Commons News
Copyright Week: What happened to the Brazilian Copyright Reform?
A few years ago, a major copyright reform in Brazil seemed imminent. What happened? On the Creative Commons Brazil blog, Mariana Giorgetti Valente and Pedro Nicoletti Mizukami have an excellent post on the complicated history of copyright reform in Brazil:
In December 2007, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture — then under Minister Gilberto Gil’s administration — started the National Copyright Law Forum, a series of seminars across the country with the participation of lawyers, researchers, artists and industry representatives, with the goal of gathering information and pave the way for a copyright reform process. Based on these events, and other closed and open meetings with different stakeholders, the Ministry of Justice prepared a draft copyright reform bill, which was submitted to public consultation in 2010.
The consultation took place in an online platform similar to that used for the Marco Civil consultation on Internet regulation. Comments could be submitted on an article by article basis, and the analysis of almost 8,000 contributions resulted in a project that was considerable superior to current law, with greater attention to public interest issues, an expanded list of copyright exceptions — including a general clause, the permission to circumvent DRM/TPMs in certain conditions, checks on the collective management of copyright (a serious problem in Brazil), and the explicit recognition that copyright may be limited by consumer protection law, antitrust law, as well as human rights.
No Comments »When Dilma Rousseff was elected the 36th President of Brazil, however, the copyright reform process suffered its first major setback. To succeed Juca Ferreira as her Minister of Culture, Rousseff chose Ana de Hollanda, a singer with close ties to the recording industry and ECAD — the central office for collecting societies in Brazil, one of the greatest adversaries of the draft bill. Indicative of how different her approach to copyright policy would be, one of the first measures de Hollanda took as Minister was to remove Creative Commons licensing from the Ministry of Culture’s website. Soon after, de Hollanda replaced most of the staff of the Ministry’s Intellectual Rights Directorship (Diretoria de Direitos Intelectuais), and mostly stalled the reform process, despite concluding a revision of the text.
Congress passes spending bill requiring free access to publicly funded research
Update: The bill was signed by President Obama January 17, 2014.
Both the U.S. House of Representative and Senate have passed the 2014 omnibus appropriations legislation (2.9 MB PDF). President Obama is expected to sign the bill shortly.
What’s so special about this legislation? Federal agencies with research budgets of at least $100 million per year will be required provide the public with free online access to scholarly articles generated with federal funds no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The agencies affected by the public access provision of the appropriations bill include the Department of Labor, Department of Education, and Department of Health and Human Services (which includes research-intensive sub-agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
According to SPARC, the bill “ensure[s] that $31 billion of the total $60 billion annual U.S. investment in taxpayer-funded research is now openly accessible.”
The inclusion of the public access provision builds upon existing initiatives, such as the NIH Public Access Policy. And it echoes the more recent push for public access to publicly funded research advocated through the introduction of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) and the White House directive. But with FASTR tabled in Congress last year and the federal agencies dragging their feet on complying with Obama’s public access directive (plans were due in August 2013), the passage of the 2014 spending legislation is a welcome measure for increasing access to publicly funded research.
SPARC thinks the language in the bill could be strengthened by adopting a shorter embargo period (e.g. six months), which would benefit the public without harming journal publishers. In addition, they suggest that research articles be shared via a central repository similar to PubMed Central and incorporate provisions to ensure the ability to conduct text and data mining on the entire corpus of federally-funded articles. Creative Commons and other groups have also communicated the need for not only free public access, but also access whereby publicly funded research is made available under open licenses.
Open Access icon was created by Duke Innovation Co-Lab and in the public domain.
U.S. Department of Education seal is in the public domain.
U.S. Department of Labor seal is in the public domain.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services seal is in the public domain.
CC is now a Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Participating Organization
As of yesterday (January 15, 2014), the Group on Earth Observations approved Creative Commons as now a Participating Organization (PO) at its GEO-X Plenary in Geneva.
GEO was launched in response to calls for action by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and by the G8 (Group of Eight) leading industrialized countries to exploit the growing potential of Earth observations to support decision making in an increasingly complex and environmentally stressed world. GEO is coordinating efforts to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).
GEOSS provides decision-support tools to a wide variety of users via a global and flexible network of content providers. GEOSS lets decision makers access a range of information by linking together existing and planned observing systems around the world and support the development of new systems where gaps exist. GEOSS promotes common technical standards so that data from the thousands of different instruments can be combined into coherent data sets. The GEOPortal offers a single Internet access point for users seeking data, imagery, and analytical software packages relevant to all parts of the globe. For users with limited or no access to the internet, similar information is available via the GEONETCast network of telecommunication satellites.
