Today, Creative Commons (CC) is excited to announce one million US dollars in new programmatic support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (PJMF) to help open large climate datasets. The twelve-month grant will enable CC to conduct key climate data landscape analyses and expand our work, bringing people together to create policy and practices to open data that advances climate research and innovation.

“We are delighted to have been awarded this new programmatic support to help us play our part in solving one of humanity’s greatest challenges, the climate crisis,” said Catherine Stihler, CC CEO. “By opening up large datasets, we open endless possibilities to further knowledge and greater understanding of the causes and solutions to our climate crisis.”

“By opening up large datasets, we open endless possibilities to further knowledge and greater understanding of the causes and solutions to our climate crisis.”

The work funded by PJMF will complement activities already underway with CC and our partners in the Open Climate Campaign, a multi-year project to promote open access to research to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity.

“Providing scale, accuracy, and granularity, data assets like the ones this partnership makes possible will serve as transformational tools in achieving climate goals and protecting our planet and community,” said Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. “Our work with Creative Commons advances and accelerates the creation of such open data sets and leverages the best knowledge we have today to create a better future for tomorrow.”

“Providing scale, accuracy, and granularity, data assets like the ones this partnership makes possible will serve as transformational tools in achieving climate goals and protecting our planet and community.”

“We are so pleased to have our climate work further supported by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation,” said Dr. Cable Green, CC Director of Open Knowledge. “Opening large climate datasets is essential to our strategy to support better sharing, which includes helping scientists share all the components of their research – including their data – to support reproducibility and further inquiry.”

CC will be recruiting soon for a new person to join our team, working on opening large climate datasets. Do you want to help with this work? Please keep an eye on our job opportunities.

 

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Since its creation in 2001, Creative Commons (CC) has helped release nearly 5 million digital open images of cultural heritage held in cultural heritage institutions using CC tools. We have also been promoting open culture to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world, and it is based on this rich experience that our Open Culture program now supports better sharing of cultural heritage globally.

Today, we are proud at CC to announce the publication of Towards better sharing of cultural heritage — A Creative Commons Call to Action to Policymakers, a simple, concise, and accessible resource that aims to support policymakers with key arguments to reform policy — in particular copyright — to achieve better sharing of cultural heritage in the public interest. 

Drafted by a small group of open culture advocates of the Creative Commons Copyright Platform and Open Culture Platform — Shanna Hollich (CC US), Emine Ozge Yildirim (KU Leuven), Maarten Zeinstra (CC Netherlands) and Brigitte Vézina (Director of Policy and Open Culture) — this resource: 

• summarizes key takeaways from the 2022 CC policy paper “Towards Better Sharing of Cultural Heritage — An Agenda for Copyright Reform; 
• applies the lessons learned during a CC virtual workshop for policy experts and open culture enthusiasts held in May 2022, and;
• distills numerous conversations with and by the CC open culture community held between June and October 2022, as well as direct document input gathering ideas, feedback and real-life examples.
  

This publication offers a basis for a shared vision on better sharing and makes a call for five actions: 

• ACTION 1: Protect the public domain from erosion
• ACTION 2: Reduce the term of copyright protection
• ACTION 3: Legally allow necessary activities of cultural heritage institutions
• ACTION 4: Shield cultural heritage institutions from liability
• ACTION 5: Ensure respect, equity, and inclusivity

Read the full document >

We’ll be presenting the publication at Open Nederland’s Public Domain Day 2023 on January 13, 2023, at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. More information and registration for this hybrid event: https://publiekdomeindag.nl/.

 

Do you want to know more about open culture at Creative Commons? Write to us at info@creativecommons.org. 

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As we’ve discussed before, the European Union has been considering a new AI Act, which would regulate certain uses of artificial intelligence (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, and to ensure that certain precautions are taken before deployment of uses deemed “high-risk.”

Last week, the European Council adopted its position on the Act. This is an important milestone, and the next step is for the European Parliament to form a common position, expected in early 2023, so that the positions of those two institutions and the European Commission can then be negotiated into a final, joint position during the so-called “trilogue” phase of the process.

While the AI Act covers a number of important issues, CC has focused on two aspects of AI regulation. First, while copyright’s relationship to AI is not core to this proposal, it is important that policymakers understand that appropriate limits on copyright are necessary to serve the public interest. Originality and human authorship must remain essential to the granting of copyright or other related exclusive rights over creative works, and content generated with minimal human input by AI does not meet those standards. What’s more, training AI on copyrighted works should not be limited by copyright law. Happily, the AI Act does not interfere with these basic premises.

