Exciting news! Registration for the virtual 2021 CC Global Summit is now open! 

It’s a special year because Creative Commons is turning 20! The 2021 CC Global Summit is shaping up to be one of our biggest, boldest events yet, so join us 20-24 September for a week of discussion, collaboration, creativity and community building. Whether you are new to the community or a long-time contributor, the Summit has something for you! 

For our second virtual Summit, we are building on our language supports, including live captioning of our major program elements. Soon we’ll open our first-ever Summit Access Fund – small dollar grants to help our community members and presenters cover internet- and technology-related costs to attend the event.

In order to deliver an equitable event that reflects the diversity of our community, we will be introducing a pay-what-you-can model for registration. If you have the means to do so, please consider contributing towards your ticket, which will help support those who cannot. We want to be clear that everyone will receive the same full access to the event and all of its features, no matter which pay-what-you-can ticket you select. 

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER 

Summit Program 

Whether you are an activist, advocate, librarian, educator, lawyer, creator, or technologist, the 2021 Summit Program has got you covered. 

We are thrilled to announce our keynote speakers who are joining from all over the world, sharing their work in open data, science and health, software and law. 

The Hack4OpenGLAM returns this year with more ways to get involved! It’s an opportunity for the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) community to learn, work, and create with one another to improve open access to cultural heritage. Thanks to our partners AvoinGLAM and the Wikimedia Foundation for their support. 

This year we are introducing a lineup of panel presentations which will feature thought leaders and community members for discussions on emerging trends and innovations in the open ecosystem. It will be a celebration of all we’ve accomplished in the last 20 years, and a look forward to what the future holds. 

Our volunteer Program Committee is hard at work curating the community-driven program, and the full 5-day program will be published at the beginning of August. Stay tuned! 

Follow along on Twitter for our latest updates.

Interested in sponsoring the 2021 CC Global Summit? We’re currently seeking sponsors!

The post Registration for the Virtual 2021 CC Global Summit Is Now Open appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re back with another episode of CC’s podcast, Open Minds … from Creative Commons!

In this episode, I speak with Audrey Tang, who is the Digital Minister of Taiwan, as well as an influential free software programmer and hacker. Tang is a vocal proponent of openness and is working to manifest a vision for how open data and radical transparency can result in positive, productive collaboration between government and civil society.

Last year, Taiwan was frequently credited with having one of the world’s best responses to COVID 19. There were a lot of reasons for their success, but it was due in large part to a digital strategy that emphasized information crowdsourcing and open data projects that kept people informed and up-to-date. WIRED published a great article about Tang last year that goes deep on all this: “How Taiwan’s Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemic.”

Tang will be one of the keynote speakers at this year’s CC Global Summit (happening September 20-24, 2021), which is Creative Commons’ annual event that brings together leading activists, artists, technologists, educators, lawyers, librarians, and others for discussion, panels, workshops, and community building. Register now!

• Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also subscribe via the show’s RSS feed.

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: Audrey Tang, Digital Minister of Taiwan appeared first on Creative Commons.

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By Cable Green: Director of Open Education, Creative Commons, and Chandrika Bahadur: Director, SDG Academy 

Open access to knowledge has never been more important than it is today. The promise of connectivity and the democratization of knowledge has made it possible for anyone, anywhere, to learn. In an increasingly connected and complex world, society faces deep challenges across economic, environmental, and social spheres that require new ways of thinking. 

The free flow of information and knowledge is critical for three reasons. First, it allows citizens to educate themselves on issues of climate change, biodiversity, health, education, poverty, food production, water, energy, urban planning, and all of the critical challenges encapsulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Second, it prepares us for a new institutional regime of learning, where the education system opens itself to learners of all ages, from all countries and all professions, extending quality education far beyond its traditional reach. Third, it allows knowledge creation and revision processes to reflect the diversity and context of people from different parts of the world, and to foster a global dialogue. 

Today, we recognize two different initiatives that have come together towards these goals: Creative Commons and the SDG Academy. We celebrate two decades of Creative Commons (CC), an international nonprofit organization dedicated to building and sustaining a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture that serves the public interest.  CC removes the legal and technical obstacles to sharing knowledge to help society overcome its most pressing challenges detailed in the United Nations SDGs. There are over 2 billion CC-licensed works online.

