has created a number of invaluable online resources for social movements through their online book (CC BY-NC-SA), technology tools, case studies, and network mapping across societal and international boundaries.

Dave Mitchell, one of the founders of Beautiful Trouble, describes their goal as to “make social movements more creative, more effective, and more likely to win,” and credits CC licensing with enabling them to adopt a modular, agile approach that contributes to their message of social good. Focusing on social movements around the world, the book, game, toolbox, and litany of online and offline resources provides a much needed dose of unity, levity, and practical focus in a divisive political era.

The Beautiful Trouble toolbox can be found online, and the organization is creating a number of new tools to support social movements, including a chatbot and a game. In addition, their network of in-person artist-activist trainers provide vital resources both online and offline to support change agents around the world.

Beautiful Trouble is a toolbox for revolution, a training manual, a collection of case studies, a network map, and more. What was the impetus to start this collection of resources? Why is it important for people to be able to access a toolbox like this online?

Beautiful Trouble emerged in 2011, the year of Occupy and the Arab Spring, and with much the same creative DNA as those flashpoints. We set out to create a common platform where people could come together to share experiences, learn from the ideas and innovations of organizers all over the world, contribute their own ideas, get inspired, get involved, make something happen.

We wanted to popularize the idea that social change isn’t about just mindlessly repeating the same tactics over and over again — but also that it isn’t rocket science. That many small groups of clowns and pranksters can change the world; indeed, maybe it’s the only thing that ever has.

While Beautiful Trouble is best known in its book form, from the beginning it has also been accessible online, where so many of us live. And because it’s modular, interlinking, and constantly expanding, it lives more comfortably online. Now we’re experimenting with letting people access the toolkit as a chatbot, accessible through various messaging apps like Telegram, Slack, and Facebook Messenger.

Why did you decide to license your work under CC BY-NC-SA? How does the CC licensing play into your work?

Creative Commons licensing made sense to us both politically and practically. Politically, our goal is to make social movements more creative, more effective, and more likely to win, and we believe that happens by promoting the kind of agile, creative and modular thinking that Beautiful Trouble embodies.

Basically, we want the ideas in Beautiful Trouble to become common knowledge — to be used, shared, repurposed, translated, adapted — so it made no sense to throw barriers of intellectual property in the path of that, beyond those required by our excellent and supportive publisher.

Practically, as the project took shape, we realized how much of it involved referencing and codifying other people’s ideas and methods. We tried always to give credit where it was due, but we also never wanted to suggest that any one person (certainly not us) owns any of the concepts or methods we included. Creative Commons licensing was one way to signal all of that.

“Artist-activists” are at the heart of Beautiful Trouble’s work. How do you define “artist activists?” How does someone join your network?

“Artist-activist” is such an awkward, artless term — we really struggled to come up with something better… artivist? pranktivist? bohemshevik? Nothing quite fit, but what we wanted to signal was the marriage of two distinct worlds: the elegance, eye for detail, and outside-the-box creativity of the art world with the time-bound, eyes-on-the-prize, immediate-results focus of the organizer. That sweet spot is where minds and hearts open and revolutions take flight, and it’s something anyone can (and should!) seek to embody in their work. Folks who want to pitch us an idea can drop us a line at getintouch@beautifultrouble.org.

How do you define “the commons?”

The commons represents our best hope for a liveable future. It’s an important enough concept to us that we included it as one of the ‘theories’ in the book, in a piece written by Peter Barnes. In that piece, he proposes that by building a system that protects and expands our common wealth rather than one that exploits it, we can address both our ecological and social imbalances.

What kinds of stories can you tell about your work and how you support global social movements? What kinds of wins are you celebrating? What has your work looked like since November? Has it changed?

For the past few years we’ve been busy working with ActionAid and activists from across the Global South to document the tools and tactics of creative activists operating under authoritarian regimes. That project is available online at beautifulrising.org, and will be published this year as Beautiful Rising: Creative Resistance from the Global South (OR Books).

After last November’s presidential election, that focus on authoritarian regimes is sadly much more relevant and timely for activists in the United States. Specifically in response to the Trump moment, we’ve started a “Trouble vs. Trump” series to update our toolbox for the current moment. We’ve been hard at work expanding our training program to meet the explosion of interest in nonviolent direct action training, and we’ve just launched a resistance hotline to help support the surge of new progressive activists planning their first actions and campaigns.

You have a number of projects in addition to Beautiful Trouble including Beautiful Rising, Climate Action Labs, and Beautiful Solutions as well as your in-person trainings for activists. How do you balance this work?

Much like the book we produced, we’re basically a modular organization — a motley crew of activists, trainers and editors scattered around the globe who are organizing horizontally together to spin out related projects that align with our goal of making social movements more creative and effective. That loose structure means we’re able to respond fairly quickly to new opportunities, but also that we sometimes struggle to keep everything running smoothly, since we’ve got no central office, no dedicated development director, and a dispersed leadership structure. Somehow we’ve managed to produce a lot of great tools and keep all the plates spinning so far. Folks who want to support this juggling act are welcome to kick in a few bucks on our Patreon page, and get a copy of our next book as a token of our thanks.

