The second annual Netlabel Day celebrating free music under Creative Commons licenses will take place on 14 July, 2016. The call for digital record labels is now open and applications will be accepted through 29 February.

First organized by the Chilean label M.I.S.T. Records in March 2015, the 2015 edition featured 80 labels from around the world and released more than 120 digital albums under CC licenses.

In addition to Creative Commons, this year’s sponsors include the Internet Archive and Free Music Archive.

Organizers will host local gigs and record label expos in Argentina, Canada and Chile.

“The goal this year is to discuss, debate, promote, and explore the state of musical management in the participant countries”, says Manuel Silva, M.I.S.T. label head and creator.

To apply, email contact.netlabelday@gmail.com. Visit http://netlabelday.blogspot.com for more info.

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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.

Every year we breathe a collective sigh of disappointment for millions of pieces of creative content that will not enter the public domain because of incredibly long copyright terms. We all know that creativity and knowledge owes something to what came before it—every creator builds on the ideas of their predecessors. Copyright terms that last decades past the death of the author will undermine the potential of the commons and needlessly limit the potential for new creativity.

And in the last few years, we’ve seen additional threats to the commons from prospective trade agreements such as the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership. If the TPP comes into effect, it would force member nations to set their term of copyright protection to life of the authors plus 70 years (if they do not already have that term), which increases the term an additional 20 years past the baseline required by existing international agreements. This means that works still under copyright in Brunei, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Vietnam will be automatically granted another 20 years of protection before they enter the public domain. We’re in agreement with leading economists that there is no logical reason to increase the term of copyright: an extension would create a tiny private benefit at a great cost to the public. It is estimated that the copyright term extension that would be required if the TPP is enacted would cost the public hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

At the same time, we celebrate the amazing works that are finally a part of our shared public domain. In addition to works that are now in the public domain because their copyright has expired, we’ve seen several interesting things happen this last year that is helping authors to share their works in the public domain right now. This is because major online content creation and sharing platforms like Flickr and Medium have added options to share works in the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication and the Public Domain Mark. What is CC0? It’s a tool that allows anyone to waive their copyright and place a work directly into the global public domain—prior to the expiration of copyright. What is the Public Domain Mark? It’s a digital stamp that anyone can apply to a work that’s already in the worldwide public domain—such as very old works whose copyright has clearly expired.

First stage of Falcon 9 rocket by SpaceX, CC0

What does the public get when authors share content in the public domain? We get to access and use an incredible body of content, including photos from SpaceX, NASA, and millions of others creators.

In the 2015 State of the Commons report, we noted a huge increase in the number of works dedicated to the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication and out-of-copyright works marked with the Public Domain Mark. According to the data, the total number of public domain works using these tools in 2014 was about 17.5 million. That number jumped to nearly 35 million in 2015. This means that the size of the CC-marked public domain nearly doubled over the last year. This is, in part, due to the tools being more widely and adopted by platforms like Europeana and Flickr. Of course, the public domain is not limited to content marked with CC’s public domain tools, but providing clear information about the public domain status of works alerts subsequent creators they can use those works without any restriction.

Even though copyright lasts far too long, the public domain is not lost. By fighting  for more reasonable copyright policy, and continuing to develop and steward legal tools that empower sharing in the public domain, we can help regain the public domain for all of us.

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Over the past week, we’ve talked about sharing, and its fundamental role in societies, and I’ve shared our goal of a vibrant, usable commons, powered by collaboration and gratitude (Read our previous posts: “We need to talk about sharing”, and “Towards a vibrant, usable commons.”). What follows next is our plan for bringing the strategy to life.

Yesterday, we announced an incredible gift from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation: a $10 million unrestricted grant, which will have a transformational impact on our work. For many years, CC has struggled with sustainability, and has lacked a strong fundraising program. Over the past 18 months, with support from many of you, we’ve set that right. We’ve tripled the number of donors, doubled individual fundraising, cut our expenses, and focused our work on the areas where we will have the most impact. That’s been difficult, but also essential to building the kind of support required for a gift of this magnitude.

