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In other news:

• There’s been a lot of discussion and debate recently about CC’s NonCommercial and NoDerivatives terms.

• A recent dispute involving Wikimedia demonstrates CC licenses' ability to withstand legal scrutiny.

• If you work with K-12 students in the US (or if you are one), then you’ll want to know about the Engage 2012 student video competition.

• Ten years after the release of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OA advocates recently released updated recommendations in support of open access around the world, touching on areas including policy, licensing, sustainability, and advocacy.

• After more than two years of hard work, the CC China Mainland 3.0 licenses are ready for use.

• We end on a sad note by remembering Lee Dirks, a strategist at Microsoft Research Connections and friend of the open access movement.

We rely on our supporters to continue our work enabling stories like those above. 

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Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Google, LuLu, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Corporation, The Omidyar Network, Red Hat, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as members of the public (you!).

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Creative Commons is turning 10 this year! We’ll be hosting parties around the world and sharing party favors online for a ten-day celebration, December 7 to 16.

To see a listing of the parties we have planned, visit the #cc10 wiki page. There are more in the works, so stay tuned.

Do you want to celebrate CC’s tenth anniversary in your city? Host your own #cc10 event! Even if it’s just a happy hour after work, we’d love to hear about it and help you spread the word. Send us an email at press@creativecommons.org and let us know what you’re planning. We’ll add it to our listing and send you some special CC swag for the party (supplies are limited and we may not be able to ship to every location, but we’ll try).

Yelabuga Medieval Tower / Ерней / Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Every day, millions of people rely on CC licenses for all manner of sharing, from merely redistributing recordings or using images found on Flickr in presentations, to leveraging massive collaborative works developed on wikis in educational settings. All of this normally happens very quietly and without fuss or exception, so long as simple license conditions are respected and those involved have no other reason for complaint. But the exceptional (rare, that is) conflict proves the simple rule that CC licenses operate as designed and as advertised: disregard the license conditions and copyright is at issue; follow the conditions and copyright is not.

As an example of the former, almost exactly a year ago we announced that the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (BY-SA) license had been successfully enforced in a case in Germany. There, a far-right political party had used a photo under BY-SA without providing proper attribution to the author and other information required by the license. The photographer sued to enforce the license, and the district court of Berlin agreed and issued an injunction against the user.

As an example of the latter, members of the Wikitravel community (together with many who left long ago to found Wikivoyage) recently announced plans to migrate to a new travel project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation (meaning a new sibling project alongside Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikipedia and others). All of these sites use BY-SA, which enables the reuse of content among those sites even when conflicts arise or differences of opinion exist about website administration or community management, for example. Indeed, BY-SA was designed precisely to enable this kind of reuse and repurposing of content. In this particular instance, Internet Brands, which currently runs WikiTravel, sued (PDF) two Wikitravel volunteers for trademark infringement, unfair business practices and conspiracy, and seeks a court order enjoining them generally from doing anything that misleads the public into believing the new website is affiliated with Wikitravel, among other things.

Wikimedia Foundation decided to support those volunteers (who are also Wikimedia volunteers) in their legal defense, and in its blog post explained that it did not think it appropriate for Internet Brands to attempt to intimidate the volunteers from communicating freely on their dissatisfaction with IB’s management of the Wikitravel community. As a result, Wikimedia Foundation filed a separate request for declaratory judgment (PDF) seeking a declaration that, “under the terms of the CC License, [Internet Brands] may not restrict the use, reproduction, sale, or modification of content on the Wikitravel website in any manner other than requiring attribution to the creator of the content and that the content be maintained under the same licensing terms”. In addition, the Foundation argues that “[Internet Brands] has no lawful right, title or interest under the CC License to prevent use of such content created by volunteer users and administrators on the Wikitravel website”.

