It’s International Museum Day and at Creative Commons (CC) we are thrilled to once again  celebrate the institutions that acquire, conserve, research, communicate, and exhibit the world’s heritage for education, study, and enjoyment. This year’s theme is The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine and in this blog post, we imagine a future where museums are empowered to freely and openly share their collections online in participatory, interactive, sustainable, ethical, and equitable ways —  we imagine a world of better sharing for a brighter future for all museums and the communities that they serve.

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2020 was a really challenging year for museums alongside other GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) and for the cultural sector as a whole. The COVID-19 pandemic forced many institutions to close their doors, lay off staff, and draw deep on their resources to find resilience in the face of abrupt and unsettling changes. An April 2021 UNESCO report states that: “in 2020, museums were closed for an average of 155 days, and since the beginning of 2021, many of them have again had to shut their doors, resulting, on average, in a 70% drop in attendance and a 40-60% decline in revenue compared to 2019.”

At the same time, this crisis was a spark that (re)kindled the fire of open access to cultural heritage. Lockdown measures meant that when the world swiftly moved online, so too did museums. According to an ICOM survey published in November 2020, many museums started or continued to enhance their digital activities and to engage with the public remotely. More than a year into this global health crisis, museums are at a pivotal moment and must lead the change to recover and reimagine our common future. 

At CC, the future we envision for museums is one where the public has greater and better access to museums’ collections on a global level. 

Where the public can experience and interpret those collections in order to enrich and bring new perspectives to their contexts and narratives.   

Where museums and their audiences can get closer together online in fresh and innovative ways based on a supportive and sustainable digital infrastructure. 

Where museums move into the post-COVID era, healed, mended, and equipped with the knowledge and know-how to meaningfully share their collections, unencumbered by unnecessary legal, technical, or financial barriers. 

Where the threats of global challenges such as climate change have been addressed and where future generations are continuously able to enjoy our shared cultural heritage. 

At CC, we want to help make that future happen.

Through advocacy for legal and policy change, infrastructure innovation, capacity building to accompany institutions on their digital transformation journey, and community engagement, Creative Commons aims to lead a global effort to ensure access, use, and reuse of cultural heritage is not hampered by unnecessary constraints.

In terms of policy, we want to strengthen the open ecosystem to support GLAMs and their public interest mission, as we did in front of the Mexican senate in September 2020. We will continue to be supportive of museums in the copyright arena, in particular, by pushing for strong, clear, and effective exceptions and limitations for, among others, preservation, research and education, and text-and-data mining. We will also continue to advocate that digitized public domain works must remain in the public domain and generally drive change to ensure the legal framework is apt for the digital environment, especially in areas such as artificial intelligence.  

We want to build a reliable legal, technical, and social infrastructure around our CC licenses and tools, and build capacity within institutions to help them shift from closed to open by releasing their online collections into the public domain. We also want to bring closer together members of the Open GLAM community, whose energy and enthusiasm are poised to unlock the museum sector’s immense potential to create a brighter, more equitable future.

Museums deserve to be celebrated all year round and we’re proud to support them the world over through our Open GLAM efforts. Interested in learning more? Get in touch: info@creativecommons.org!

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The news yesterday from US trade Ambassador Katherine Tait that the Biden-Harris administration supports waiving IP protections for COVID vaccines is not just welcome, it is laying a stake in the ground for others to follow. The deafening silence from both the EU and UK to support the US places them on the wrong side of history and will not be forgotten (to be clear, being willing to discuss the US plan is not the same thing as supporting it). 

As we all know, there is a global shortage of vaccines. Taking action to ensure more people get access is the right thing to do. Full stop. It will also benefit all of us. If we do not get the world vaccinated at the same time, new variants of the virus will arise, which the current vaccines will not be able to protect us against. The US Government recognises this reality and does not want to jeopardise their hugely successful vaccine rollout without playing their part to help the rest of the world. As Ambassador Tait’s tweet said; “These extraordinary times and circumstances…call for extraordinary measures. The US supports the waiver of IP protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help end the pandemic and we’ll actively participate in WTO negotiations to make it happen.” Notice the choice of words: end the pandemic. 