Through its open licenses and public domain tools, Creative Commons helps knowledge and culture to spread across the planet, giving individuals and institutions alike an easy, free way to create and distribute content for the betterment of society. Through its Open Education program, CC works to minimize barriers to effective education by advocating for the use of open licenses and open education policies to maximize the benefits of open education for all.

The SDG Academy is the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). It aims to advance education for sustainable development by creating and curating high-quality educational content from world-leading experts and making it available to the students, researchers, practitioners, and citizens who are best poised to take action on the SDGs. To date, the SDG Academy has reached over 860,000 learners across 193 countries. 

For the SDG Academy, a partnership with Creative Commons ensures that the products created by its wide ranging network of experts from around the world are available for use on a non-commercial basis by universities, practitioners, students, and policymakers. The SDG Academy’s goal is reach, impact, and transformation. Opening up the use of its content under a CC license is a way to access a wider audience and clarify the terms under which this content can be reused, adapted, and distributed. The SDG Academy announced in October 2020 that, moving forward, all of its new content will be available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. 

For Creative Commons, a partnership with the SDG Academy is a natural extension of its work to introduce the sustainable development community to open educational resources (OER), and share OER about the SDGs with educators, learners and policy makers globally. First coined by UNESCO’s Forum on the Impact of Open Course-ware for Higher Education in 2002, OER has evolved into a broader “Open Education” movement which includes open education resources, practices, and policies. In 2019, UNESCO Member States unanimously adopted the UNESCO Recommendation on OER, and countries around the world are now starting the process of implementing these recommendations. All of this work is done in the service of achieving SDG 4: Quality Education.

While the SDG Academy has always encouraged the sharing, integration, and contextualization of its free content, becoming officially open under a CC license sends a clear message that learners and educators can feel confident using these educational resources in the ways that are most useful for them. 

As Creative Commons completes two decades of work, its mission is more relevant than ever. And with more than 35 massive open online courses hosted on edX, 1,500 educational videos in its SDG Academy Library, and a new series of podcasts, an open SDG Academy is in an even stronger position to expand the reach of its high-quality, open educational materials on sustainable development and distribute this essential knowledge as a global public good.

The post SDG Academy & Creative Commons appeared first on Creative Commons.

Last year, six projects were carried out thanks to funding made available to the Creative Commons Copyright Platform members to drive policy issues affecting the open movement. In this blog post, we’re glad to share the engaging, inspiring articles the project lead wrote on CC’s Medium publication We Like to Share.

Preparing Bulgarian GLAMs for the EU Copyright Reform — by Ana Lazarova

The initiative ‘GLAMs to Fix Copyright: Preparing GLAMs for the Copyright Reform in Bulgaria’ was organized by Creative Commons Bulgaria in collaboration with Digital Republic Association, and supported by Creative Commons Global Network Copyright Platform Activity Fund.

On December 07 and 14, 2020, we organised a two-days extensive copyright training for public libraries in Bulgaria. Our main purpose was to inform library representatives about the upcoming implementation into national law of the recently adopted Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (the CDSM Directive). However, we also included what turned out to be much-needed information on copyright basics, CC licenses, Rights statements, the legal status of e-books and digitisation. Read more…

The impact of the Paying Public Domain on Creative Commons public domain tools – by Maximilliano Marzetti

Works in the public domain are free to be reused, remixed and mashed-up. Well, unless a “domaine public payant” or paying public domain (PPD) system is in force, in that case, a fee (or tax) has to be paid to a state agency beforehand. This is the case in several countries, including Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. In these three countries, after copyright expires, the PPD begins and lasts indefinitely. Unlike what happens under copyright law, in a PPD system it is the State and not the author who gets paid. The PPD applies to national and foreign authors’ works, anonymous works, and even works that were never copyrighted. Read more here and here…

A new copyright that belongs to everybody: the CCMX grant project — by Salvador Alcántar

In Mexico, as in many other countries, the copyright discourse is made up of different parts, but it always has a notorious bias towards the point of view of the so-called entertainment industry. Sometimes you feel copyright is not like a set of rules that motivates creation, innovation and new content, but as a bunch of don’ts that freeze cultural activity and require payment for every form of use of content. Thanks to a Creative Commons grant, the local CC chapter in Mexico decided to lead a publication integrating other visions about copyright, a document that could become a milestone for new understandings in the responsibility of public policy about culture, freedom, inclusion, sharing and other non-traditional visions about authorship. Read more…

