Over the past few months, members of the Creative Commons (CC) Copyright Platform along with CC friends from around the world have worked together to develop a policy paper addressing the key high-level policy issues affecting access and sharing of cultural heritage, notably by galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs). In this blog post, we provide some background on the paper and share a few highlights. 

Policy at Creative Commons

CC strives to influence global policy to ensure better sharing of creative content and to bring down the copyright barriers to universal access and reuse of knowledge and culture, including the cultural heritage held in GLAMs. As part of our Open Culture Program, we work to ensure that the interests, concerns, and needs of the public and GLAMs in fulfilling their public-interest mission are balanced with those of rights holders in a fair manner. 

We developed this paper to provide a global, condensed reference point for CC’s advocacy work in copyright reform in the cultural heritage context. We hope it will support members of the CC community in their own advocacy efforts, guide policymakers in their legislative processes, and inform anyone interested in the policy issues gravitating around access and reuse of culture and cultural heritage.

Paper highlights

The paper offers an extensive overview of copyright challenges to the legitimate activities of GLAMs, notably preservation (largely through digitization) and sharing of digital and digitized content images and data for access, use and reuse. It also notes copyright’s chilling effects in the face of the GLAM sector’s general risk aversion. The paper then provides insights towards effective copyright reform addressing those challenges, with a focus on the opportunities related to the digital environment. The proposals for reform are geared towards legal certainty,  international harmonization, and as a means to facilitate cross-border transactions. 

The paper recognizes  the pivotal roles of GLAMs in preserving and providing access to knowledge and culture to all members of society. It calls for  policies that support better sharing of cultural heritage in the public interest.

Read the full paper here and stay tuned for an exciting event building on this paper coming soon!

The post CC publishes policy paper titled Towards Better Sharing of Cultural Heritage — An Agenda for Copyright Reform appeared first on Creative Commons.

I’d like to share with our community a congratulation and a heartfelt farewell to staff in the Creative Commons legal team.

First, CC is excited to announce that longtime CC staffer, Kat Walsh, has been promoted to CC General Counsel. Kat was on the CC legal team from 2012-2015 during the drafting and initial publication process of version 4.0 of the license suite. She returned to CC in 2021 as Deputy General Counsel. Kat has a nearly 20-year history in the free and open culture movements, including many years on the boards of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Free Software Foundation, and has previously worked in library policy, technology startups, and online community management. She is an advocate for free access to knowledge and for CC licensing as part of the infrastructure for an internet that belongs to everyone. As General Counsel, she oversees the legal support for all aspects of CC’s activities, provides strategic input, leads the stewardship of CC’s legal tools, and advises the organization on new programmatic initiatives.

Next, we would like to congratulate Sarah Hinchliff Pearson as she leaves her CC General Counsel post for a new and exciting opportunity. CC has been lucky to have Sarah on staff for nearly 11 years, first as Senior Counsel, then as General Counsel. Her service to CC has been marked by calm and deeply wise judgment and commitment to CC over these many years, for which our gratitude is endless.

Sarah‘s tireless research and diligence on the 4.0 license suite, as well as the translations of all the licenses, has opened up more in the world than anyone could possibly measure. The CC Global Network, the greater open knowledge community, and beyond have benefited greatly from her work.

Throughout her time at CC, Sarah has been committed to growing as a teammate and leader and to fostering the growth of others. It is thus with sadness but also admiration that we see her depart CC for the next leg of her professional journey.

The team and I want to wish them both Kat and Sarah well in their new and exciting roles.

The post Congratulations and Farewell appeared first on Creative Commons.

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Welcome to episode 18 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Stacy Allison-Cassin, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the LIS program at the University of Toronto. Her work is centred in the areas of knowledge organization, metadata, and knowledge equity. A Citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario, she engages in work and research related to Indigenous matters in libraries and the larger cultural heritage sector. With a deep interest in increasing access and visibility for non-textual materials and marginalized knowledge, Stacy is a passionate advocate for change in information structures and metadata systems within the library profession and across the wider GLAM sector.

Stacy 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.

Episodes will be released twice a week until June 2022. Missed episode 17 of our Open Culture VOICES series? Catch up here >>

The post Episode 18: Open Culture VOICES – Stacy-Allison Cassin appeared first on Creative Commons.

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Welcome to episode 17 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Patricia Díaz Rubio, a Chilean social communicator (Universidad de Chile) passionate about collective work and social impact. Since 2018, she has been working at Wikimedia Chile, promoting local and open content on the Internet.

Patricia 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.

Episodes will be released twice a week until June 2022. Missed episode 16 of our Open Culture VOICES series? Catch up here >>

The post Episode 17: Open Culture VOICES – Patricia Díaz Rubio appeared first on Creative Commons.

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