As connectivity continues to increase globally, more people than ever live in a ubiquitous and nonstop media environment. In light of these changes, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s work has never been more important. Founded four years ago after the exposure of government collusion to create a financial blockade against Wikileaks, the Freedom of the Press Foundation develops tools and processes to advocate for journalists to fight against censorship to call for more transparency and accountability in both government and media.

From technical tools that allow news organizations to support the privacy and security of their sources to their public work for a more engaged and political press, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has received international acclaim for their important work in both disrupting and supporting both traditional and alternative journalism.

Trevor Timm is the co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Learn more about how you can support their work at their website.

How does the Freedom of the Press Foundation work to create a more equitable world? How can openness drive significant change both in the press and the work of your organization?

Our overarching mission is to protect and defend journalism that’s dedicated to transparency and accountability. A lot of that work revolves around government transparency and wanting to help journalists and whistleblowers connect in a more secure environment so that information that the public should know but the government’s keeping secret can eventually become public and we can force a more open and transparent government.

This happens in a variety of ways. We advocate for reforms to the Freedom of Information Act. We build tools like visual security tools to help journalists and sources communicate securely. We train journalists how to use encryption tools in the newsroom and we have a variety of lawsuits going on right now dealing with government transparency.

When you say “government transparency” do you mean specifically in the realm of journalism or do you work for transparency in other realms as well?

We certainly focus on [other forms of transparency]. For example, our two lawsuits right now involve transparency as relates to journalists specifically, but what we want to do is facilitate journalists to make government more transparent across different fields. While our specialty area definitely involves journalists themselves, the idea is that journalists are often the conduit for accountability inside government whether we’re talking about the environment or civil rights or healthcare. We want to make sure that journalists can do their job without interference to the best of their abilities.

You work a lot with encryption and privacy tools. How can organizations that are concerned with transparency be transparent and also work smart in terms of privacy and encryption?

There are a few cases where privacy rights and free speech rights collide and these are difficult questions that I think a lot of people have strong opinions on. When we’re talking about the government, I think that they are held to a higher standard of openness than private citizens.

We are generally in favor of strong privacy rights for private individuals, especially vis a vis the government, but when we’re talking about government officials it’s different. The apt term is the difference between secrecy and privacy. Government officials essentially work for the public and so they should be transparent as possible about what they’re doing behind closed doors. Unfortunately, a lot of officials in the United States government have an opposite view—that it’s okay to violate the privacy of private citizens but it’s okay for the government to keep information secret.

The biggest display of this is in the past few years has of course been the Snowden revelations. Edward Snowden worked with reporters to expose a government mass surveillance system that essentially nobody outside of government knew about. This meant that the government was essentially vacuuming up all sorts of information from private citizens yet keeping this information completely secret. We think that principal should be flipped on its head. That its the private citizens that deserve privacy and it’s the government that should be much more transparent about what they’re doing.

At Creative Commons, one of our tenets is to work open and to work transparent. How can open organizations support your work in privacy and encryption for journalists and for publishing and for creation?

The principles of openness are embedded in everything we do.

For example, our high profile work on SecureDrop, which is essentially a document submission system for news organizations that allows sources to securely send them documents and information. All of our tools are completely open source and free software. We think when you’re talking about security tools it’s incredibly important for the code to be completely open so that other outside experts can make sure that the tools are actually living up to their promises.

For us, Creative Commons licenses are incredibly important for the advocacy we do as well. All of our blog posts are licensed with Creative Commons licenses by default and it allows us to be able to get our message out a lot more broadly because different websites are allowed to essentially repost everything that we post on our website. CC allows our message to spread farther and we’re not losing anything by doing so.

When it comes to copyright and censorship, oftentimes we see ourselves as an advocate for news organizations to be more open licensed as well. Copyright claims can often lead to censorship in a lot of cases when information is clearly newsworthy and should be shared as widely as possible. While Creative Commons and Freedom of the Press Foundation are working on two different tracks, we certainly see those tracks as parallel.