A few claims in the dispute provide the opportunity to highlight some important features of BY-SA and the other CC licenses. First, all CC 3.0 licenses contain mechanisms that protect licensors wanting to distance themselves from the projects and individuals reusing the CC-licensed content in ways allowed by the license, for any reason whatsoever. Our licenses contain a “no endorsement, no sponsorship” clause that prohibits users from implicitly or explicitly asserting or implying “any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by” the author, the licensor or others to whom attribution is being provided, either for the licensee herself or the work as reused. Additionally, anyone modifying content (when allowed by the license, as BY-SA does) must clearly label or identify that changes have been made, thereby ensuring modifications are not wrongly associated with the original author. Finally, where the original author or licensor wants to completely disassociate themselves from particular reuses, they have the right to request that all attribution and mention of them be removed, and those reusing the work must do so to the extent practicable. These mechanisms provide effective tools for those concerned about being affiliated with permitted reuses of their works.

Second, an assertion in the dispute relates to whether proper attribution has been provided. While the factual underpinnings of this claim are not provided in the court filings and it does not appear the content is question is being used at this time, it’s worth mention that Creative Commons tools provide a sophisticated yet flexible method for reusers to provide proper attribution. All CC licenses permit attribution to be provided in a manner “reasonable to the medium or means” used by the licensee, and for credit to be provided in a “reasonable manner.” This flexibility facilitates compliance by licensees – minimizing the risk that overly onerous and inflexible attribution requirements are simply disregarded as being too difficult – while at the same ensuring that credit is still provided. This makes it easy for reusers to “do the right thing.”

Whatever the decision the court makes regarding the other claims by Internet Brands against the Wikitravel volunteers, it is clear that under the terms of BY-SA, the Wikitravel content can and should be used on other websites, so long as the users comply with the requirements of the license.

If you work with K-12 students in the United States (or if you are one), then you’ll want to know about this video competition. Engage 2012 asks young people to create short videos about political issues impacting their communities. All entries will be uploaded to YouTube under CC BY, meaning lots of great fodder for future remixes.

From the website:

Every four years, American voters decide who calls the White House home. And the road to the election is full of questions. How does the next presidential election affect you, your family, and your neighborhood?

Answers to this question appear in newspapers, on television, and on the radio. But we want to know what the story is in your community. There’s just one question: Can you tell us in two minutes?

The Engage in Democracy 2012 Student Journalism Challenge is a competition for K-12 students from across the United States and its territories. Our goal is to involve you in the political process.

To participate, shoot a video under two minutes in length using stories from around your community with a focus on one of these six big election topics:

• Voter Turnout
• Jobs and the Economy
• Education Reform
• Health Care
• Energy and the Environment
• Immigration

The contest is open through November 5.

Ten years after the release of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, OA advocates last week released updated recommendations in support of open access around the world, touching on areas including policy, licensing, sustainability, and advocacy. Of particular interest are recommendations that urge funders to require open access when they make grants: “When possible, funder policies should require libre OA, preferably under a CC-BY license or equivalent.” When funding agencies institute open access policies for the grant funds they distribute, they increase the impact of the research produced. This is because the outputs can be widely reused under the CC-BY license, which allows for reuse for any purpose (even commercial) so long as attribution is given to the author.

The updated recommendation document includes a section on licensing and reuse (see the three listed below). The document “recommend[s] CC-BY or an equivalent license as the optimal license for the publication, distribution, use, and reuse of scholarly work.”

OA repositories typically depend on permissions from others, such as authors or publishers, and are rarely in a position to require open licenses. However, policy makers in a position to direct deposits into repositories should require open licenses, preferably CC-BY, when they can.

OA journals are always in a position to require open licenses, yet most of them do not yet take advantage of the opportunity. We recommend CC-BY for all OA journals.

In developing strategy and setting priorities, we recognize that gratis access is better than priced access, libre access is better than gratis access, and libre under CC-BY or the equivalent is better than libre under more restrictive open licenses. We should achieve what we can when we can. We should not delay achieving gratis in order to achieve libre, and we should not stop with gratis when we can achieve libre.