In November 2023, the Court of Appeal in THJ v Sheridan¹ offered an important clarification of the originality requirement under UK copyright law, which clears a path for open culture to flourish in the UK.

A game-changing ruling

In setting the copyright originality threshold, the court stated: “What is required is that the author was able to express their creative abilities in the production of the work by making free and creative choices so as to stamp the work created with their personal touch.” Crucially, the court affirmed that “this criterion is not satisfied where the content of the work is dictated by technical considerations, rules or other constraints which leave no room for creative freedom.” For a thorough analysis of the case, see Professor Eleonora Rosatti’s take for the IPKat.

The case is potentially a game-changer in the UK open culture landscape, as noted by open culture advocates Bendor Grosvenor (paywall) and Doug McCarthy. How so? Because by setting the standard for copyright to arise based on “free and creative choices” it effectively bars copyright claims from being made over faithful reproductions of public domain materials (i.e., materials that are no longer or never were protected by copyright).

No copyright for faithful reproductions of public domain materials

This is a position that Creative Commons (CC) has been championing for years as part of our Open Culture Program: digital reproductions of public domain material must remain in the public domain. In other words, no new copyright (or related right) should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.” Europeana and the Communia Association, among many other open culture organizations, share this position. It is also aligns with Article 14 of the 2019 EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which states that: “when the term of protection of a work of visual art has expired, any material resulting from an act of reproduction of that work is not subject to copyright […]”.

In practice, this means that CC licenses should not be used by cultural heritage institutions (museums, libraries, archives, etc.) to release digital reproductions of public domain works, since licenses can only be used in connection with in-copyright content. To share digital twins of public domain content, we recommend the public domain dedication tool (CC0) or the public domain mark (PDM).

A widespread but problematic practice

Alas, a great many institutions still claim full copyright or use CC licenses to share faithful reproductions of public domain material, often against payment of a (steep) fee — this is particularly prevalent in the UK, as reported by Dr. Andrea Wallace in her study for the Towards a National Collection program.

In an effort to curb this undesirable practice, in 2022, a CC Open Culture Platform working group led by Deborah De Angelis (CC Italy) and Tomoaki Watanabe (CC Japan) investigated this issue and developed proposals for technical, legal, and social interventions to address the problem of “PD BY” (i.e. the use of CC BY licenses to share reproductions of public domain works). On that basis, we are currently developing a set of guidelines to provide alternative design ideas and platform examples to cultural heritage institutions that wish to better share the digitized public domain cultural heritage material in their collections. Stay tuned for their release soon!

A new dawn for open culture in the UK and around the world?

This court case unlocks vast untapped potential for open culture to blossom in the UK cultural heritage sector. We are heartened that by offering enhanced legal certainty, this decision will give a boost to cultural heritage institutions to engage more deeply in the open culture movement and make these vast collections openly accessible to everyone.

Get Involved

For additional guidance and tailored support in developing or implementing open access policies or to get involved in promoting open culture around the world:

• Join the CC Open Culture Platform
• Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter
• Support our policy initiative Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture (TAROC)
• Take our CC Certificate online training
• Contact us at info@creativecommons.org

¹ THJ Systems Limited & Anor v Daniel Sheridan & Anor [2023] EWCA Civ 1354, https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/civ/2023/1354

The post UK Court Clears Path for Open Culture to Flourish appeared first on Creative Commons.

On Wednesday, 17 January, 2024, at 3:00 pm UTC, CC’s Open Culture Program will be hosting a new webinar in our Open Culture Live series titled “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution.”

As we observed a few years ago, there is growing awareness in the open culture movement about issues related to the acquisition, preservation, access, sharing, and reuse of cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples and local communities (including traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions), heritage in the context of colonization, and culturally-sensitive heritage. Many questions arise in the context of open access, for example:

• Who decides what can be digitized and/or made openly available online, and under which conditions?
• Who has control and who can make governance decisions over their contents?
• How are the consultation and decision-making processes designed and implemented and by whom?
• How can institutions communicate permitted uses to users (including but mostly going beyond CC licenses or tools)?
• When is restitution the answer?
• How do we share ethically, responsibility, and with respect and sensitivity?
• Who should be entitled to answer those questions and take action?

