Today we commemorate Fair Use Week, a week-long celebration of the doctrines of fair use and fair dealing.

Creative Commons is proud of how its licenses respect fair use and other exceptions and limitations to copyright. CC licenses end where copyright ends, which means you don’t need to comply with a CC license if you don’t need permission under copyright. You will hear us repeat this fundamental design principle about our licenses often because it is important in practice, but even more so as policy. Anything that claims to grant “permission” to do things allowed under fair use is problematic because it promotes “permission culture” and increases FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about fair use. This maxim goes for open licensing just as it does anything else, which is what makes the treatment of fair use in our licenses so important.

Even so, there remains some potential tension between open licensing and fair use. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that relying on fair use to include content in an otherwise openly-licensed work can make it difficult for people around the globe to reuse your work. While most countries have some form of fair-use-like rights, those rights are not harmonized internationally. That means it is possible that the portion of your work used under fair use would have to be carved out before it is reused in some jurisdictions. Proper marking of what content falls outside the scope of the license can help minimize this problem.

The other potential tension results from the gray area around where fair use begins and ends. Thanks in no small part to the work of Peter Jaszi and Patricia Aufderheide, the public has a much better idea of how fair use plays out in practice than it used to. But inevitably, some challenging fair use questions remain. When reusers are faced with those close cases, some opt to use CC-licensed work instead of relying on fair use of an all rights reserved work. By providing a licensed alternative, CC licenses provide a nice cushion for fair use in those situations. But in other contexts, reusers have to decide whether to rely on fair use when reusing a CC-licensed work. While it is common practice to give attribution when using something under fair use, complying with other CC license restrictions is often impossible when relying on fair use. This is exactly how it should be. As we know, using a work under fair use means the CC license is irrelevant and the license terms do not apply.

Creative Commons never discourages reusers from relying on fair use or other exceptions or limitations to copyright, even when that means not complying with a CC license. Respect for fair use was written into the code of our licenses from the start, and that has not changed. We recognize that fair use is a muscle, and it needs to be exercised. Now go workout.

Creative Commons and the Open Policy Network hosted the first Institute for Open Leadership meeting in San Francisco 12-16 January 2015. The Institute for Open Leadership (IOL for short) is a training program to identify and cultivate new leaders in open education, science, public policy, research, data and other fields on the values and implementation of openness in licensing, policies and practices. The rationale for the IOL is to educate and empower potential open advocates within existing institutional structures in order to expand and promote the values and practices of the idea that publicly funded resources should be openly licensed.

IOL group shot by Cable Green under CC BY

There was significant interest in the first iteration of the IOL program: we received over 95 applications and selected 14 fellows for the first Institute. The fellows came from around the world (Bangladesh, Barbados, Chile, Colombia, Greece, Nepal, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Somalia, United States ), and reflect a wide range of institutions–from community colleges to government sector to public radio.

The central component of the IOL program requires fellows to develop, refine, and implement a capstone open policy project within their home institution. Creative Commons staff and other selected mentors provided guidance throughout this process.

Week’s activities
The week was deliberately structured with the fellows at the center of the conversation, with a specific focus on providing them with the information and tools to develop and successfully implement their open policy project in their institution. We constructed the week’s activities to cover a wide range of topics, including:

• Overview of Creative Commons and open licensing, as this is a key aspect to all open policies.
• Deep dive into open policy, including identifying existing real world examples, sharing lessons learned, discussing the value proposition, sharing typical opposition arguments.
• Discussion of practical development of policy roadmaps and roll-out strategies across different sectors/institutions.
• Campaign planning and advice/best practices about how to communicate with decision makers about open policy.
• Identification of resources in support of open policy development and implementation, including presentations, reports, videos, informational and promotional materials.
• Sharing of best methods for educating and informing decision makers about open policy, including workshops, courses, hackathons.
• Testing fellow’s open policy knowledge and expected challenges through an open policy “shark tank.”
• Hewlett Foundation communication team interviewed multiple IOL fellows for a Hewlett story on the power of CC licensing.

Mentors included Cable Green, Paul Stacey, Timothy Vollmer and Puneet Kishor from Creative Commons and Nicole Allen and Nick Shockey from SPARC. Each of these persons had specific subject-area expertise and acted as a “mentor” for two or more of the fellows. We grouped the fellows based on their project ideas with a mentor in the following categories: Open Educational Resources, Open Access, Open Data, Open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums), and Open Business Models. During the week, we provided time for fellows to work individually, with other fellows, and with their mentors.

IOL session by txtbks under CC BY

On the final day of the in-person Institute we asked each fellow to report back on their progress from during the week, and asked each to answer common questions, such as talking about their open policy project objectives, planned activities to meet those objectives, identification of challenges they expect to face, partners they plan on working with, and metrics for success.

In addition to the whole group discussions, mentor breakouts, and individual work, we included informational and motivational speakers to talk with the fellows over our lunch breaks. These talks were given by individuals with experience working in open policy across a variety of sectors, including Hal Plotkin (former Senior Policy Advisor within the U.S. Department of Education), Abel Caine (OER Program Specialist at UNESCO), Heather Joseph (Executive Director at SPARC), Laura Manley (Project Manager at Open Data 500) and Romain Lacombe (Plume).