How do you feel like other journalists and media outlets could use CC in their work?

I think especially for non-profit news organizations, which there are more and more of these days, it’s more important for them to have their stories be read as widely as possible than it is for them to get clicks on a particular website.

By licensing stories with CC licenses, this is an incredible way to have your stories published on many more platforms and also retain the recognition and respect you get for producing journalism in this way.

I’m not sure how much news organizations think about this. Unfortunately, a lot of news organizations and their lawyers are often maximalist when they think about copyright solely because that’s the only way that they’ve ever done things. I hope that with more news organization’s disrupting the space that people will see that being copyright maximalists can actually be a detriment and not necessarily a help to getting the word out about the work.

Switching gears a bit, one aspect of the Freedom of the Press Foundation that’s particularly interesting is how you utilize crowd’s funding in your work to support other organizations. Do you feel like this model is extensible to other non-profits and do you feel like other non-profits can support each other in this way? How do you balance your own funding needs in conjunction with supporting other organizations?

That’s a really good question. I don’t think that crowdfunding is necessarily a long-term answer for sustaining news organizations that may employ dozens of people.

I think it is a great way to (excuse the expression,) kick start an organization that may not have a lot of notoriety. It can give new organizations seed funding to get themselves on their feet and be the spark for growth in the future. But it is, quite honestly, very expensive to run a news organization, and crowdfunding can certainly be a supplement to a lot of what they do. But ultimately to be sustainable, other sources of funding are certainly needed, unless you’re talking about an organization that only has a handful of people working for it. I’m certainly a big believer in crowdfunding, but I don’t think it’s the be all end all for solving monetary woes inside news organizations.

How do you work both within and outside traditional journalism by crafting tools that are used by mainstream media while still supporting an active and engaged alternative media?

I think it’s an important balance to strike. We are huge fans of independent media and non-profit media.

There needs to be more voices that can be heard by millions and millions of people and the only way for that to happen is to get their name out there and have ordinary people show their support.

But on the other hand, as many problems as I have with legacy news organizations, a lot of them still do important work. I can list ten criticisms of The New York Times or The Washington Post, yet there are dozens and dozens of journalists who work at both those papers who are among the best journalists in the world and that the public would be much poorer off if they didn’t exist. When we’re talking about defending reporters’ rights, we want to make sure that we’re defending the rights of journalists at The New York Times and The Washington Post, but we will also want to make sure that we are defending the rights of independent media, individual bloggers, citizen journalists, and any organization that crops up that some people may be uncomfortable with, but that their rights are still protected as much as the most mainstream outlet out there.

The post Embedding openness in everything we do: Freedom of the Press Foundation appeared first on Creative Commons.

 

Next weekend, 30 participants from 15 different countries will meet for a regional meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. In this packed weekend, we will work on a variety of subjects such as Copyright Reform during a School of Rocking Copyright session, OER and Open Science, CC Business models, Tech and Infrastructure, and we’ll also kick off the GLAM certificates project. Many thanks to the fabulous CC Portugal team for hosting us!

Stay tuned for a recap in the next few weeks.

The post Announcing the CC Europe meeting! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today Creative Commons, CC Colombia, and over a dozen other CC affiliates and partners sent a letter to the Colombian government calling for user-friendly copyright reform. Colombia’s copyright law is being re-opened to come into compliance with the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

We believe that this is a timely opportunity to introduce positive changes to copyright that will support users and the public, such as adopting a flexible use exception like fair use. Our community looks forward to providing ideas and feedback during the reform process.

Letter of support for balanced Colombian copyright law reform [English]
Carta para apoyar una reforma equilibrada al derecho de autor en Colombia [Spanish]

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The signatories below are writing to you regarding the proposed updates to copyright law in Colombia that will be introduced in order to implement the U.S.-Colombia Trade Agreement. We are concerned that these changes will only further tip the balance of copyright toward the interests of rights holders, while ignoring necessary protections for the public domain, as well as for users, consumers, and the general public.

