Back in 2004, ccMixter.org was born when Creative Commons and Wired magazine collaborated to support communities engaged in remixing openly-licensed and public domain music. As it has evolved over the years, ccMixter has become an independent project that supports musicians and creators working in remix culture, connecting them with each other and their fans. To reflect ccMixter’s contemporary identity, they have developed a new logo and a new tagline, “collaborative community”, represented by the “cc” in their name and logo.

Starting in 2009, ccMixter’s marks, terms of use, and format were managed by both Creative Commons and ArtisTech Media, an organization that supports global open music communities. Going forward, ccMixter will be operated independently by ArtisTech Media alone, with Creative Commons’ enthusiastic support.

“Today we’re celebrating an exciting new chapter for ccMixter,” said Emily Richards, CEO of ArtisTech Media. “Our history with Creative Commons and its licenses built a solid foundation for our community’s culture of sharing. We’re ready to take our creative collaboration to yet another level.”

Along with their new identity and independence, ccMixter has updated their platform to use the latest CC licenses, version 4.0, which enable shared music to be remixed more flexibly and with greater legal certainty across international jurisdictions.

“We are delighted that ccMixter can now be independently stewarded by the expert hands of Emily and her colleagues at ArtisTech Media,” said Catherine Stihler, CEO of Creative Commons. “Better sharing and the ability for us to work together with like-minded organizations further increases the value of the commons for generations to come. We wish Emily and her colleagues well and know that the commons is stronger for our working together to enable this project to live and grow in their hands.”

CC salutes ccMixter and its collaborative community and the ongoing beat of remix culture!

The post ccMixter: A Collaborative Music Community appeared first on Creative Commons.

Did you know that access to cultural heritage is part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights? Stephen discusses this little known article among other important aspects of access, participation, and engagement of cultural heritage and the responsibilities of institutions in this regard. He also explains how Open Culture is a way to establish the social responsibility of institutions to a community and society.

Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Stephen Wyber is the Director of Policy and Advocacy at IFLA which coordinates meetings and collaborations between GLAM institutions, namely libraries, around the world. He works to co-create meaningful understanding of the needs of libraries and what role libraries play in society and community.

Stephen responds to the following questions:

1. What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
2. What are the barriers?
3. Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
4. Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?

Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.

Want to hear more insights from Open Culture experts from around the world? Watch more episodes of Open Culture VOICES here >>

The post Stephen Wyber — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 20 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today, the European Parliament (EP) adopted its position in plenary on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. This is the culmination of a months-long process whereby thousands of pages of amended text have been pored over by policymakers, civil society and industry alike. The strong, cross-party endorsement (499 votes in favor, 28 against and 93 abstentions) paves the way for tough negotiations with the European Council, which concluded its position at the end of last year. Since then, the bulk of the EP’s political focus has been on so-called “foundation models,” which are trained on vast ranges of data for a wide set of downstream tasks. In particular, they have focused on “generative AI,” with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) seeking to provide a legal framework for recent innovations such as ChatGPT or Bard.   

In a rare move, the EP, European Commission, and European Council agreed to start three-way negotiations — the so-called trilogues — immediately after the vote at 9pm CET today. This need for speed underscores the political imperative of reaching a deal before next year’s EP elections on the high-stakes, hot-button draft AI Act, which is the regulation that will set the rules around AI in the EU space. In fact, the Act is bound to shape how policymakers approach regulating AI in many other jurisdictions and at the international level. 

Creative Commons (CC) has actively engaged in the AI Act process (see here and here) and welcomes the EU’s leadership on defining a regulatory framework around this impactful technology. In this blog post, we highlight the issues most likely to impact the topics we focus on: growing the commons and better sharing of knowledge and culture. 

Background and key issues for CC

The AI Act process started in 2021 with a proposal by the Commission and has since been debated in Parliament and Council, whose approaches will need to converge in order for an agreement to be reached and the Act adopted. 

In its initial conception, the Act focused on regulating certain uses of AI. In particular, it seeks to ban certain uses of AI, such as broad-based real-time biometric identification for law enforcement in public places. It also seeks to ensure that certain precautions are taken before deployment of uses deemed “high-risk,” such as the use of AI for access to education, employment, financial credit, or other essential services. 