GEO is a voluntary partnership of governments and international organizations providing a framework to develop new projects and coordinate their strategies and investments. As of 2013, GEO’s Members include 89 Governments and the European Commission. In addition, 67 intergovernmental, international, and regional organizations with a mandate in Earth observation or related issues have been recognized as Participating Organizations (PO).
Dr. Robert Chen, CC’s Science Advisory Board member, was at the Plenary, and he had the following comment, “The GEO Executive Director, Barbara Ryan, pointed out in plenary that there was an extensive discussion in the GEO Executive Committee about making sure that new POs are active contributors to GEO activities. She noted that all of the proposed POs in today’s slate met this criterion.”
Creative Commons has been contributing to the GEO Data Sharing Task Force’s Legal Interoperability Sub-Group and its draft white paper on “Legal Options for the Exchange of Data through the GEOSS Data-CORE (PDF).” (I was a part of the Sub-Group as a Science Fellow, and our Senior Counsel, Sarah Pearson, reviewed the paper). We intend to continue to be active contributors by guiding GEO and its members on the legal aspects of data sharing.
Thanks to Paul Uhlir of the Board on Research Data and Information, National Academies for making the right introductions; and to John Wilbanks, another Science Advisory Board member, for initially encouraging CC to get involved with GEO.
No Comments »OER Summer Camp on Luxi Island
The following is a guest post by LIUPing and SUN Beibei, members of the CC China Mainland Affiliate team and the School of Open community. Below, they describe CC China Mainland’s experience with running a two-week open educational resources (OER) summer camp for the children of Luxi Island, a remote island off the coast of China. The CC China Mainland OER Summer Camp was included in the 2013 round-up of School of Open activities.
ZHU Renkai / CC BY
The idea of a real world open educational resources (OER) activity has long been on the agenda of CC China Mainland volunteers. As one of the CC global community’s OER advocates, CC China Mainland has in the past put more effort into promoting the use of CC licenses in OER instead of co-hosting multi-party activities in remote China. This past summer, however, CC China Mainland co-organized a real world OER activity in rural China which taught us how powerful collaboration across organizations could be.
Where did it happen?
Luxi, a small, remote island (1600km from Beijing) in Northeast Dongtou County, Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province. The island depends on ferry for transportation to surrounding areas twice a day.
Because of the inconvenient transportation, there are very limited educational materials available for primary and middle school students from the island. In addition, many of the students’ parents work in big cities to make a living. These “left behind” children have to stay with their grandparents for most of their childhood. However, they have the same dreams like kids in urban cities.
Who made it happen?
For 5 successive years, students from Renji School of Wenzhou Medical University have served as volunteer teachers for Luxi children of various grades during their summer vacations. In summer 2013, LI Lujing, a member of CC China Mainland team and teacher in Wenzhou Medical University, led a group of 30 volunteer students to Luxi for another summer session.
After initial communications, CC China Mainland decided to turn the Luxi project into the first OER summer camp by inviting some OER providers to join the lessons. Guokr.com responded to CC’s initiative first based on past cooperation.
ZHU Renkai / CC BY
How did it happen?
After several rounds of online discussion, CC China Mainland OER camp took place:
What did the partners think?
Here is some feedback both from Guokr.com and Renji School.
Guokr.com (the most popular online platform for science and knowledge sharing in China) contacted a couple of active users who used to put their own video lessons online. All of them were very interested in helping but none could make the travel because of time or distance. Based in Beijing, with members all around the country, Guokr thought that it would be difficult to send members to Luxi Island, due to both finance and timing.
But it turned out that distance doesn’t matter.
At this point, Guokr.com’s MOOC initiative inspired us. Guokr has been dedicated to popularizing MOOCs and its MOOCs online community has become the largest in China. We decided to support the program by designing a MOOC.
Deyi is a student majoring in agricultural science who happened to run a Guokr-sponsored project named “box of making plant specimens – a teaching guide.” The box contains materials for producing plant specimens as well as teaching guidance. To facilitate teaching, Deyi recorded 4 videos to show viewers how to use the box. A quiz is displayed in the middle of the videos as well.
Before the formal classes, Deyi delivered 4 boxes to the school and contacted a local volunteer as the teaching assistant. He trained the volunteer on how to play the videos and guide students to use the box.
That’s how a MOOC-like class goes into a school on a small island and that’s how a class happens without the teacher standing in the front of a classroom.
The content below is provided by Renli School of Wenzhou University.
Every summer, 30 volunteer students go to Luxi Island to give some courses to Luxi Children. The free teaching activity has lasted for 6 years and is warmly welcomed by the parents of the island, because most of the children were “left behind” and needed to be cared for.