I’m personally very grateful to Hewlett for their support for CC — they’ve been there from the very beginning, and it’s clear they’ll be there well into the future. Their donation doesn’t mean we’re free and clear: we’ll need these new resources to make some important investments, but we’ll also need others to join us if we’re going to be successful. But more on that another day. For now, let’s focus on the plan.

To articulate our strategy, we developed an intended outcome statement — a brief statement that expresses clearly our goal:

“Creative Commons will, within 3-5 years, foster a vibrant, usable, and collaborative global commons, powered by an engaged community of creators, curators, and users of content, knowledge, and data. We will do so by focusing in three intermediate outcomes: discovery,  collaboration, and advocacy.”

That could mean a lot of things, and the hardest part of any strategy is deciding which things you’re not going to do. Saying no is much harder than saying yes. CC will focus our strategy in three specific areas: Discovery, collaboration, and advocacy.

Discovery is about creating a more vibrant and usable commons, both on the platforms where open content is hosted, and also for those works that are individually hosted on creators’ websites. It is also about telling a compelling story of open collaboration, and demonstrating its value to the world so that others will join the movement. Search, curation, meta-tagging, content analytics, one-click attribution are all examples of areas where improved discovery would support creators that use the commons.

To do this work, CC will need to establish a small developer team. We work in the open, and can draw on the open source community, but to do that we need the capacity to develop our own prototypes and tools, maintain our services to licensors, and work with contributors. We’ll also strengthen our communications team to tell the story of the commons, our partners, and our community — watch for an announcement on that soon.

Collaboration is about helping creators across sectors, disciplines, and geographies, to work together to share open content and create new works. CC’s role is to facilitate greater cooperation and engagement in the commons, realizing the unique benefits of open across many of the communities that rely on open content.

To do this work, CC will play an active role in developing and facilitating solutions for cooperation and engagement in communities like OER or open access. Solutions which will often then scale up to other communities — imagine helping to build more effective search for open educational resources, or The List, a mobile app that allows users to request images and others to submit them with a CC BY license to a public archive, as simple ways to facilitate collaboration that can scale up across multiple communities. CC will assign staff to develop partnerships with platforms and creative communities that create and remix content, and help improve the experience of sharing and working in a public commons.

Advocacy is about CC’s vital role in advocacy and policymaking. Creative Commons has a powerful and respected role in pushing for positive reforms. We are frequently called upon to lend our voice to important open policy debates, and to explain the impacts for the public good of particular policies, while identifying areas where new or existing policy impacts the ability of users to apply or rely upon CC licenses. However, the fight for copyright reform is a global one, and will only be won if we activate the power of many interconnected global communities.

To do this work, CC will focus on strengthening and supporting the global affiliate network — chapters in over 85 countries comprised of some of the world’s leading experts and advocates in open content and knowledge. At our most recent summit in Seoul, South Korea, the energy and excitement from the network was inspiring — but we have to ensure that energy turns into action, and there’s an urgent need to create a global network strategy to connect it all together. CC may not have the capacity or expertise to manage dozens of copyright reform campaigns globally, but the CC affiliate network does, if properly supported and engaged. With a strong team in place, micro-grants for local projects, and better infrastructure, CC will put collaboration at the centre of our approach, as we have been successful at supporting and collaborating with connected communities that advocate for policies that strengthen the commons, like the Open Policy Network and Communia.

This is where you come in

What’s next? We’re now developing program implementation plans, including consultation with the CC global affiliate network and key partners. We expect that work to be complete by the end of February.

We want to hear from you about how we can truly light up the global commons. This will be a transformative change for Creative Commons — a new direction that is more focused and will have even greater impact. We don’t have all the answers, and we can’t do it alone. I hope you’ll join us as we shape the projects and programs that will bring this strategy to life.

So tell us: What’s your idea to help CC make the commons more vibrant and usable, and to foster communities of collaboration and gratitude?