However, in the last year, the focus expanded. The Council incorporated provisions with respect to “general purpose AI” (GPAI), and the Parliament subsequently created requirements specifically for “foundation models.” Rather than addressing specific high-risk uses, these provisions impact technologies that have a wide range of uses, both potentially beneficial and harmful, and of varying degrees of risk. Moreover, the Parliament added specific requirements for generative AI, including requirements related to transparency of copyright works used to train these models.

At CC, we support the overall aims of the draft legislation, but we want to ensure that these new points of focus are handled in a careful, narrowly-tailored way. Specifically, here is what we will be focusing on as we engage policymakers going forward.

CC comments on specific issues

For many years, CC has focused on the interplay between copyright and AI, because of the way this technology can foster better sharing, helping people build on and contribute to the commons, spurring on new creativity and knowledge sharing. The Act poses several challenges to these aims, and we address them in turn below. 

Free and open source software (FOSS)

FOSS provides important benefits, including by improving transparency and auditability of AI systems and by making it easier for a wide variety of players, including nonprofits, start-ups, researchers/academics and SMEs, to innovate, test and compete in the market. As such, CC’s views are that collaborative development of FOSS and merely making FOSS available in public repositories should not subject developers to the AI Act’s requirements.

GPAI, foundation models, and FOSS

We appreciate the concerns policymakers have about how general purpose tools can be used “downstream” by other actors in harmful ways. It is particularly important that downstream users have sufficient information about the underlying model in order to address possible risks.  

At the same time, it is important to treat general purpose tools distinctly from tools aimed for a particular, high-risk use. For multi-purpose tools, it can be impractical for developers to implement risk management in ways suited for narrowly defined, “high risk” AI uses. In turn, imposing the same rules on GPAI creators may create significant barriers to innovation and drive market concentration, leading the development of AI to only occur within a small number of large, well-resourced commercial operators. With that in mind, we also want to ensure there are proportional requirements for FOSS “foundation models” that are “put on the market” or “put into service,” tailored to different services and providers.

In particular, we have concerns when it comes to FOSS developers. As above, merely developing and making available in a repository a FOSS “foundation model” or other general purpose tool should not subject developers to the Act’s requirements.

Transparency of training data and copyright

At CC, we are convinced that greater openness and transparency in the development of AI models can serve the public interest and facilitate better sharing by building trust among creators and users. As such, we generally support more transparency around the training data for regulated AI systems.

The Parliament version of the text includes specific provisions with respect to generative AI models, requiring providers to “document and make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary of the use of training data protected under copyright law.” On the one hand, this can be a sensible way to ensure transparency, particularly for rightsholders who wish to exercise their right to “opt-out” of exceptions to copyright pertaining to AI training pursuant to Article 4 of the EU Copyright Directive in the Digital Single Market. On the other hand, it is important that this requirement is applied proportionately; developers should not be expected to literally list out every item in the training data, but rather provide useful summaries, such as use of a particular dataset like Common Crawl or LAOIN-5B, which rightsholders can then use to determine whether their works were used or not.

Generative AI and copyright generally

The Parliament’s text also requires that generative AI model providers take “adequate safeguards against the generation of content in breach of Union law, in line with the generally acknowledged state of the art, and without prejudice to fundamental rights, including the freedom of expression.” While perhaps to reaffirm that developers should comply with copyright law, this is likely to create much more uncertainty; at worst, it could be read to suggest a more sweeping requirement for developers to implement copyright filtering tools that could address perfectly lawful uses. We encourage policymakers to take steps to ensure this does not become a backdoor expansion of copyright law; to the extent policymakers want to consider this broader topic, they should do it separately, rather than tacked on to the AI Act at the eleventh hour.

Looking ahead

Regarding the start of the trilogues, Creative Commons CEO Catherine Stihler said: “Creative Commons remains committed to finding fair and lasting solutions to ensure AI can support creators and grow the commons, in line with our strategy of better sharing and our values of openness, transparency, fairness, and creativity. At CC, we will continue to proactively engage with EU institutions as the trilogues commence, in order to achieve our mission to empower individuals and communities around the world by equipping them with technical, legal and policy solutions to enable sharing of knowledge and culture in the public interest.”