As a bunch of communicators, what do you think messaging is going to look like on the left in the upcoming months and years? What should it look like?

There’s a battle raging right now for the future of the electoral left. It has taken different forms in different countries, but at its core, that struggle is over whether or not the traditional left/liberal parties can be repurposed to present a compelling, broad-based, radical alternative that speaks to people’s 21st-century fears and frustrations, hopes and dreams, or whether these parties will continue to play the role of neoliberalism’s good cop. The outcome of that battle will basically determine whether or not we can bring the fight for a better future from the margins to the mainstream.

Another way to say it: the left needs to get much better at speaking to people’s values hopes, and desires for a better future, and then put that messaging to work in service of a shared political project.

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RightsCon is an annual conference that focuses on awareness-raising, organising, and advocacy on global issues at the intersection of technology and human rights. The event is produced by the international nonprofit organization AccessNow. RightsCon participants include members of digital rights organisations, legal experts, civil society, government, and business representatives.

Creative Commons, Mozilla, and the Wikimedia Foundation organized a panel discussion on the work being done to reform the European Union copyright rules. The goal of the session was to share information on key topics in the Commission’s proposal related to copyright and digital rights as well as connect people with educational and advocacy efforts that support a progressive reform in the public interest.

MEP Julia Reda set the stage for the panel, providing background about both the underlying principles for modernising the copyright rules, and also the process that’s involved and where we are now. Ms. Reda is a member of the European Pirate Party and VP for the Greens/European Free Alliance group, She was the rapporteur for the comprehensive copyright evaluation report presented to the Parliament in 2015.  

We then moved on to explore six key issues of the copyright reform proposal. Lisette Kalshoven from Kennisland and the Communia Association explored the opportunities and challenges presented by the new copyright exception for education. Lisette talked about how the existing copyright exception for educational uses laid out in the 2001 Information Society Directive is quite good, but is not harmonized across all Member States and doesn’t cover online uses of educational content. The new education exception introduced in the Commission’s proposal is positive because it is mandatory. However, there are three main challenges. First, there is a feature whereby if there is a licensing option in a particular Member State, then that country could ignore the implementation of the education exception. Second, the exception would only cover more traditional educational establishments, such as schools, leaving out other informal education practices, such as online courses. Finally, there’s still some confusion about whether the new exception would adequately cover both online and offline uses of educational resources. Lisette also mentioned the recently-launched digital campaign https://rightcopyright.eu/, which aims to mobilize the public in supporting positive changes to copyright that will improve access and use of educational materials and technologies for teachers and students of all types.

Raegan MacDonald from Mozilla discussed the possibility for including a copyright exception for user-generated content. Raegan talked about how the idea of introducing this type of copyright exception would go a long way in creating a better balance in the reform, since the current provisions seem to address the (sometimes unwarranted) concerns of the traditional rights holders like publishers rather than new creators and users. While it was not included in the Commission’s original proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, an exception for user-generated content (UGC) has been introduced in the draft opinions of both the Culture and Education Committee and the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection. The key point on introducing a UGC exception is to support new digital creativity, free speech, and cultural expression.

Paul Ayris from University College London Library talked about the proposed exception to enable text and data mining. Paul said that current research predicts a 1.9% growth of European GDP if the EU commits to a broad exception for text and data mining. Researchers (or anyone else) should not be forced to acquire additional licenses to conduct text and data mining on content which they already have lawful access, and he argued that the EU should follow the lead of the recommendation laid down in the Hague Declaration that “the right to read is the right to mine.” The exception should also cover users and uses outside of the traditional academic research community, as doing so would promote novel innovation across and between the public and private sectors.

Marta Peirano from eldiario.es talked about the controversial ancillary right for press publishers. Marta explained the negative repercussion to news producers of Spain when they implemented an ancillary copyright a few years ago. This is because Google News, which would have been forced to pay fees to link to and provide context to publishers’ content, called the bluff of rightsholders by discontinuing their service. When users weren’t able to discover information through content aggregation services, access to news sites dropped precipitously. She explained that the publishers pushed for a similar ancillary right in Germany, with comparable results. With so much harm to readers and no return to rights holders, the only sane option is to remove the Commission’s ancillary right for press publishers through Parliament amendments.

Agata Nowacka from Seznam talked about the Commission’s proposal that would require filtering of user-uploaded content. Seznam is a search engine based in the Czech Republic that enjoys a high market penetration there—it is one of the few places in Europe where Google does not fully dominate the search market. Agata said that as a relatively small operation (~1000 employees) Seznam would be hard pressed to pull the resources required to implement an active monitoring mechanism proposed by the Commission’s draft directive. This type of “active censorship” would be negative for most of their users, and might only work to reinforce the ubiquity of the major players, thus reducing competition in the search business.