 

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On behalf of the Creative Commons staff, Board, Affiliate Network, and global community, we are thrilled to announce that the Board of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has unanimously approved an unrestricted multi-year grant in the amount of $10 million to Creative Commons.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been a proud founding partner and longstanding supporter of Creative Commons; In particular, CC and Hewlett have worked closely together to innovate in education — CC licenses are at the heart of Open Educational Resources, and CC is an active and engaged leader in the OER movement. Hewlett is also an adopter of CC — the Foundation has implemented an open policy for many grantees, requiring open licenses on grantee outputs to ensure maximum use and re-use.

The grant comes at pivotal time as a major investment in CC’s new strategy. “Creative Commons is the chief steward of a large and growing movement for openness, a movement to make knowledge more freely available, to foster sharing and collaboration, and to spur advances and improvements that make the world a better place for everyone,” said Hewlett Foundation President Larry Kramer, in announcing the grant.

With this critical lead support and tremendous vote of confidence in our work, Creative Commons is now able to invest in its next organization phase, a renewed vision for not just the licenses but for the broader commons movement. “Our renewed strategy will be aimed at building a more vibrant, usable commons powered by collaboration and gratitude,” said Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley. “This is how we light up the commons: Creators need to be able to easily find the very best content in the commons, share feedback, give gratitude, get analytics, and work together to build networks around their interests and passions.”

This effort to build a more connected global commons is nothing short of transformational. It’s a strategic shift for Creative Commons that will require us to develop new infrastructure, new tools, and new resources; and it will require a new level of investment. Lead support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provides key momentum and will be critical in catalyzing this new level of investment, part of a much broader effort to ensure long term organizational sustainability and a thriving global commons for decades to come.

Our deepest thanks to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and to all of you who have supported CC over the years. And for those of you who are new to CC, we welcome you to our community and look forward to sharing all our big wins with you. We are humbled by the generous show of support and feel privileged to be able to take on the important work ahead.

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Over the next few days, I’m going to share a series of posts about Creative Commons’ 2016-2020 strategy. Let me skip to the end: CC is going to refocus our work to build a vibrant, usable commons, powered by collaboration and gratitude. Over the course of these next few posts, I’ll explain what that means, and how we plan to achieve it. Read our first post: We need to talk about sharing.

The challenge we face

While we may all be hard-wired for sharing, legislators in every country in the world have taken copyright well beyond its original role as “an incentive for creation” to a carefully-guarded and nearly never-ending right to private profit.

Copyright was originally designed to inspire more creativity from creators — to guarantee them some limited benefit to incentivize their creation. Today’s copyright practically ignores the fact that the Web and technological innovation made us all creators and publishers, often dozens of times a day. This modern reality has implications for creativity, innovation, privacy, business models, and more, yet most of these issues remain unaddressed in antiquated copyright structures. As a result of its refusal to acknowledge the present, today’s copyright rules restrict sharing, slow and prevent collaboration, and leave millions of works locked away regardless of the author’s desire (or lack of desire) to use them.

As a society, we are failing to limit the past — this was Lawrence Lessig’s warning and refrain from “Free Culture.” In fact, we have capitulated to the past, protecting traditional structures and business models, often at the expense of innovation and creativity. We put private good before cooperation. We will never know exactly what we’ve lost as a result. It’s impossible to quantify fully the inventions not made, discoveries not revealed, and creativity restrained.

The benefits that should be afforded to the public as part of an effective system of copyright are sadly lacking today, and it’s reasonable to expect that without a dramatic shift we may never realize these benefits. Secret deals, negotiated by governments and corporations hand-in-hand, without public review or consideration, are the new normal. Most copyright negotiations and consultations are focused on making minor changes, rather than addressing the major failures of laws that were written for another century. The fight for copyright reform can’t be won without rethinking our approach, and harnessing the power of many interconnected global communities.