COVID knows no boundaries, does not recognise the nationality of its victims and if we do not have a global approach to vaccinations, we will never bring the virus under control and end the pandemic. If the global North gets vaccinated whilst the Global South does not, this is a tragedy of our own making and we will all ultimately suffer. You might be getting tired of the virus, but the virus is not tired of you. 

Tomorrow I will get my first vaccine—my husband too. We are lucky. I want everyone to have the same opportunity to be vaccinated as I have. I hope other countries will follow the US’s lead and make history at the WTO for the sake of all humanity. Thank you, Ambassador Tait.

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Like lots of people on the internet, we here at Creative Commons have been thinking about NFTs, and the possibilities that unique digital assets might bring for artists and creators. (By the way, did you know that Beeple, the artist who famously sold an NFT for $69 million, has been using CC licenses for years?)

Most of the questions we’ve seen show up on CC’s social media feed relate to the intersection between CC licenses, which enable limitless copying (within the bounds of what the particular CC license’s terms allow, of course), and NFTs, which are designed to create digital scarcity and provide something unique to the NFT’s owner.

In short, if a CC license makes it legally possible to create infinite copies of a work, and NFTs are designed specifically to provide something that cannot be copied, is it problematic for a CC-licensed work to be minted as an NFT?

In our view, there’s nothing contradictory about a creator offering their work to the public under a CC license as well as minting it as a single (or limited edition) NFT. It seems no different to us than someone publishing their work under CC while also selling limited edition prints of it.

While we’re interested to see so much energy and inventiveness happening around enabling creators (whether they use CC licenses or not) to monetize their work, we’re also very concerned about the environmental impact of NFTs and crypto art. We’re hopeful that the enthusiasm in this space leads to a next wave of innovation that is focused both on sustainability and valuing the work of artists.

It’s important to note that there are many open questions about NFTs and copyright. A pair of posts on the Kluwer Copyright Blog does a good job laying out the big picture (and points to several other resources that are helpful to read). The main question, as far as CC licensing is concerned, comes down to whether someone needs to either own or have a license to a copyrighted work in order to mint it as an NFT.

On the one hand, an NFT is not a copy of the object itself, but instead, as the authors of the Kluwer post aptly put it: “metadata that represents and points to where the digital object and any details about it really reside.” This could indicate that creating an NFT does not implicate copyright.

On the other hand, many argue that it’s not a completely settled issue, and certainly not so when it comes to artists’ expectations about the rights they have under copyright law. As Katarina Feder, a vice president at Artists Rights Society, says in a post for Artnet: “The dynamic is the same for an NFT as it is for a t-shirt: the copyright for an artwork rests with its creator … If you want to make an NFT of an artwork that’s not your own, you need to go to the source for permission.”

Obviously, these are questions we’re extremely interested in, and we’re looking forward to participating in the larger ongoing conversation about NFTs and copyright. In the meantime, I wanted to point to a situation involving NFTs and CC licensing that I think provides a useful thought exercise.

Recently, podcaster Pete Cogle posted on the Creative Commons Slack (sign-up required) to ask about whether an artist whose music he included in one of his CC-licensed podcast episodes was allowed to mint the episode as an NFT:

In 2010 I created a podcast where the digital artwork and two pieces of music were created by one artist. I collected (curated) 6 more pieces of music and released this as an MP3 file with a [CC BY-SA] license.

There have been no issues until today when the artist listed the MP3 as an NFT as part of their larger body of work.

The artist asked my opinion about selling it as an NFT and I said no, partly because the podcast contained other CC licensed tracks and because I created it, not them, even though it contained some of their derivative works. …  I’m wondering if someone knows more about how NFTs and CC licenses should work together.