We understand that the proposed changes would include increasing copyright terms  for some types of rights holders, and adopting an instrument to mirror the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We urge the Congress to take this opportunity to provide for crucial balances to copyright that protect the rights of users. In the fast-changing digital and online environment, the Congress should consider introducing a flexible exception to copyright that echoes the regulation of countries that have adopted “fair use” or “fair dealing” exceptions.

It has been our experience that to ensure the maximum benefits to both culture and the economy in this digital age, the scope and shape of copyright law need to be reviewed. Now is the time for the Congress to ensure that appropriate and necessary exceptions and limitations are updated in order to protect and support users, access to information, and creativity.

Creative Commons Colombia
Creative Commons
Fundación Karisma
COMMUNIA International Association on the Public Domain
Centrum Cyfrowe
Creative Commons Peru
Creative Commons Uruguay
Kennisland
Creative Commons Netherlands
Creative Commons Ireland
Creative Commons Ukraine
Creative Commons Indonesia
Creative Commons Portugal
Creative Commons UK
Australian Digital Alliance
Creative Commons Chile
Creative Commons Australia
Creative Commons Nigeria

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Screwdriver And Wrench by To Uyen, CC BY 3.0 US
Copyright by Marek Polakovic, CC BY 3.0 US

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I have been a fan of Marisa Anderson’s music since discovering her albums at the legendary Chapel Hill radio station WXYC, where my show usually ran from from 4-8AM.

At 4 in the morning in a windowless studio, the title of Anderson’s 2011 release “The Golden Hour” seemed apropos. I would listen to her virtuosic, dreamy fingerpicking through my headphones, fuzzy around the edges but always precise; Anderson’s playing is euphoric and timeless, grounded in the best of traditions while reaching its branches toward future plateaus. Feeling her music tangibly in the studio during those rapturous early morning hours, I felt the kind of intimacy with Anderson that only the best folk musicians can inspire, evoking the “high lonesome sound” that touches the listener at her core.

While Anderson is a successful independent artist who works with a variety of record labels including Mississippi and Chaos Kitchen, she has also worked with radio stations aligned with Creative Commons, such as WFMU and KBOO community radio in Portland. Anderson uses her work with these stations to augment her catalog, releasing “community-owned songs” for free on the internet, including the 2013 Elizabeth Cotten split 7”, released under a BY NC-ND license.

Anderson’s music can be found on the Free Music Archive, on KBOO, and at a record store near you. Anderson is currently on tour through Europe and the United States and generously answered these questions by email.

You are a student of American music as well as a musician yourself. How has your scholarship shaped the way you play and think about music and your craft?

In many cases when we say “American music” we are actually talking about music that arose in the southeastern United States as a result of the cultural collisions of the past 500 years. The melodies are hybrids, the songs were passed orally, and the words adapted to reflect the singer’s situation or to comment on current events of the time. This is particularly true for many religious and patriotic songs where the words were basically propaganda attached to a melody that belonged to another song.  For example, compare “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to “John Brown’s Body,” or “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” to “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye.”

I think of myself as existing along a continuum, as being caught up in a conversation that moves backward and forward through time. Tradition is what we glean from the past and what we pass onto the future.

Recording technology froze the folk process and tricked us into thinking that songs have fixed identities. I like to think that I’m picking up a conversational thread from another time, shining my own light on it, and passing it on into the future.

In 2013 you released an album of traditional and public domain songs. While most of these tunes are well-trodden territory for folk musicians, your renditions push on the boundaries of interpretation, creating a rich soundscape while still maintaining the songs’ integrity. Why did you decide to release this album? What compelled you to interpret these songs in this way? Why public domain and traditional songs in particular?

In 2013 I was the artist-in-residence at KBOO community radio in Portland, Oregon. As KBOO is a community-owned radio station, for my residency project I decided to make a record of community-owned songs, or in other words, public domain songs.