Mapping user rights in the evolving EU copyright framework — by Paul Keller

In a little less than a month from now, on the 7th of June 2021 the new Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, that was adopted in April 2019 after much controversy will come into effect across the 27 EU Member States. While the directive is primarily known for its problematic provisions, such as the new rules requiring online content sharing platforms to install upload filters for copyrighted works (Article 17 of the Directive) and a new press publishers right (Article 15), it also includes a number of provisions that strengthen user rights in the EU Member States. Read more…

Open Knowledge Platform — by Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič and Azra Jušić

Intellectual Property Institute (IPI) (https://www.ipi.si/en/) is working on the project Open Knowledge Platform (the Project), aiming to bring together an open science community in Slovenia. In addition to covering copyright and open licensing, its focus is to engage educators and cultural heritage institutions. For this Project, IPI has teamed up with project partners, who are bringing together different institutions involved in open science. The two main project deliverables are 1) building strategy for setting up the platform/community focused on copyright and open licenses and 2) launch of initial activities and program of the Project. Read more…

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To join the CC Copyright Platform, sign up to: 

• The CC Policy Mailing List; and/or
• The CC Slack (it will send an invitation email), then join the #cc-copyrightreform channel

The post CC Copyright Platform Members Share the Stories of Their Projects appeared first on Creative Commons.

Following our recent announcement of a major grant from Arcadia to advance open access at galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs), we’re excited to officially launch Creative Commons’ Open GLAM program. In this post, we share an overview of the program’s rationale and briefly introduce our key program areas.

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GLAMs’ public interest mission, rooted in the imperative to make their cultural heritage collections available to their users, is squarely aligned with the open access ethos. Indeed, making their collections as openly accessible, shareable, and reusable as possible is the best way for GLAMs to achieve their mission as they digitize and offer their collections online.  

So, how come only a tiny fraction of the world’s GLAMs share their collections through open access initiatives? How come only a tiny fraction are reaping the benefits of open access and hence making a greater impact on the communities they serve through renewed conversations, interactions, and collaborations leading to novel interpretations and experiences? The answer, it seems, is that GLAMs face a host of barriers to embracing open access: from complex copyright rules to conservative institutional policies, practices and mindsets, all the way to financial constraints and concerns.

At Creative Commons, we want to help GLAMs overcome these barriers, because if they don’t, we will all miss out on the potential of open access to unlock universal access to knowledge and culture, pursuant to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. That’s why our new Open GLAM Program will build a coordinated global effort to help GLAMs make the content they steward openly available and reusable for the public good.

Informed by our 2021-2025 strategy and 20th anniversary campaign to ensure better sharing of knowledge and culture, our program is made up of four key components: (1) policy, (2) infrastructure, (3) capacity-building and consulting, and (4) community engagement. In a nutshell, our plans include:

On policy, we’ll work to reform the copyright system on a global level to bring it in line with the needs of GLAM institutions and allow them to conduct their legitimate activities; we’ll continue to insist that works in the public domain must remain in the public domain; we’ll encourage a purposeful policy discourse celebrating open culture as a positive affirmation of the importance of open access and sharing of cultural materials to the fullest extent possible; we’ll also engage in conversations on respectful and ethical use of culturally-sensitive materials.

On infrastructure, we’ll continue to steward our licenses and tools (especially our Public Domain Mark and Public Domain Dedication Tool) and see to it that they are fit-for-purpose in the GLAM sector’s digital sphere. 

On capacity-building, we’ll work to transform a diverse range of institutions and move them from closed to open, thanks notably to our GLAM Certificate and suite of training and consulting activities. We’ll do our best to make sure institutions are well informed and skillfully equipped at every stage of their openness journey — speaking of, have you had the chance to listen to our podcast with Effie Kapsalis, Senior Digital Program Officer, Smithsonian?

On community engagement, we’ll support, empower and contribute to building resilience in the open GLAM community and open movement. In particular, we’ll provide a platform to unlock the GLAM sector’s potential to create a fairer and more equitable world and continue to support the OpenGLAM initiative.

Want to know more? Do reach out —> info@creativecommons.org

We are currently recruiting a GLAM manager to grow our team. Could that be you? Apply!

The post We’re Launching the CC Open GLAM Program appeared first on Creative Commons.