Second, we’ve focused on ensuring that the AI Act takes a tailored approach to general purpose artificial intelligence (GPAI) and, in particular, the sharing and use of open source tools. We believe this is particularly important to get right, given the fact that GPAI can be an input into myriad different uses, including AI tools for generating content like GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion.

Because GPAI is by definition a multi-purpose tool, it may be impractical for GPAI 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. When it comes to open-source GPAI, overly broad regulation may be particularly harmful, as open source is critical to lowering barriers to AI development, and open-source developers have even more limited ability to control how their works are shared and re-used.

While there are a wide range of views on how best to address GPAI, the best approach, we believe, would be for legislators and regulations to focus on ensuring GPAI creators provide information to downstream users so that they can comply when implementing “high risk uses.” When GPAI creators and users have an ongoing relationship, the AI Act could require ongoing information exchange and cooperation in service of compliance, with requirements tailored to the different actors’ roles. When it comes to open source, the Act should take a proportionate approach, ensuring developers make information available to downstream users in support of their compliance, but otherwise not regulating open-source software or creating the expectation that open-source developers can control or be responsible for downstream use.

On this GPAI topic, the Council’s approach appears to go further, while still leaving many questions open. The Council’s text applies many of the risk management requirements for “high risk” AI uses to all GPAI services. At the same time, how these requirements will be specifically applied is left to further “implementing acts” (secondary legislation) that the European Commission will craft in the future, and the text recognizes the need to tailor requirements in a proportionate manner to GPAI’s distinct elements. Whilst we appreciate the complexity in drafting future-proof primary legislation of this nature, the potential delay in clarity regarding the technical application of the GPAI provisions may constitute a significant barrier to innovation and sharing. To the extent possible, this should be avoided.

We’re glad to see that further care will be taken on this subject, although this approach leaves a considerable amount of uncertainty for developers at the moment. With that in mind, we would urge the Parliament to continue to refine the proposal to ensure responsibilities are allocated in a way that supports GPAI development, especially when it comes to open-source developers, so as to ensure AI’s potential can benefit society.

The post As European Council Adopts AI Act Position, Questions Remain on GPAI appeared first on Creative Commons.

As the year comes to a close, we’re spotlighting Creative Commons’ public policy work, recapping what we’ve done and looking ahead to the new year. In this edition, we turn to our work on better sharing of data.

The sharing of open data can be incredibly beneficial to society: facilitating enhanced scientific collaboration and reproducibility, increasing government and corporate transparency, and speeding the discovery and understanding of solutions to planetary and societal needs. Creative Commons has long championed open data, including in our recent launch of our Open Climate Campaign and our collaboration with partners to launch The Movement for a Better Internet.

Along with promoting open data, we also believe that other ways to share data better can help build the commons and support our mission of better sharing: sharing that is inclusive, just and equitable — where everyone has wide opportunity to access data and to contribute their own data as they see fit. Of course, not all sharing of data is beneficial; for instance, collection and use of one’s personal data can undermine a person’s choice, autonomy, and fundamental rights and raise real concerns. At the same time, there are other ways to share data beyond merely open data — such as by giving individuals control over sharing of their own data — that hold the potential for meaningful benefits.

Creative Commons’ Approach to Data & Public Policy

Creative Commons’ advocacy on data sharing centers around the following key areas:

Neither copyright nor related or sui generis rights should be used to raise barriers to the reuse and sharing of data. Data — that is, facts about subjects — has not traditionally been protected by intellectual property laws, in part, because of the negative consequences of granting legal monopolies over facts. Protecting facts with ownership rights locks up truths about the world, making the basic building blocks of creativity and innovation unavailable for anyone else to use other than their rightsholders, potentially for decades.

People should be able to use, reuse, and share the data they generate when engaging with digital services. Public policy should enable data portability for the data people generate, particularly in contexts of dominant service providers that effectively act as gatekeepers in a market. Enabling portability can foster innovation in the marketplace by preventing users from being locked-in to particular services; unlock more value from the data by allowing others to use and build upon it; and can lead to creative new insights that may have been invisible to the initial data holder.

Interoperability can help ensure individuals can access and share their data. While regulations may encourage or require data sharing, such sharing may be impossible or impractical because of differing data standards. Public policy can play an important role by facilitating or mandating interoperability. To that end, policy can support the development of clear, agreed-upon standards by which data can be shared across services.

