Following in the footsteps of open culture pioneers, many institutions are taking the leap to open their collections online, partly as a way to celebrate a sense of (re)connection with cultural heritage collections in the digital space. While the road to OC is strewn with barriers, its benefits are well worth the journey.
This report distills the many views expressed in our Open Culture Voices (OCV) series about the ways in which so many people can benefit from open culture. In short:
Openly shared cultural heritage:
is easier to find
reaches broader and more diverse audiences
can be preserved, safeguarded and refined in digital form
can be (re)used with more legal certainty
Open cultural heritage leads to:
More resilient and relevant collection holders
More vibrant research and more participatory education
More dynamic cultural creativity
More just, democratic, diverse, free, and equitable societies
Last week, Creative Commons (CC) participated in the 45th session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR). In this post, we briefly report on the session discussions on exceptions and limitations for cultural heritage institutions (CHIs), a topic of utmost relevance to our Open Culture Program.
As in previous SCCR sessions, our main objective was to drive copyright reform towards better sharing of heritage materials in the interest of the public and in tune with the sharing possibilities of the digital environment. For more details check out our official statement and watch our intervention on the WIPO webcast.
Overall, we welcome the session outcomes. However, protracted discussions on the various versions of the implementation plan for the Work Program on Limitations and Exceptions (SCCR/45/6 and SCCR/43/8 REV.), which aim to determine a clear path forward in the negotiations, meant that substantive discussions could not take place. We look forward to engaging with the future Draft Implementation Plan on the Work Program on Limitations and Exceptions (SCCR/45/10 PROV.) and to bringing our expertise on copyright in the public interest to the discussions on objectives, principles, and options.
Limitations and exceptions for CHIs were not the only issue on the Committee’s agenda. Other key items included the protection of broadcasting organizations (read Communia’s take on this topic), other exceptions and limitations such as for educational and research institutions and for people with disabilities, copyright issues in the digital environment, as well as the interplay between generative artificial Intelligence (AI) and copyright, among others.
We look forward to participating in the Committee’s next session to contribute to creating a fairer and more balanced international copyright system in the public interest.
Creative Commons is proud to announce the launch of “Open Educational Resources for Librarians and Educators,” our first professional development microcredential course and partnership with the University of Nebraska Omaha, commencing on 31 May.
This microcredential pilot started with one CC Certificate alumnus’s enthusiasm for open education. Craig Finlay, OER and STEM Librarian at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) Libraries, took the CC Certificate course for Academic Librarians in September, 2021. Since then, he’s advocated for open education in a variety of capacities: managing UNO’s biannual campus Affordable Content Grants, which largely fund converting courses from using all traditional textbooks to using at least one open educational resource; hosting regular CC workshops for faculty on campus; and co-authoring a white paper exploring OER’s positive impact on student success. Co-creating the microcredential course offered the next step in applying his CC Certificate expertise and passion for open education. Craig was intent on bringing CC licensing expertise to more learners, seeking professional development, and UNO granted a pathway for this.
Over the course of the last several months, CC and UNO have developed the “Open Educational Resources for Librarians and Educators.” The course remixes Certificate lessons in open licensing, open education and open access. Content targets the ecosystem of scholarly and academic publishing; copyright and Creative Commons; Open Education and Open Access; as well as starting, growing and managing these sorts of initiatives. Learners enrolling in this 9-week course will engage asynchronously, but should expect to work five hours per week to complete course work; successful completion will result in a microcredential for non-credit and professional education.
What are the next steps? Registration will open on 31 May, 2024. Once the class roster is full, UNO will announce a start date for the course.
Outside of the actual course content, we wanted to share a few crucial elements that made this partnership successful:
A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which outlined the goal, key roles, responsibilities and timeline for our work.
A mutually viable financial model, which ensures this work can be sustainable for both institutions.
Adaptability. Because this project involved multiple stakeholders, we needed to remain flexible to meet differing needs.
Trust. Working together has been easy because of our basis in trust.
We share these key ingredients to this microcredential pilot because we expect the partnership can be replicated for a number of new communities. If you work at an institution and are interested in partnering with CC on a microcredential course related to CC Certificate course content, please contact certificates [at] creativecommons.org.
Note: The CC Certificate program was created as an investment in our open advocates around the world. CC built the training to strengthen the global communities’ work engaging in open movements in education, access and more recently, cultural heritage.