Next steps
With the successful completion of the in-person portion of the IOL, the fellows have now returned to their home countries and will begin the process of implementing their open policies. The mentors are committed to continue working with their respective fellows, including providing advice and assistance. Fellows and mentors will meet to discuss progress over webinars planned for the following months. The goal is for the fellows to have implemented their open policy at the institution within a year. The fellows will be able to share more information about the implementation of their capstone policy projects in the coming months.

We’ve already solicited feedback from fellows and are currently evaluating the activities and structure of the just-completed IOL. There are already several improvements we’d like to see as we begin to develop the second round of the IOL, to be held outside of North America in January 2016. We plan to open the application process for round two in mid-2015. The demand for IOL is large and additional funding is being sought to support additional ones beyond the first two.

Yoda Fountain by Nasir Khan under CC BY-SA
Note: Lucasfilm has offices inside The Presidio, where the IOL took place. Thus, Yoda.

One of the aims of the Institute For Open Leadership is to link participants together into a global network. Participants from this inaugural Institute for Open Leadership, and all future ones, become part of a peer-to-peer network providing support for each other, asking and answering questions, and getting ongoing help with open policy development and implementation. This network helps participants overcome barriers and ensure open policy opportunities come to fruition.

Today the Ford Foundation announced an open licensing policy for all of their grant-funded projects and research. The new arrangement came into effect February 1, 2015 and covers most grant-funded work, as well as the outputs of consultants. The Ford Foundation has chosen to adopt the CC BY 4.0 license as the default for these materials. Grant agreements will now include a paragraph requiring the grant recipient to broadly share all copyrightable products (such as research reports, photographs, videos, etc.) funded by the grant under CC BY. And the Ford Foundation is leading by example by adopting CC BY for all materials not subject to third-party ownership on their own website.

Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said, “This policy change will help grantees and the public more easily connect with us and build upon our work, ensure our grant dollars go further and are more impactful, and – most importantly – increase our ability to advance social justice worldwide.”

“We’re incredibly pleased to see the Ford Foundation adopting a Creative Commons licensing policy for a wide range of grant-funded works, promoting openness and re-use of content produced through its philanthropic grantmaking,” said Ryan Merkley, CEO of Creative Commons. “The Ford Foundation joins a growing movement of foundations and governments adopting policies that increase access to and re-use of digital education materials, research articles, and data using Creative Commons.”

The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization created in 1936. Its mission is “to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement.” In 2013 the Ford Foundation granted almost $570,000,000 to projects and organizations around the world.

The Ford Foundation joins several other philanthropic grantmaking organizations who have adopted Creative Commons licensing policies for the outputs of their charitable giving. We’ve highlighted several over the last few months, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (who also now require CC BY for all their project-based grantmaking) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (who adopted a CC BY open access policy for published grant-funded research and data). Releasing grant-funded content under permissive open licenses like CC BY means that these materials can be more easily shared and re-used by the public. And they can be combined with other resources that are also published under an open license.

Congratulations to the Ford Foundation on adopting an open licensing policy that will encourage the sharing of rich content and data in the digital global commons. Creative Commons continues to urge other foundations and funding bodies to emulate the ongoing leadership of the Ford Foundation by making open licensing an essential component of their grantmaking strategy.

Together with the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons has officially proposed the GNU General Public License version 3 as a candidate for compatibility with CC BY-SA version 4.0. The announcement was made on the CC license development mailing list on January 29th, kicking off what will be at least a month-long discussion period before a final compatibility determination is made.

This proposal is significant because it would bridge a gap between two of the most widely-used copyleft licenses for code and content. Currently, developers are sometimes reluctant to integrate BY-SA content into GPL projects because of uncertainty about how the two licenses work together. Eliminating obstacles to remix between licenses so similar in aim and spirit is precisely what the compatibility mechanism in BY-SA was designed to do.

However, there are differences between the two licenses that pose issues for the CC and FSF communities to consider before declaring compatibility. Over the next several weeks, we will be leading a public discussion about those topics, ensuring the final decision will be informed by community input. We encourage anyone interested to join the discussion by signing up here.

GPLv3 is the second candidate for ShareAlike compatibility considered by Creative Commons. The Free Art License version 1.3 was considered under CC’s established compatibility process and criteria and was declared compatible in October 2014.

Join us in San Francisco at Park Life Gallery on 13 February 2015 for a Creative Commons DIY Salon. This salon features local artists who celebrate inexperience, sharing culture, and self-taught expertise in projects ranging from publishing and printmaking, to web-based collaborative music communities, to building open source libraries and visualizations.

This event also celebrates the San Francisco launch of I Can Do Anything Badly 2: Learning By Doing is a Shared Responsibility, a Creative Commons licensed artist’s book by Hoël Duret & The Big Conversation Space, designed by Frédéric Teschner, which features conversational interviews in English and French about DIY culture – from computer programming and independent publishing, to Wikipedia and furniture design.

Talks will be interspersed with ambient music performances from musicians from the Disquiet Junto.

Event Details:

Friday February 13th
5:00 – 8:00 PM
Park Life Gallery
3049 22nd Street
San Francisco, CA

Facebook event page.