 

If you are in Brussels on 28 June, 2023, do not miss Creative Commons’ Brigitte Vézina speaking at the European Internet Forum’s Generative AI, art & copyright: from creative machines to human-powered tools event, an in-person panel organized by EIF with opening remarks by MEP Dragos Tudorache, Parliament co-rapporteur on the AI Act — you can find more information on the program and register on the EIF’s website. 

The post European Parliament gives green light to AI Act, moving EU towards finalizing the world’s leading regulation of AI appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Open Climate Campaign is pleased to see the recent wave of announcements requiring open access to knowledge that support our goal to make the open sharing of research outputs the norm in climate science. The Campaign recognizes that in order to generate solutions and mitigations to climate change, the knowledge (i.e. research papers, data, educational resources) about it must be open. To us, “open” means: immediately available without embargo, with an open license (or dedicated to the public domain), supporting rights retention, and published in a standardized format that enables machine readability. The emphasis on these specifics in these announcements is what is particularly exciting and different than what has come before.

This open access wave began in August 2022 with the release of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Public Access Memo, commonly referred to as the “Nelson Memo,” after Dr. Alondra Nelson, the Director of the OSTP at the time. The memo calls for each of the US Federal Agencies to make “articles resulting from all U.S. federally funded research freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories, without any embargo or delay after publication.” The memo also directs agencies to describe: “the circumstances or prerequisites needed to make the publications freely and publicly available by default, including any use and re-use rights, and which restrictions, including attribution, may apply.” Creative Commons and our partners SPARC, Harvard and American University have been working with the US agencies to help them ensure rights are retained and publicly funded research is openly licensed.

The next crest in the wave was on 20 May 2023, with the release of the G7 Leaders Communiqué, which stated that the G7 will “promote open science by equitably disseminating scientific knowledge, publicly funded research outputs including research data and scholarly publications following the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles.” Followed just a few days later, on 23 May, by the release of the Council of the European Union’s proceedings on “High-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing.” As waves are measured by the distance between consecutive crests, the decreasing time between these announcements suggests that this open wave is growing.

Once considered simply a good practice, open scholarship is becoming the default for publicly funded research. Both practitioners and decision-makers recognize how critical open access to knowledge is in understanding the world and solving the world’s greatest challenges. While open plans and policies have been cropping up across the world (e.g. Ukraine, Montenegro), these announcements have stipulations that require not just open access to publications, but immediate access and “supporting the rights of researchers to publish, share, disseminate and communicate openly the results and data of their research…as well as maximum accessibility and reusability of research results.” These broader definitions of open match CC’s strategy for better sharing: sharing that is not just open, but that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable. The tide has turned: it’s now not only important to make research open, but also to enable the full potential of open access by making publications accessible as quickly as possible and enabling the reuse of content and data.

The Open Climate Campaign welcomes these developments and language that aligns with our definition of open. This ongoing wave of announcements heralds real change in enabling better knowledge sharing and collaboration to solve the world’s greatest challenges.

At the Open Climate Campaign, we are working to make the open sharing of research the norm in climate science through global advocacy, one-on-one work with funders, national governments and environmental organizations; and partnerships with open projects and publishers.

You can learn more about how you can participate at www.openclimatecampaign.org.

The post An Open Wave: New Calls for Open Access appeared first on Creative Commons.

Mauricio says that “open access makes it easier for people to use what is a common good for all.” In this episode we dive into the work of a historian and librarian in Argentina. Mauricio discusses the value of cultural heritage preservation over generations and what role present day  institutions play for the future.

Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Mauricio is a historian, librarian, and museologist. He works with Wikimedia Argentina to open up collections and make them accessible for people all over the world.

Marcio responds to the following questions:

1. What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
2. What are the barriers?
3. Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
4. Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?

Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.

Want to hear more insights from Open Culture experts from around the world? Watch more episodes of Open Culture VOICES here >>

The post Mauricio Genta — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 19 appeared first on Creative Commons.