The public sector has a critical role to play in facilitating data uses for public purposes. Data collected by public bodies is a public asset, and, except where it’s subject to valid limitations (like privacy and security interests), should be made freely available for everyone to use, reuse, build upon, and share without restrictions. Similarly, databases and datasets that are produced using public funds should be open to the public, even if they were created by third parties. Moreover, public sector entities have a crucial role to play in unlocking access to business’ data in order to serve public purposes. Policy can empower the public sector to help build and steward a broader data commons, where both private sector and public bodies’ data can be accessed and used to public ends, and can encourage more collaboration between the public and private sectors regarding the use and sharing of data.

CC’s Engagement on Data & Public Policy in 2022

• Engaging on data regulation in the EU: This year, the European Commission introduced the Data Act, as part of its broader data governance strategy. The Data Act is designed to rebalance control and power over data and hands more control back to consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to more broadly unlock industrial data. We welcomed the Act, organized briefings on it, and have advocated before policymakers to strengthen provisions around interoperability and business-to-government data sharing, among other matters.
• Supporting open access in the USA: The United States White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued guidance to all US federal agencies requiring federally funded research and research data to be made available to the public to access and reuse. We have long advocated for the importance of open access to publicly funded research data, and this is an important step toward building a better open commons of data that serves the public. We welcome this decision by the OSTP, and we look forward to working with US federal agencies to develop their public access plans.
• Ensuring data sharing is part of infrastructure policy in the UK: We submitted comments to the UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy’s open consultation Enabling a national Cyber-Physical Infrastructure to catalyse innovation. We argued to remove barriers to information and promote the sharing of data and knowledge by educators, activists, advocates, librarians, educators, lawyers, technologists, scientists and more.
• Exploring standards for sharing climate data: Through our work on the Open Climate Campaign, we have seen how large climate change datasets are distributed and not easily accessible to climate researchers and policy makers, due to a combination of varying technical formats and confusing legal terms of use. This year, we have begun to explore what it would take to develop a sharing standard for climate data (similar to the Digital Public Goods Standard that CC helped create), and are looking at how this effort could be sufficiently resourced.

What’s Next

In the coming year, we’ll continue to engage on specific legislation like the EU’s Data Act and campaign for ensuring that data can be put to critical public-interest purposes, including through our Open Climate Campaign. While the Data Act has requirements for business-to-government sharing in certain limited public policy circumstances, it’s also worth thinking about how to support public service entities in building and stewarding a broader data commons. Groups like Open Future and others have elaborated on this concept, and, for our part, CC’s Copyright Platform Working Group 2 “Digital Sharing Spaces” will be publishing a comparative mapping of the legal landscape for data sharing for research purposes across the US and EU. The European Commission has signaled that progress on health and mobility data spaces is a priority, and we look forward to contributing to these and other efforts.

The post Our Work in Policy at CC: Data appeared first on Creative Commons.

As the year comes to a close, we’re spotlighting Creative Commons’ public policy work, recapping what we’ve done and looking ahead to the new year. In this edition, we turn to our work on artificial intelligence (AI).

Recently, you might have seen the news headline “Art Made With Artificial Intelligence Wins at State Fair,” or even played with one of many tools that enable people to generate content through artificial intelligence. These are just some of the ways AI is becoming increasingly connected with our daily lives. AI is a broad, evolving concept that relates to a number of technologies (such as machine learning and neural networks) that enable computers to analyze and make assessments about data on a scale that was never possible before.

At Creative Commons, we’ve focused on how the development of AI intersects with the commons. Generating content with AI is particularly relevant to CC’s mission, our better sharing strategy, and our participation in the Movement for a Better Internet. AI systems are often trained by analyzing copyrighted works — for instance, the coronavirus was detected in its early stages via large-scale analysis of news articles, and similar sorts of analysis are key to vaccine research. What’s more, AI is used in systems people use to find, access and share information — consider, for example, the recommendation systems used to find information across social media. Across all the complexity of new AI systems and their uses, we’re guided by two questions: How does the proliferation of AI connect to better sharing: sharing that is inclusive, just and equitable — where everyone has wide opportunity to access content, to contribute their own creativity, and to receive recognition and rewards for their contributions? And how does the proliferation of AI connect to a better internet: a public interest vision for an internet that benefits us all?

CC’s Approach to AI & Public Policy

Creative Commons’ advocacy on AI centers around our core beliefs about building the commons and around addressing copyright barriers to better sharing.

