Earlier this year, Creative Commons announced that four working groups of the Creative Commons Copyright Platform would examine policy issues affecting the open ecosystem from a global perspective: (1) artificial intelligence and open content; (2) platform liability; (3) copyright exceptions and limitations; and (4) the ethics of open sharing. 

The CC Copyright Platform was established as a discussion space to strategize on copyright reform as a complementary action to developing and stewarding CC licenses. Over the last few months, each working group has discussed, researched and dissected these issues, and produced four Position Papers encapsulating their outcomes, available now on the CC Medium Publication.

At ‘The Future of Open’ webinar, hosted on 9 November 2021, the four working group leads presented their work to CC Global Network members, practitioners, policymakers and the general public. Speakers at the webinar included: Catherine Stihler, CEO, Creative Commons (Welcome Remarks), Brigitte Vézina, Director of Policy, Open Culture, and GLAM, Creative Commons (Moderator), Max Mahmoud Wardeh, WG 1 Lead (Artificial Intelligence and Open Content), Emine Yildirim, WG 2 Lead (Internet Platform Liability), André Houang, WG 3 Lead (copyright exceptions and limitations), Josie Fraser, WG 4 Lead (the ethics of open sharing). Below you will find the webinar recording, summaries of the four papers, and links to read them.

Working Group 1 — Artificial Intelligence and Open Content 

Max kicked things off presenting WG 1’s paper Key Findings of the Creative Commons Working Group on Copyright and AI. Max highlights that “this is an area that’s constantly changing in terms of the legislation, as well as, of course, the technology, and it’s also a very wide ranging remit in terms of how much progress has happened with regard to the use and generation of content by computers.” This informed the group’s decision to divide their work and outputs into five key areas: the definition of AI; text and data mining; training of AI and machine learning algorithms; AI generations and creations; and authors collaborating with AI. Max reminds us that the positions and recommendations mentioned in the paper are just a summary of the details that have gone into exploring and considering the topics of the Working Group. They will continue to build on the work done so far, in line with the developments in the social, technical, and legal aspects of AI and copyright. They invite you to explore and contribute to their continued work on the CC AI Working Group site, and by joining the conversation on their channel in the Creative Commons Slack.

Working Group 2 — Internet Platform Liability

Emine presented key findings from WG 2’s paper Freedom to Share: How the Law of Platform Liability Impacts Licensors and Users. Emine shares that WG 2 limited the geographic scope of their paper to the European Union, U.S. & Canada, New Zealand, and several countries in Latin America (Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru). They focused their work and outputs on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Access to Information, Right to Participate in Cultural Life and Freedom to Share. Through this lens, they assessed current trends and produced five recommendations: 

Working Group 3 — Exceptions and Limitations to address Global Challenges

André shared key findings from WG 3’s paper Creative Commons Copyright Platform Working Group on User Rights’ Position Paper. In their paper, WG3 stressed that “important changes in copyright are necessary to ensure user rights are protected, and that copyright in turn achieves its goals of promoting access to culture and knowledge.” André starts by explaining that although they are traditionally referred to as “exceptions and limitations” of copyright, this paper refers to them as “user rights” to reflect the complex layers of this issue. André explains they “decided to avoid focusing on issues specific to U.S. copyright law or European copyright law, and instead adopt a broader view, which we understood could make our paper have a broader reach and be useful to different organizations.” 

Working Group 4 — Beyond Copyright: the Ethics of Open Sharing

Josie presented key findings from WG 4’s paper Beyond Copyright: the Ethics of Open Sharing. To begin with, Josie starts off by explaining WQ 4’s definition of Ethics and Open Sharing in the context of this paper, explaining that “for the purposes of this paper, we’re looking at ethics primarily in relation to principles of equity, diversity and inclusion.” She adds “by ‘open sharing’ we mean the act of sharing digital materials either under an open license, or by applying a public domain tool”. This paper particularly focuses on the decisions that communities, groups and organizations take to share the materials they produce — including code, data and databases, images, software, sound and video recordings, written content, and 3D models — openly or not.

Based on these definitions, they explored this issue and developed 6 recommendations for an ethical open practice:

We are hugely appreciative of the efforts of all the working group members who contributed to these papers, those who participated in the public consultation of earlier drafts, and to the WG leads for their role in guiding these efforts and presenting them so clearly at the webinar. 

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The conversations continue in the Creative Commons Copyright Platform! Interested in joining? You can: 

• Join the #cc-copyrightreform Slack channel; and/or
• Join the Copyright platform mailing list and attend our monthly meetings.

The post The Future of Open Webinar Recap & Recording appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons (CC) was saddened by the news of Elliot Harmon’s passing on October 23. Prior to his role as activism director at Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), he was the director of communications at Creative Commons. As mentioned on EFF’s website, “We will deeply miss Elliot’s clever mind, powerful pen, generous heart, and expansive kindness. We will carry his memory with us in our work.”

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“Elliot was always willing to grapple with the hard problems, and you could tell he wasn’t satisfied with the easy answers. I remember rides on the Caltrain from Mountain View back to San Francisco where we’d use the whole time debating; in the best sense possible. He used those debates with me to find the underlying truth so we could improve what we did every day at CC.”

