Cape Town by Kemal Kestelli on Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0.

Earlier this year, Creative Commons and the Open Policy Network hosted the first Institute for Open Leadership (IOL). The IOL is a training and support program to empower new leaders interested in crafting and implementing an open licensing policy within their discipline. We had a diverse cohort of 14 fellows who came together for a week in January, 2015 in San Francisco. The fellows worked with mentors and each other to hone their open policy project ideas. Since then they’ve working within their institutions and fields to implement their open policy plan.

Today we’re opening the application period for the next round of the institute. IOL 2 will take place March 14-18, 2016 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Application instructions are on the Institute for Open Leadership webpage. Applications are due October 30, 2015. We will accept 15 IOL fellows.

We encourage applications from a variety of areas, including the public sector, cultural heritage institutions, publishing, and scientific labs. We’re interested in individuals who are eager to become experts in open licensing, pursue new opportunities for open sharing of content and data, and directly influence policy decisions in their institution and field of work.

Thanks again to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundationand the Open Society Foundations for their support for the Institute for Open Leadership.

Creative Commons is pleased to announce a grant award in the amount of $450,000 over 3 years from the Arcadia Fund, the charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Since its inception in 2001, Arcadia has awarded grants in excess of $331 million. Arcadia works to protect endangered culture and nature. Creative Commons will use funds from Arcadia to develop tools that complement the current CC license suite and empower authors to retain or regain their right to publish so they can make their scholarly and academic works available for public use.

Building on the success of the current CC licenses — now with nearly 1 billion licenses in use across over 9 million websites — Creative Commons is enthusiastic about developing tools that can be used by authors who “write to be read” but face all too common barriers to making their research openly available. These resources will be developed for global use, taking into account country-specific copyright laws, customs, and language. Once in widespread use, these tools are expected to increase the number of articles and publications that are available for broad public use.

To accomplish this ambitious goal, Creative Commons will work with CC’s international network of over 100 affiliates working in over 80 regions around the world. This core group will next convene at the 2015 Creative Commons Global Summit on October 14-17 in Seoul, South Korea. A dedicated summit session will be held to discuss the best approach to formulating tools and materials that enable authors to retain and regain their rights, while also addressing the needs of publishers. Collaborators on this project include Authors Alliance, Free Culture Trust, and SPARC, all of whom are dedicated to supporting authors, institutions, and the public in promoting access to research and scholarly work. Importantly, this group also includes academic publishers who support or have interest in promoting open access principles.

Creative Commons is grateful to the Arcadia Fund for its essential support of our work. We look forward to sharing our progress and success with all of you!

About Creative Commons and our collaborators

Creative Commons enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools to help realize the full potential of the Internet—universal access to research and education, and full participation in culture.

Authors Alliance is a membership-driven non-profit organization that supports and advocates for authors who write to be read.

Free Culture Trust is dedicated to helping authors and artists make their works widely available by removing bureaucratic and structural barriers to sharing.

SPARC is an international alliance of organizations dedicated to creating a more open system for sharing research and scholarship.

This is a guest post by Jan Gondol.

Pencil by Mari Pi, Public Domain.

In the midst of the European migrant crisis, the Czech Republic is showing the power of open educational resources (OER).

EDUin, a non-profit organization based in Prague worked with the Czech organization of civic education teachers to address the current migrant crisis. Students in schools were asking questions and wanted to understand what was going on. Why are so many people on the run? What is the difference between a refugee and a migrant? What is the difference between migration, emigration and immigration?

The teachers worked on developing the materials for Czech schools, and the resulting worksheets are now shared on their website (in the Czech language). These worksheets are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, and there are different versions for ages 6-11 and ages 12-16.

“This activity shows that open educational resources can help react to a new situation very quickly in a way traditional textbooks cannot,” says Tamara Kováčová, coordinator of EDUin’s open education program. “Because of fast distribution, materials get to schools around the country in a matter of days. Teachers get support in time when they need it and teaching is up-to-date. Furthermore, it’s possible to join several school subjects together on phenomenon based learning principle.”

Files. By Pieter J. Smits. CC BY 3.0

 

Creative Commons believes that public and foundation funded resources should be openly licensed by default. We have written extensively about the importance of open licensing policies in government, foundations, and have built the Open Policy Network and the Institute for Open Leadership with our open policy partners around the world. In the past few years, the United States federal government has accelerated its interest in and implementation of open licensing policy requirements on the products of publicly funded grants and contracts.

To support the education of government staff creating, adopting and implementing open licensing policies – we’ve drafted a “Open Licensing Policy Toolkit.” While this draft is tailored for U.S. government federal staff, it can easily be revised to meet the needs of any country. We share it here under a CC BY 4.0 license hoping others will take, improve, and modify it to meet regional, national and/or local needs. We look forward to seeing what you create… and we are happy to collaborate with you should you identify an opportunity to work with your government on broad open licensing requirements on publicly funded resources.

 

 

 

There are plenty of examples to depict our broken copyright system, but the “dancing baby” case is one of the most notorious. That’s the one where Universal Music used the DMCA to take down a 29-second YouTube video of an adorable baby dancing to “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince. Putting aside the legal questions, it is unclear what motivated Universal Music to go after this home movie where the Prince song was almost indecipherable. It’s impossible to imagine people were using the short video as a substitute for buying Prince albums, and of course, it’s impossible to imagine this sort of enforcement would help the troubled record industry earn goodwill from the public. But sadly, this is (or at least was) the state of copyright.

Most DMCA takedowns result in quiet removals of content, but this one resulted in 8 years of litigation that continues to this day. The mother of the dancing baby, Stephanie Lenz, teamed up with EFF and fought back. They sued Universal Music for violating Section 512(f) of the DMCA by misrepresenting their claim in the takedown notification. The fight continues, but the good news is this week the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion that affirmed some of the key principles at stake in the case.

Specifically, the panel of circuit judges held that copyright holders have to consider fair use before sending a DMCA takedown notification. The court also definitively explained something most of us already knew – fair use is authorized by law. It’s not simply an excuse for infringement or even an affirmative defense. It is outside the scope of copyright.

The decision wasn’t perfect. It went on to state that if copyright holders like Universal fail to consider fair use before sending a takedown, it just creates a question of fact for the jury to decide whether the rights holder had a good faith belief that the claim was valid. The court also made a somewhat confusing reference to copyright holders who use automated systems to determine what content to have taken down, stating that doing so was a reasonable solution but not explaining how that would possibly account for fair use.

Nonetheless, the key takeaway from the case was a win for fair use. It confirmed that exceptions and limitations to copyright are affirmative rights, and it created a mechanism to help deter sham DMCA takedowns. Given how easy it is to have content removed using the DMCA, it is increasingly the tool of choice for anyone looking to have content removed online, whether or not they have a valid copyright claim. This case should help deter at least the most blatant bad actors from misusing the statute in this way.

Perhaps the case also symbolizes a larger shift in how rights holders view reuse of their content. Not every use of copyrighted content is infringing, and not every use is a threat.