It’s worth reading the full back-and-forth between Cogle and members of the CC team and broader CC community in the post’s replies thread (Cogle agreed to let us use his question in this case study). While we’re not presuming that the minting of an NFT does indeed implicate copyright, we felt Cogle’s concerns pointed to important related questions about the spirit of CC licensing and people’s expectations around what can and should happen with a work once it’s been offered to the public under one of CC’s copyright licenses.

Our thoughts, in a nutshell: Because Cogle’s podcast episode was originally made available under CC’s BY-SA license, it seems that as long as the person minting the NFT abides by the terms of the license (e.g. offers proper attribution and complies with anything that would be triggered by the SA clause), they are operating in line with what the license enables, both legally and in spirit. To extend the “limited edition prints” analogy from earlier, this would be a bit like pressing a limited run of vinyl records using CC-licensed audio.

Again, there are lots of unanswered questions about these subjects, and we’re excited to play an active role in helping to bring clarity to as much of it as we can. We’re also interested in knowing your thoughts, opinions, and ideas about the intersection of NFTs, copyright, and CC licensing. We’ll be watching Twitter and the CC Slack for your comments and questions. Additionally, I can imagine there being some really interesting presentations and conversations about these topics at the next Creative Commons Global Summit. 

The post At the Intersection of NFTs and Creative Commons Licenses appeared first on Creative Commons.

We are pleased to announce today that our friends at the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) at American University Washington College of Law have taken over stewardship of the Open COVID Pledge (OCP).

Last year, Creative Commons joined forces with an international group of volunteer researchers, scientists, academics, and lawyers who sought to spur innovation that could be used in the fight against COVID-19. The result was the OCP, a project that offers simple, public licenses that anyone can use to make their patents and copyrights available to the public to be utilized in the global health crisis.

Amazon, Facebook, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NASA JPL, Sandia National Laboratories, and Uber are among the dozens of companies and institutions that have used the OCP’s licenses to open up an estimated 500,000 patents and multiple copyrights in support of solving the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In August, CC formally assumed leadership and stewardship of the project. As part of this work, we collaborated with members of the CC Global Network (CCGN) to bring information about the OCP to new communities and institutions around the world. We also led an effort to translate the OCP into all six of the official languages of the United Nations.

PIJIP is the perfect group to take on stewardship of the OCP at this critical moment, with infections continuing to soar in large parts of the world. The PIJIP team is at the forefront of making and promoting intellectual property policy that brings about progress. The program also happens to be the home of Creative Commons USA.

I want to offer my admiration for and sincere thanks to PIJIP, as well as to the OCP steering committee, who have done so much to make this project a success. And finally, thank you to the many people, companies, and institutions who have pledged their intellectual property to the public via the OCP.

For information about how to participate in the OCP’s ongoing efforts, visit the project’s website.

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Creative Commons is thrilled to confirm that CC Search, the search engine we built for openly licensed content, has found a new home and will soon be joining WordPress. With its talented team and active community of open source contributors from all around the globe, WordPress is the perfect partner to help keep the project growing and flourishing in the years ahead.

Our teams are still finalizing details and timing, and we’ll be sharing updates with you as we get closer to the finish line.

Every month around 300,000 users come to CC Search and discover CC-licensed content that they are free to use, share, and build upon. Our index of images totals over 500 million, and the meta search we built for audio and video allows broad discovery of those content types from other services. There is unlimited potential for what early on was referred to as the “front door to the Commons.” 

As it turns out, the greatest beneficiaries of CC Search thus far have been in the education space. The majority of CC Search users identify as teachers, researchers, students, and librarians, who are studying and creating new materials on a daily basis.

At the CC Global Summit in 2020, we shared early prototypes of audio search integration, with plans for video following closely behind. It is deeply gratifying that this vision for growth will be honored by the team at WordPress, with their publicly stated intentions to expand the service in both depth and breadth.

We are proud of having proven the CC Search concept and launched the product, and excited for it to benefit from the vast technical resources and enthusiastic community at the WordPress project. Please join us in celebrating this excellent match, and stay tuned for more details.

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