 

“Elliot was passionate, uncannily insightful, and a joy to work with personally and professionally. I really enjoyed EFF’s post. I don’t have anything particularly unique to add to CC’s that others wouldn’t have already expressed. I will miss his contributions to the public dialogue, whether at conferences or in his writings, where he could always be counted on to be pressing an urgent point or seeking out all points of view.”

 

“The thing that I remember most about him is that he was always strongly committed to doing the right thing. He cared a lot about doing right by people and about telling them the truth. He never wanted to communicate something that sounded good but wasn’t truly honest and forthright. That he could have a strong idea of what was right and still be able to hold in his head all the complexity of the issue, and empathy for those who believed differently. And that once he was committed to something that was right, he didn’t commit halfway. He was incredibly smart and perceptive, but never made a show of it. You’d just notice when he heard about an issue for the first time, and immediately figured out what the hardest bits were, and started asking questions about it to get to the truth. And then he could explain it to others as if it was the simplest thing in the world.”

 

“He made your work better somehow, by being supportive when you needed it, and being challenging when you needed that, by asking the questions that made you think more deeply about what you were doing and why, and who it would help. He always wanted to know how things ‘really’ worked and sometimes you’d find you didn’t know either. I’ve seen some of the EFF staff talk about how good he was as a manager of their activism team, and of course he was, he really cared about setting others up for success.”

 

“He cared a lot about what he was doing, whether it was going to help, whether people involved were behaving with integrity, and it’s a mindset that could be harsh and humorless but instead he was one of the most hilarious people you’d ever meet, cracking quietly devastating jokes, sharing bits of weird and delightful knowledge about everything that he carried in his head. He was really open to meeting people and hearing what they had to say and truly engaging with people and ideas that weren’t his. I’ve seen a bunch of remembrances on Twitter now and of course everyone who met him was struck by his kindness and intelligence, feeling his loss not just to the digital rights community but as a personal connection they were going to miss.”

 

“He was always someone I could trust to be honest, and to be kind. I wish I’d seen him more often without a work-related question to bring. I remember him spending a lot of time trying to understand the licensing changes so he could explain and advocate for them to others.”

 

“When I think about Elliot, the primary word that comes to mind is exuberance. Elliot was tall, had stunning red hair, and a loud wonderful voice and laugh. He had a quick smile and wit, and he was extremely knowledgeable and well-read, making him an incredibly interesting person to talk to about just about anything.”

 

“If I remember correctly, Elliot grew up in South Dakota and his father was a lawyer, and I think perhaps that made him especially interested in talking through legal issues despite not being a lawyer himself. He believed very deeply in the open internet and digital rights, and you could tell his work at both CC and EFF was far more than a j-o-b to him. He was passionate about it.”

 

“Elliot was also a poet, and I believe he did some spoken word poetry as well as lots of writing. I think that detail helps reveal why he almost had an aura about him, like he was in touch with some things in life that many people overlook.”

 

“I did not know Elliot that well, though we did socialize some during our brief time overlapping at CC. But yet he made a big impression on me. He was a ray of light or of sunshine. There was something larger than life about him, and I am really sad to know he is no longer in this world.”

The post Remembering Elliot Harmon, 1981-2021 appeared first on Creative Commons.

This #GivingTuesday — Tuesday, November 30th, Creative Commons invites you to join our 20th Anniversary celebration. In the weeks leading up to #GivingTuesday, we’ll be spotlighting leaders in the Open Movement and encouraging you to support our Better Sharing, Brighter Future campaign.

We’ve set a goal to raise $100,000 before the end of this year.  The great news is that every donation up to $30,000 will be generously matched by a handful of longstanding CC supporters. 

Creative Commons is not only an online ecosystem of CC licenses and tech. We’re a movement of people — a vast network of dedicated activists, scholars, inspiring librarians and teachers, lawyers, artists, fashionistas, digital masterminds and policy makers, fighting for more equitable global access to education, resources and creativity.

This includes individuals like Tyler Green, this week’s community spotlight, an award-winning historian, critic, author and host of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, a weekly (CC licensed!) program featuring discussions with artists, historians, authors and curators. 

Green recently released a new book, Emerson’s Nature and the Artists: Idea as Landscape, Landscape as Idea, which explores the ways the written work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 19th century U.S. author, poet and philosopher, was deeply influenced by “American Art” and the natural landscape in the United States. He argues Emerson’s famous text Nature was a game changer in our modern day understanding of the commons and Open Access, and that, as a scholar, Green needed access to both visual and textual resources to make his case.

“…the greatest obstacle to understanding art’s role in the American project, in the idea of the American nation …is that it costs scholars serious money to publish our works. That makes it harder for scholars to know what’s out there, but it also makes it harder to make arguments. If you can’t publish the visual part of your argument with the textual part of your argument, why work hard to have an argument that is both visual and textual. And so open access is, at the risk of sounding grandiose, open access is the answer, right? Open access makes that possible.”

Green encourages his audience to consider how greater access to a range of historical resources, visual and written, might strengthen our ability to understand our collective past and imagine a better and brighter future.