Hacking copyright and driving reform

Creative Commons didn’t change copyright. The terms of copyright are still so long that a new work published today will be locked down until long after we are all dead. But a Creative Commons license offers an elegant solution for someone who wants to share right now. The licenses are not, and never will be, an alternative to meaningful copyright reform, but they are a powerful tool that creators can employ now without waiting, and without asking permission. CC created a release valve to the constraints of copyright — a doorway to an alternate reality of free and open content, powered by creators who share a set of important values. And while CC has been successful, our work will not be complete until we light up that universe of content and creators to establish what we might describe as an open distributed social network.

Now well into our second decade, the CC licenses are ubiquitous, and accepted as the global standard for sharing of content under permissive legal terms. They are embedded in major content platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Medium, public archives like the DPLA, Internet Archive, and Wikimedia Commons, and have been adopted by governments and foundations, including the White House and major US foundations including Hewlett, Gates, and Ford. The CC licenses enable open access to academic research and data, open textbooks, and are increasingly used for government open data (via CC0). The license suite functions globally, and is brought to life around the world by CC affiliate chapters in 85 countries. The commons is massive and growing. The 2015 State of the Commons report showed that between 2010 and 2015, the commons nearly tripled in size.

Creative Commons represents just one part of the global commons. Today’s commons: one with the potential for infinite abundance rather than the tragedy of mismanaged scarcity, is made up of many overlapping communities: open source, open government data, open science, open educational resources (OER), Wikipedians, Mozillians, free software creators, etc. While we don’t agree on everything, our common thread is a desire to foster the benefits of openness: access, opportunity, equity, innovation, transparency.

Taken together, the commons is a platform for cooperation. Each person joins the network when they share, which invites a collaboration with others — sometimes direct, and often indirect. Today, there are over 1.1 billion Creative Commons licensed works, shared by millions of people around the world. What’s most powerful about this number is that each creator chose to cooperate, to collaborate, and to share. Despite this profound gift, their works too often sit disconnected from each other, without context, gratitude, or mechanisms for collaboration.

A renewed focus

CC’s focus should no longer be to achieve scale. The key challenge facing the commons today is usability, vibrancy, and collaboration.

CC has helped to foster a global movement that has reimagined the idea of the commons as a digital environment of infinite abundance inspired by collaboration, rather than mismanaged scarcity plagued by self-interest. The size of the commons is not as important as how (and if) the works it contains are used to achieve our vision and mission. This is most likely to come to fruition if the materials contained within the commons are easy to discover and curate, to use and remix, and if those who create feel valued for their contributions. To date, this has not been the case. In every part of the commons, users struggle to realize these benefits. The opportunity for CC is to focus and do more to offer tools, education, advocacy, and community-building.

The Web has obviously changed significantly since 2002 when CC launched, but the way the CC licenses work hasn’t. While most web services and apps are data-driven and accessible via API, CC’s licenses are largely static, devoid of data, and rooted in markup. There are no services to enhance the user experience, or provide additional value and create connections. Users still have to manually provide attribution. There are no analytics about use or re-mix. Adding a work to the commons is a huge gift, but contributors get very little in exchange — no feedback, no analytics, not even a “like” or a “thank you.” While CC is integral to many kinds of creativity and sharing on the web, it has yet to capitalize on this influence to connect and light up the commons.

CC must recognize its various roles in a variety of diverse and active communities. We provide essential infrastructure for the Web, and are vital contributors and leaders in these global movements. The opportunity to realize the benefits of openness will come from showing how “open” is uniquely able to solve the challenges of our time. Our role is not just as providers of tools, but also as strategic partners, advocates, influencers, and supporters to quantify, evangelize, and demonstrate the benefits of open.

We also acknowledge that Creative Commons is both an organization and a movement, and that there will be many actors — especially CC’s global affiliate network — who will take on their own projects and initiatives that extend the scope of these activities. That is not only acceptable, it must be encouraged and supported to the greatest extent possible. A powerful movement is one of common values with many independent actors seeking a shared outcome, not uniform application of programs and tools. If we are successful, our initiatives will support these communities in various ways as we all seek to strengthen the commons.

Next: Our strategy and plan

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