Finally, Dimi Dimitrov from Wikimedia’s Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU discussed policy options for safeguarding the public domain. While there are some positive provisions in the Commission’s proposal to strengthen cultural heritage institutions, there are several ongoing disputes between museums and the Wikipedia community. Dimi pointed to a case in which a German museum claimed copyright on the digital reproduction of a portrait of composer Richard Wagner. The work was painted in 1862, so it clearly is in the public domain, which would make it a natural addition to the Wikipedia page about Wagner. However, the museum claims a new copyright that arises when the work was digitized, thus for all practical purposes keeping the work out of the public domain. Dimi said that these types of disputes are not uncommon, and that a forward-looking EU copyright law should aim to clarify that digital reproductions of public domain artworks should also be in the public domain—for the broad benefit and enjoyment of the public.

We’ll continue to advocate for a progressive reform in the public interest. Right now amendments are being tabled by the relevant committees, which will eventually be negotiated and voted on in the European Parliament and Council. There’s still time to fix this copyright law to make sure that it supports users and creators in the 21st century.

The post RightsCon Redux: Working Toward A Progressive Copyright Framework For Europe appeared first on Creative Commons.

 

Last week COMMUNIA launched the rightcopyright.eu campaign in order to support a better copyright for education. Let’s raise our voices and spread the word about this petition so we can influence European legislators in creating a better copyright for education.

SIGN THE PETITION

Why we need your help

The European Commission has presented a new European copyright law (Draft Directive) to the European Parliament that deeply impacts education in a disappointing and non-facilitative manner. Educators have embraced modern possibilities, and so should copyright. Therefore, COMMUNIA has developed a campaign website to collect signatures of educators throughout Europe to let the European Parliamentarians know we need a better copyright for education.

The European parliament will vote on the proposal later this year and can change, accept or reject it. COMMUNIA will present the outcomes of the petition in the European Parliament, clearly showing them the voice of citizens eager for a good-quality education, and a copyright that matches.

Copyright impacts education – it determines the extent to which a teacher may use, share or remix any material made by someone else. In some cases, there is a special exception to copyright for education, but teachers are often forced to do things that are not allowed. All European countries have implemented the current EU laws on copyright in a different way, which makes it very difficult for teachers to know what they can and cannot share internationally.

What you can do

Please visit the campaign website rightcopyright.eu and sign the petition for a better copyright for education. Please share the campaign with your colleagues, friends and family via mail, social media or face to face as well. You can find sample tweets, posts and images on the campaign website.

If you would like to know more about the campaign, or have questions, please contact Lisette Kalshoven at lk@kl.nl.

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What if every time you opened up a new tab you could spice up your day with an artwork selected from the collection of Europeana? Thanks to a new chrome browser plugin developed by Creative Commons Netherlands affiliate Kennisland you can.

Art up your tab is a simple browser plugin that will display a full page artwork from the collection of Europeana when you open a new tab in any browser. All artworks that are displayed by Art up your tab are either in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution Share alike license. The Images are presented in full screen without any text – clicking on the image allows the user to discover additional information about the artwork on display.

Europeana.eu is a platform that brings together digitized heritage of more than 3,700 cultural and academic institutions across Europe including gems like “Night Watch” by Rembrandt to a 18th-century corset, from photos of paintings by Michelangelo. At this time, the database of Europeana contains approximately 30 million images 7,5 million of which are either in the Public Domain or available under free CC licenses.

The initial version of Art Up Your Tab, which has been realised with a contribution from the Dutch Network for Digital Heritage, showcases works provided by Dutch heritage institutions. The images displayed by the plugin are constantly updated and over time the plugin will display images from cultural heritage institution from other European countries as well.

If you are reading this in a chrome browser, you can head over to the chrome web store to install the plugin right now.

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In January we urged the new Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, to make sure that whoever she appoints as the next Register of Copyrights should put the public at the center of the work of the Copyright Office. Currently the Register leads the Copyright Office, an institution that sits within the Library of Congress. The Register is a key position responsible for—you guessed it—copyright registrations, and also influences copyright policy in the United States.

But now, a bill has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would alter the role of the Register, and possibly the future of the Copyright Office itself. Last week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) introduced H.R. 1695, the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017. The bill would give the President—not the Librarian of Congress—the power to appoint the Register of Copyrights. The position would be subject to Senate confirmation and would last for a term of 10 years (with the possibility of renewal).

There is a lot of work to be done in upgrading and modernizing the important processes around the Office’s strategic priority “to make copyright records easily searchable and widely available to authors, entrepreneurs, and all who need them”. It’s unclear how changing the confirmation and reporting structure of the Register would serve that priority. But it is clear that the shift could further politicize the role, and thus embolden the political agendas of several of the largest publishing associations and entertainment industry businesses that are currently cheering this legislation.

The mission of the Library of Congress is “to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.” The Register of Copyrights should continue to report to the Librarian of Congress. Moving this position out from underneath the public interest mission of the Library will only continue to nudge the balance of copyright toward serving the interests of the incumbent players, and will ignore new creators and users.

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