Last year, a kid told us his dream of being a scientist. At that time, we realized that they want more than what the island can offer. But most of the volunteers are medical students, lacking the professional knowledge of other fields. At that time, we thought about cooperation. CC was our first choice and with their help, we got connected with Guokr.com.
In the local classroom, one of our volunteer students played the role of teaching assistant to guide the children to learn better, because the children were too young to understand the video alone. After the class, every student got to focus on their own work. They were really happy to be involved and asked us to bring more courses next year.
ZHENG Haotian / CC BY
In addition to the OER Summer Camp, CC China Mainland has run engineering and design challenge workshops incorporating open source and CC licensing education for university students in China. Called the eXtreme Learning Process (XLP) at Tsinghua University in collaboration with Toyhouse, it is also a School of Open project and was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal last year.
About the School of Open
The School of Open is a global community of volunteers focused on providing free education opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and more. Volunteers develop and run online courses, offline workshops, and real world training programs on topics such as Creative Commons licenses, open educational resources, and sharing creative works. The School of Open is coordinated by Creative Commons and P2PU, a peer learning community and platform for developing and running free online courses.
1 Comment »Letters for Bassel
We’ve written several times on this blog about Bassel Khartabil, the Syrian Creative Commons community leader who’s been imprisoned since March 2012 without having had any charges brought against him.
European Parliament members Charles Tannock and Ana Gomes recently submitted an official question to the Parliament leadership concerning Bassel’s imprisonment:
- Is the VP/HR aware of the ongoing imprisonment of Bassel Safadi Khartabil? If so, has she issued any public statement on the matter?
- Does she agree that this represents a further abuse by the Assad regime in its attempts to block the free spread of information?
- Will the VP/HR use the leverage available to her to press for his release, insisting upon his status as a non-combatant whose only crime has been to oppose censorship and promote the freedom of information?
Our friend Niki Korth recently created Letters for Bassel, a blog that collects letters to Bassel from friends or people who’ve been inspired by his story. She recently published this heartbreaking letter that Bassel wrote to his wife Noura on their first anniversary:
As Cathy wrote in her piece on Bassel for Huffington Post, “For Bassel and others around the world who fight for open, a free internet is not a theoretical matter. Real lives hang in the balance.” Creative Commons’ wish for 2014 is for Bassel to be freed and rejoin our community.
No Comments »Why we choose open
I promise to keep this short. I wanted to share a note we received from CC donor Dorothea Salo:
When I was a librarian hired to run an institutional repository, CC licenses helped me cut through copyright thickets with worried-but-interested faculty. CC’s unwavering support for free culture, and promotion of its benefits, demonstrated every day to often-skeptical, occasionally-hostile workplaces that I was not alone in working for openness.
Dorothea, you’re not alone. The Creative Commons community fights for open because we’ve seen its impact in the worlds of culture, education, science, and more. We choose open because open works.
As some of you know, I will be leaving my role as CEO of Creative Commons at the end of February. My greatest CC experiences have been meeting members of the community and learning about the countless innovative ways you use CC licenses. You give our tools meaning by using them to change the world.
Alas, before I go, I have a final request. The Brin Wojcicki Foundation is matching every donation CC receives in January. That means now is the perfect time to make a donation to Creative Commons. We have some fun gifts for donors (people are really loving the Team Open trading cards), but much more importantly, we will use your investment to fight harder and more strategically than ever for a more open world.
While the CEO is changing, our vision of universal access to knowledge and culture is as rock solid as ever. Realizing that vision is more important today than it’s ever been.
With warmest regards,
Cathy
Copyright Week: Read-only access is not enough
Today is the third day of Copyright Week, and today, we’re focusing on open access. As EFF put it in the Copyright Week principles:
The results of publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public online, to be fully used by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
This is a principle that Creative Commons has always upheld. It’s crucial that the public has free online access to the research it pays for. It’s important, too, not to forget the second part of the principle: “…to be fully used by anyone.” In CC’s opinion, simply giving the public access isn’t enough. It’s impossible to enable full use without communicating the legal rights available to downstream users of those works. The definition in the seminal Budapest Open Access Initiative makes this point clear:
By “open access” … we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.
The open license attached to open access publications has enabled innovations that would have been impossible without it. For example, Daniel Mietchen (co-winner of the Accelerating Science Award Program), developed a software tool to crawl and export multimedia files from openly licensed science articles in PubMed Central. The tool has uploaded over 13,000 files to Wikimedia Commons, where they’ve been subsequently used in more than 135 English Wikipedia articles.
In some ways, 2013 was a great year for open access. In the United States, the White House issued a groundbreaking directive requiring that most publicly funded research be made available to the public, and Congress introduced the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), a bill that would require those federal agencies with yearly external research budgets exceeding $100 million to provide the public with online access to research articles stemming from such funding within 6 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. And several states are considering public access policies of their own. In Europe, Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda, helped launch a pilot to open up publicly funded research data.