CC Certificate courses develop peoples’ practical expertise in open licensing, copyright, and ways to engage in open knowledge and culture movements. The program has certified over 1700 people in 65 countries with open licensing expertise. Through open licensing course content, CC supports communities making derivatives of the course, from Masters level courses, faculty workshops, an audio recording, to nine language translations, and more.
The Board of Directors of Creative Commons (CC) is pleased to announce the appointment of Anna Tumadóttir as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CC.
“The CC Board universally supported Anna’s appointment as CEO,” says CC’s Board Chair Delia Browne. “Anna has been a source of stability as well as a catalyst for CC’s future direction throughout her time at CC. The Board is looking forward to her leading the team with her experience, thoughtfulness, and commitment to removing barriers, improving workflows and effectiveness, and sharing openly as part of a robust knowledge commons,” continues Delia.
CC staff photos are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Gratitude to Sara Jordan Photography.
Anna’s longstanding leadership at CC has been a pillar of CC’s success since she joined in September 2019 as Director of Product. Anna was promoted to Chief Operating Officer (COO) in 2021 after her successful time leading product strategy. In 2023, she also held the role of Deputy CEO, ensuring ongoing effective operations and stewardship of organizational priorities.
During her tenure as Interim CEO, Anna articulated an innovative and sustainable future for CC. As CC continues to define its role within the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), Anna is positioned to guide this exploration with an unwavering commitment to knowledge sharing within the broader commons. Cementing CC’s role as the stewards of the legal infrastructure of the open web, in collaboration with the CC Global Network and community, is a key priority.
“I am honored to formally step into the role of CEO, and bring my experience with and understanding of CC’s global contributions, and ongoing need for sustainability and world-class operations, into this role,” says Anna. “I wish to thank the Board of Directors for their support during this transition period, as well as give my thanks to the CC team who are co-creating a shared vision of the future that I’m excited to implement alongside them,” continues Anna.
Anna’s appointment is effective immediately and will begin with a strategic refresh for the organization with more details and opportunities to engage with this process to come. Please join us in congratulating Anna and wishing her well in this new role.
Our work on copyright has long focused on supporting libraries and archives in the service of their missions to preserve and ensure access to culture. Our 2022 copyright reform agenda centers those sorts of institutions (and more generally GLAMs) and the critical role they play in society. Among other things, that agenda calls attention to the ways in which copyright might impede libraries and archives who wish to make their collections available for research uses, including use for AI training in order to fulfill their public interest missions.
That issue – AI training – has become ever more relevant. The concept of mass digitization of books, including to support text and data mining, of which AI training is a subset, is not new. But AI training is newly of the zeitgeist, and its transformative use makes questions about how we digitize, preserve, and make accessible knowledge and cultural heritage salient in a distinct way.
In 2023, multiple news publications reported on the availability and use of a dataset of books called “Books3” to train large language models (LLMs), a form of generative AI tool. The Books3 dataset contains text from over 170,000 books, which are a mix of in-copyright and out-of-copyright works. It is believed to have been originally sourced from a website that was not authorized to distribute all of the works therein. In lawsuits brought against OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Bloomberg related to their LLMs, the use of Books3 as training data was specifically cited.
The Books3 controversy highlights a critical question at the heart of generative AI: what role do books play in training AI models, and how might digitized books be made widely accessible for the purposes of training AI for the public good? What dataset of books could be constructed and under what circumstances?
Earlier this year, we collaborated with Open Future and Proteus Strategies on a series of workshops to explore these questions and more. We brought together practitioners on the front lines of building next-generation AI models, as well as legal and policy scholars with expertise in the copyright and licensing challenges surrounding digitized books. Our goal was also to bridge the perspective of stewards of content repositories, like libraries, with that of AI developers. A “books data commons” needs to be both responsibly managed, and useful for developers of AI models. Today, we’re releasing a paper based on those workshops and additional research.
While this paper does not prescribe a particular path forward, we do think it’s important to move beyond the status quo. Today, large swaths of knowledge contained in books are effectively locked up and inaccessible to most everyone. Large companies have huge advantages when it comes to access to books for AI training (and access to data in general). At the same time, as the paper highlights, there are already relevant examples of nonprofit and library-led efforts to provide responsible, fair access to books for many more people, not just the privileged few. We hope this paper can support further research, collaboration and investment in this space.