I chose to address songs that were already well known standards because I wanted listeners to approach the recordings with some degree of familiarity, to invite the audience into the project rather than use it as a platform to display some obscure knowledge.

I believe that common things in the world around us hold deep surprises, and that looking for the new often involves looking at the old.

Using public domain material freed up the creative side of recording because my responsibility was to arrange and interpret music rather than compose it. I was able to dive deeply into the sonics of the record. This became really important because I was making instrumental versions of songs that contain lyrics and stories that are very familiar to many people. The melodies and chord changes for the songs I chose are simple and repetitious. The major challenge of the record lay in how to make compelling renditions of these simple forms without losing the essential identity of each song.  In other words, how was I to convey the emotional impact of the lyrics without singing, and without significant modification of the melody? I was looking for ways to serve the songs and enrich the melodies when I started working with more diffuse and textural sounds to fill out the emotional palette.

“Battle Hymn of the Republic medley” from Live at WFMU on Shrunken Planet April 28th, 2012 by Marisa Anderson. Released: 2012. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

You often work with independent radio stations like KBOO and WFMU to produce new music under Creative Commons licenses as well as release your work with traditional licensing arrangements under several labels including Mississippi and Chaos Kitchen. Can you talk about what sharing your work looks like in this context? How do you find inspiration in these two different modes of production?

Making and distributing a record is a physical process, with associated costs. Many people are willing to pay for the artifact, or even for a download. Today, when most music is accessible for free, I see these purchases as a modern form of the patronage system and I deeply appreciate people who choose to support my work in that way.

My records are largely improvised and often the version of a song that gets put onto the record is simply one of many versions. The songs change every time I play them and it’s nice to have an avenue for people to hear the evolution of a song that started as an improvisation, became fixed onto a record, and is released into the world through performance.

I appreciate that each arrangement has its value. I don’t feel ownership of a performance in the same way as I do for the actual composition or the physical artifact.  A performance, by its very nature, is a shared event which feels natural to me to release more freely into the world.

What is it like to be a successful independent artist in 2016? Where do you find inspiration for your work? How do you find distribution in the age of the streaming service?

I feel like the luckiest person in the world that I can pay my bills by playing guitar and sharing what I create. It’s a tremendous privilege and one that involves quite a bit of strategy to stay afloat. I’ve found that the key for my survival as an independent artist is threefold: I keep my overhead low both personally and professionally and I do as much as I can for myself, which means at different times I’ve had to be my own booking agent, recording engineer, tour manager, etc. I also make sure that my income comes from multiple sources such as record sales, commissioned work, and performance fees.

I find inspiration in so many places! Sometimes inspiration comes in very concrete forms, from current or historical events or the juxtaposition of a modern viewpoint with a song from a different era.  At other times it’s very abstract: I often respond to natural processes, dreams or memories. I tend to work through aspects of my personal history through composition. I also can get really inspired by the quality of a sound, or by searching for a sound that just feels right.

Probably I don’t think enough about distribution. I have a few different methods that work well enough to get the music into the world and I just trust that the music will find its way to the ears of those who need it. I know how much I need to make in order to survive, and once that amount is secured, I’m a bit lazy. I’d rather be making music than chasing every last dime!

Would you consider releasing more of your work under Creative Commons? What benefits and drawbacks do you see with sharing legally on the Web?

I’m sure that more of my work will be released under Creative Commons or other free licensing structures. I like that more people can share in the music, and that anyone who want to trace my process or the evolution of one of my songs have an avenue to do so.

A friendly reminder: Our partners at the Free Music Archive are raising funds to stay afloat. If you are one of the 40 million people who benefitted from their work this year alone, please consider donating. You’ll ensure that this important project lives on (and get a cool shirt!)

 

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The artist Patrick Hochstenbach is a comic artist, programmer, and digital architect at University of Ghent libraries. Check out more of his work on Instagram and Twitter.

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