In this webinar, we will discuss the many complex considerations around such heritage and explore some of the different approaches to respectful, sensitive, responsible, and ethical — in sum, better sharing. We will be joined by experts including:

• Jane Anderson, Vice Chair & Founding Member, Strategic Advisor, Co-Founder, Local Contexts
• Maui Hudson, Council Founding Member, Strategic Advisor, Local Contexts
• Camille Callison, Indigenous Librarian and Activist, University of the Fraser Valley
• Erna Lilje, Curator, Indigenous knowledge & material culture, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen

Register here.

CC is a non-profit that relies on contributions to sustain our work. Support CC in our efforts to promote better sharing at creativecommons.org/donate

Background reading

• Beyond Copyright: the Ethics of Open Sharing by Josie Fraser, 2021. Creative Commons – We Like to Share Medium Blog.
• Traditional Knowledge and Copyright Intersections by Connor Benedict, 2023. Creative Commons – We Like to Share Medium Blog.
• Collaborate, Communicate, and Navigate Ethical Considerations with the Ethical Sharing Card Game by Isaac Oloruntimilehin, 2023. Creative Commons – We Like to Share Medium Blog.
• An Africa centered approach to restitution data  by African Digital Heritage, 2021.
• Response to the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report: Statement on Intellectual Property Rights and Open Access relevant to the digitization and restitution of African Cultural Heritage and associated materials by Mathilde Pavis & Dr. Andrea Wallace, 2019.
• Restitution with a Catch? The Copyright Perspective on the Sarr-Savoy Report by Camille Francoise, 2020. IFLA Blog.
• Open and Equitable – Questions on how to handle digital copies in collections from colonial contexts (Part III) by Andrea Wallace, 2022. Wikimedia Deutschland Blog.
• Decolonization and Indigenization by Andrea Wallance, 2021. OpenGLAM.
• Preservation or plunder? The battle over the British Museum’s Indigenous Australian show by Paul Daley, 2015. The Guardian.
• Traditional Knowledge and Creative Commons White Paper by Mehtab Khan, 2018
• Sharing Indigenous Cultural Heritage Online an Overview of GLAM Policies by Brigitte Vézina and Alexis Muscat, 2020
• Taking Care Conference 2022 Keynote, Brigitte Vézina

What is Open Culture Live?

In this series, we tackle some of the more complex challenges that face the open culture movement, bringing in speakers with personal and professional expertise on the topic.

• Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject 
• Back to Basics: Open Culture for Beginners 

 

The post Upcoming Open Culture Live Webinar: “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution” appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today Creative Commons CEO Catherine Stihler is announcing the conclusion of her time leading the organization. We are grateful to Catherine for over three years of leadership at CC. 

During her tenure as CEO, Catherine demonstrated tremendous energy. Joining as a leader in August 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, meant navigating challenging times. Like many nonprofits during that time, the organization struggled financially. Under Catherine’s leadership the organization recovered from that. A successful 20th Anniversary Campaign that concluded in December 2022 led to more predictability for some of CC’s core program areas, due to multi-year funding commitments.

Organizational highlights from Catherine’s tenure at CC include a year-long campaign of thought leadership and community consultation on AI & the commons, which culminated in the 2023 CC Global Summit. This was CC’s first in-person community gathering since 2019. We also launched the Open Climate Campaign in partnership with SPARC and EIFL, and the organization has invested deeply in the Open Culture sector. Both initiatives are the result of generous funding from Arcadia. These are achievements that we can all be proud of.

The Creative Commons Board of Directors remains as committed as ever to CC’s mission of empowering individuals and communities around the world by equipping them with technical, legal, and policy solutions to enable sharing of knowledge and culture in the public interest.

On behalf of the board, I want to express our thanks for Catherine’s service to the organization. During this transition period, Anna Tumadóttir will serve as Interim CEO. As we look to the future, we are excited to come together with CC’s staff, global network, and broader community, to interrogate what our role is in protecting the commons in a very different world than the one we lived in 20+ years ago, when the CC licenses first came into existence.

New challenges lie ahead, and we are grateful to have the privilege of working on public interest solutions together with our dedicated staff and community.