• Originality and human authorship must remain essential to the granting of copyright or other related exclusive rights over creative works, and AI-generated content by itself does not meet those standards. Copyright exists to incentivize human creativity and, where the hallmarks of creative choices don’t exist, protection should not arise. Giving exclusive rights for works produced by AI would impede copyright’s core purposes and impoverish the commons without any recognizable public benefit in the form of bolstered creativity. Thus, AI-generated output should be presumed to be in the public domain, insofar as the content was generated autonomously without human, creative choices.
• Copyright shouldn’t provide a broad monopoly over complementary technologies, and the use of lawfully-accessed creative works to train AI should not be constrained by copyright. The use of creative works to train AI, such as through text and data mining (TDM), does not compete with the original markets for the work, and, in fact, may enhance them by increasing demand for the work. Meanwhile, restricting such non-consumptive and non-expressive uses is not necessary to incentivize creation of the underlying works and thus would not create public benefit.

To take a holistic approach to supporting better sharing, we have also expanded the focus of our advocacy to consider other key issues.

• The capacity to develop and use AI to support better sharing should be widely distributed, rather than concentrated among a narrow few: Better sharing depends on a dynamic environment, where people are not locked into a narrow set of services for sharing knowledge and creativity. While it is crucial to ensure commercial viability and incentives for investment in helpful services, it is also crucial to ensure that developments in AI do not come at the expense of robust competition, consumer protection, and the public interest more broadly.
• The risks of AI should be addressed through tailored means, without wide-sweeping, generic restrictions on general purpose technology and sharing: AI does not always generate unqualified good or harm. Harmful uses are best addressed through a contextual approach, based on clear principles that can adapt to new developments in how AI is designed and implemented for different use cases based on their risks to society. Such a tailored approach can and should avoid overly broad restrictions on general purpose technology, in particular the sharing and use of open source tools.
• Online platforms’ management of content sharing should be coupled with transparency and accountability measures: Large social media and user-generated content platforms use automated tools, increasingly driven by AI, in order to manage the vast scale of information produced and shared on their services. CC has long opposed mandatory, automated filtering for copyright infringement, because of the ways filtering can negatively impact free speech, as well as the sharing of culture and knowledge. When it comes to voluntary measures taken to manage content on sharing platforms, we believe it is important, at a minimum, to ensure people are well-informed about platforms’ practices, and to hold platforms accountable to their promises.

CC’s Engagement on AI & Public Policy in 2022

• Engaging on AI regulation in EU and UK: Starting in 2021, the European Union has been considering a new AI Act, which would regulate certain uses of AI. In the EU, Creative Commons has proactively worked with policymakers and other key stakeholders, creating a constructive dialogue to inform both the content of the text and the context of the debate. We have focused on ensuring the intersection of copyright and AI is well understood. Moreover, we have advocated for the benefits of supporting open data, open source, and interoperability as means to support a healthy marketplace for and robust competition in the development and use of AI. Similarly, we responded to the UK’s consultation on their white paper: Establishing a pro-innovation approach to regulating AI.
• Supporting transparency around content moderation and opposing filtering: The EU passed landmark legislation, the Digital Services Act, regarding how online platforms moderate user generated content. We raised concerns about proposals to mandate filters, which fortunately did not make it into the final text, and we supported the enhanced accountability and transparency measures included in the text. Meanwhile, in the USA, Creative Commons joined a coalition of groups concerned with legislation that would have mandated copyright filters.
• Policy paper on copyright, including AI: In our new policy paper titled “Towards Better Sharing of Cultural Heritage — An Agenda for Copyright Reform,” we advanced proposals to support cultural heritage institutions in making use of their collections for AI-training purposes, and in making AI-generated content available. In addition, CC’s Copyright Platform Working Group is working to update previous work on the intersection of copyright and AI.
• Webinars: AI Inputs, Outputs and the Public Commons: We also sought to bring more visibility to issues around AI and copyright, by hosting a series of webinars with experts, one focused on how open works and better sharing intersect with AI inputs  — works used in training and supplying AI — and another focused on how open works and better sharing intersect with AI outputs — works generated by AI that are, could be, or should be participating in the open commons.

What’s Next

Next year, we plan to build on this work in a number of ways. First, as AI tools for generating content have become more widely available, there are more and more questions about how copyright should apply. We will continue to engage in this debate to support better sharing. Second, as the EU’s institutions negotiate the final text of the AI Act, we will continue to actively engage and comment on the draft texts. We’ll also engage in similar debates in the UK, at the World Intellectual Property Organization, and elsewhere as opportunities arise.

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