Learn more about Tyler Green and his work by tuning into Creative Commons’ Open Minds Podcast.

In the coming weeks, we’ll feature more Open Access advocates like Green, who are working to make our global culture more open and collaborative. In the meantime, we invite you to join our Better Sharing, Brighter Future campaign. See below for ways to get involved. 

Donate 

Make a donation to CC’s 20th Anniversary Campaign. Visit our Donor FAQ for information on all the ways to contribute.

Share 

Share why you support the open movement on social media, with the hashtags #CCTurns20 and #BetterSharing, and don’t forget to tag @creativecommons.

Listen 

Check out our Creative Commons’ Open Minds Podcast and share with your friends.

Follow 

Follow CC on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. 

The post CC Community Spotlight Series: Meet Tyler Green appeared first on Creative Commons.

Open Science No Text. By: Greg Emmerich. CC BY-SA 3.0

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference, officially known as the 26th Conference of Parties, or COP26, continues in Glasgow, Scotland, I’m pleased to share some good news. The Open Society Foundations approved funding for Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL to lead a global campaign promoting open access to climate and biodiversity research. This is a promising new strategy to encourage governments, foundations, institutes, universities and environmental organizations to use “open” to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and to preserve global biodiversity. Catherine Stihler, CC’s CEO and a native of Scotland, publicly announced the campaign during her keynote at the University of St Andrews’ Power to the people event and will have the opportunity to announce the campaign at a COP26 fringe event – Open UK: Open Technology for Sustainability – on 11 November. CC is particularly happy to have the opportunity to work closely with our longtime allies in the open access movement to ensure that this effort is truly a global campaign, and hope that this initiative will help to provide a blueprint for future funding of similar collaborative campaigns.

Additional Detail

Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. The complexity of the climate crisis requires collaborative global interventions that center on equity and evidence-based mitigation practices informed by multidisciplinary research. Many researchers, governments, and global environmental organizations recognize the importance of the open sharing of research to accelerate progress, but lack cohesive strategies and mechanisms to facilitate effective knowledge sharing and collaboration across disciplinary and geographic borders. 

During the COVID-19 crisis, the power of open access to democratize knowledge sharing, accelerate discovery, promote research collaboration, and bring together the efforts of global stakeholders to tackle the pandemic took center stage. Scientists embraced the immediate, open sharing of preprints, research articles, data and code. This embrace of openness contributed to the rapid sequencing and sharing of the virus’ genome, the quick development of therapeutics, and the fastest development of effective vaccines in human history. The lessons learned during the pandemic can – and should – be applied to accelerate progress on other urgent problems facing society. 

The goal of this project is to create a truly global campaign to promote open access, open science and open data as effective enabling strategies to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. It will develop effective messaging, strategies, and tactics to empower stakeholders currently leading critical climate and biodiversity work to embed open practices and policies in their operations, and make open sharing of research the default.  

We expect to identify the most important climate and biodiversity research publications not already OA and coordinate a campaign to open those publications, remove legal and policy barriers to applying open licenses to research articles, influence key funders (governments, foundations, and institutes) of climate science and biodiversity research to adopt and implement strong OA policies, and identify opportunities to open climate and biodiversity educational resources so students, teachers and citizens can learn about these global challenges and help contribute to solutions.

We will encourage global environment organizations to adopt open licensing policies to ensure all their content is free to be reused, built upon and shared for the global public good, delivering on their SDG commitments. We will engage with researchers, universities and policy makers in the Global South to ensure inclusive outcomes throughout.

We will share additional news on this campaign as it progresses.

The post Creating a Campaign to Increase Open Access to Research on Climate Science and Biodiversity: A joint initiative of Creative Commons, EIFL and SPARC appeared first on Creative Commons.

Hi Creative Commoners! We’re back with a new episode of CC’s podcast, Open Minds … from Creative Commons.

In this episode, CC’s Ony Anukem sits down for a conversation with award-winning author, historian and art critic, Tyler Green. Tyler is also the producer/host of The Modern Art Notes podcast, described by The Washington Post as “one of the great resources for all art lovers.” Tyler is an avid Creative Commoner, and since launching the podcast in 2011, it has been released, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Tyler recently published his latest book ‘Emerson’s Nature and the Artists’,which brings together a selection of 75 artistic works in dialog with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 Nature essay for the first time. All of the artworks in the book were sourced from art museums and libraries with open access policies. Tyler offers his own compelling insights into Nature through new research into how Emerson’s art experiences influenced the essay, and in turn how it informed American art well into the twentieth century. In the episode, we discuss Emerson’s understanding of landscape and the public commons, and how it is still relevant to Creative Commons and the broader open movement today. Tyler shares top tips from a decades worth of podcasting experience and much more.

• Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also subscribe via the show’s RSS feed.
• Episode transcript: Text // PDF // Doc

Please subscribe to the show in whatever podcast app you use, so you don’t miss any of our conversations with people working to make the internet and our global culture more open and collaborative.

The post Open Minds Podcast: Tyler Green of The Modern Art Notes appeared first on Creative Commons.