Yours,

Delia Browne, Chair of the Creative Commons Board of Directors

The post Leadership Transition – Thank You to Catherine Stihler appeared first on Creative Commons.

This December, Creative Commons led a CC Certificate Bootcamp, or condensed Certificate training, for faculty and staff from 16 different California Community Colleges implementing Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) degree programs. This marked the second CC Bootcamp for California Community Colleges after the California legislature invested $115 million to expand ZTC degrees and the use of open educational resources (OER) within the statewide California community college system. ZTC degrees and increased use of OER reduce the overall cost of education and shorten the time to degree completion for students. With the average cost of course textbooks estimated at $100/student/course, ZTC degrees are crucial for students’ higher education. Further, students’ grades achieved in ZTC programs are higher than in traditional courses.

The CC Certificate program provides training and tools for ZTC program faculty and staff to legally and effectively implement the open licensing requirements of California’s historic investment in education. After learning about copyright basics, fair use, the public domain, and CC licensing, participants brainstormed and initiated some great ways to support ZTC program faculty and student needs. Examples of participant work include using generative AI to create “Creative Commons Bots,” tools to help others learn about licensing, and test their own knowledge with quiz questions; creating a grants guide for OER funding; drafting a potential strategic plan for OER/ ZTC work (work in progress), and remixing previous courses or resources to address ZTC communications and learning needs for localized audiences (works in progress). See what participants are saying below.

“This is one of the best professional development experiences I’ve had in years”

“Thank you so much for sharing wonderful resources and CC practices. I will share this knowledge with my colleagues”

“You’ve nailed the condensed week workshop. So much fun, and creating work groups was really beneficial”

We are proud to support California Community Colleges’ collaboration as they strengthen their foundations for open education. CC is grateful to the Michelson 20MM Foundation for generously funding this bootcamp at San Bernardino Valley College. Special thanks also go to the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges for their liaison work, expertise and support, to San Bernardino Valley College for hosting the event, and to Fresno Pacific University for providing professional development credits to faculty.

If you’re interested in advancing open education efforts in your own institution, Creative Commons offers an array of learning, training, and consulting opportunities to support our global community in developing open licensing expertise and a deeper understanding of recommended practices for better sharing. Visit the CC Training & Consulting page to learn more about our training services, workshops, lectures, and CC Certificate courses. Register for our next CC Certificate online courses, starting 29 January.

The post More California Community Colleges Get CC Certified! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Join Creative Commons, Internet Archive, and many other leaders from the open world to celebrate Public Domain Day 2024. The mouse that became Mickey will finally be free of his corporate captivity as the copyright term of the 1928 animated Disney film, Steamboat Willie, expires along with that of thousands of other cultural works on the first day of 2024.

The year 1928 brought us a host of still relevant, oft-revived and remixed culture, from H.P. Lovecraft’s classic horror story, “Call of Cthulhu” (originally published in Weird Tales; now currently a popular video game), to the Threepenny Opera, a critique of income inequality and the excesses of capitalism that is surprisingly on point for our current era.

And further, classic works of literature such as Orlando by Virginia Woolfe, Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, and Black Magic by Paul Mourad; children’s literature like House on Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, which introduced the character Tigger, and Millions of Cats by Wanda Gág; movies like Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, and Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman; and music like Dorothy Field’s “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” and Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” will grow the rich set of materials that are freely available to all of us as part of the public domain.

Join us for a virtual celebration at 10am PT / 1pm ET on 25 January, 2024, with an amazing lineup of academics, librarians, musicians, artists and advocates coming together to help illuminate the significance of this new class of works entering the public domain!

Of course our program wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of Generative AI, which to some has become a new kind of Eldritch God unleashed upon humanity—a Chtulhu of sorts—out to alter or control human reality. New AI technologies have raised all kinds of questions about human creativity, and the various monsters we must vanquish in order to preserve it. We’ll get into all that and more in our panel discussion of AI, Creativity and the Public Domain.

REGISTER NOW

This event is co-hosted by Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, Library Futures, SPARC and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

The post Celebrate Public Domain Day 2024 with us: Weird Tales from the Public Domain appeared first on Creative Commons.