But the march toward open access is long and slow. Open licensing requirements for publicly funded research should really go hand in hand with those for other publicly funded materials, including educational resources and cultural works. Creative Commons recently formed the Open Policy Network and the Institute for Open Leadership to equip advocates for open policy across disciplines.
A few months ago, we published these infographics to help make the economic case for open access to publicly funded research:
The point is obvious: the fewer restrictions are put on the public’s use of materials, the more swiftly scientific progress, the more efficiently those research grants can achieve their purpose of advancing knowledge.
Related
2 Comments »Google Image Search improves license filtering
If you use Google Image Search to look for CC-licensed photographs, you might have noticed an improvement to the interface this week. Rather than having to hunt for it in the advanced search options, you can now filter by CC license right from the “Search Tools” menu on the search results page.
You can also get to Google Image Search results – along with results from numerous other search engines – through our Creative Commons Search page.
Via Lessig
2 Comments »Copyright Week: Tools and policies for building and defending a robust public domain
The public domain is the DNA of creativity. Whereby current copyright law requires permission in order to use a work, the public domain is a copyright-free zone whereby anyone can use the work for any purpose without restriction under copyright law. One way works rise into the public domain is when the copyright protection term expires. Over the years, copyright terms have been extended again and again, making it really difficult for creative works to enter the public domain. While most early copyright terms lasted only a few years, a majority of copyright terms today last for the duration of the life of the author + 50-100 years. Increasing copyright terms have stymied creativity, drastically raised the prices of books, and exacerbated the orphan works problem (where authors of works can no longer be located to ask permission to use a work).
But the extremely long term of copyright is not the only problem for the public domain. The contours of copyright law grant certain rights to the author automatically, and without any necessary action from the creator. This seems like a reasonable thing to do for some creators, but it doesn’t support those who simply wish to make their content freely available, or who wish to opt out of copyright in the first place.
Tools
Authors should be able to say what they want to do with their creativity. The Creative Commons license suite provides a flexible way for creators to indicate the rights they wish to grant and those they wish to retain. Creators can use the CC licenses, which are a nonexclusive license that relies on existing copyright law for enforceability. And the CC license lasts for as long as the copyright term, after which the work will then be in the public domain. The CC licenses help to lower transaction costs by communicating certain rights in advance. That way, users don’t have to hunt down authors to get their permission to use a work. The permission is granted in advance by the author, so long as the user follows the terms of the license.
Another way for works to enter the public domain is when creators proactively waive their copyrights–they can place works in the public domain before the copyright term is over. Creative Commons has developed the CC0 (read “CC Zero”) Public Domain Dedication tool to allow authors to do this. The CC0 tool is used by authors who want to release all copyrights to their work and fully break down all barriers to downstream reuse.
CC0 enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.
The CC0 Public Domain Dedication is used widely by creators to waive all copyright and put their content in the worldwide public domain. It is used by open access publisher BioMed Central, who has adopted a policy whereby it now requires that data supporting its published articles be released into the public domain using CC0. Europeana uses CC0 to describe 30 million cultural objects in its massive collection. And even video game creative assets are being released into the public domain under CC0. And there are many more cases where creators and institutions in all fields are releasing their cultural, scientific, and educational works into the public domain.
CC0 allows authors to place their work into the public domain prior to the expiration of the copyright term. But what about works that are already in the public domain, such as really old works where it’s clear that the copyright has expired? To help label those works as already part of the public domain, CC has developed the Public Domain Mark.
[The] Public Domain Mark enables works that are no longer restricted by copyright to be marked as such in a standard and simple way, making them easily discoverable and available to others.
One particularly interesting use of the Public Domain Mark is from Europeana. Whereas Europeana uses the CC0 tool to dedicate to the public domain the metadata that describes cultural works (so anyone can use it to create interesting representations or applications), they use the Public Domain Mark to signal which of the works in their digital collection (e.g. the very old paintings, sculpture, etc.) are in the public domain already because the copyright term has clearly expired. In this way, it’s easy for users to filter the catalog to view works that are already in the public domain and which may be used for any purpose because their copyrights have expired.
Advocacy & policy change
Even with tools making it easier for authors to communicate the rights they want attached (or not) to the works they create, we need to support public policy efforts to increase access to the public domain. One such effort is led by the International Communia Association, whose mission is “to foster, strengthen and enrich the public domain.” Communia originally developed the Public Domain Manifesto (which you can sign here), and also has generated 14 policy recommendations that lay out ways that the public domain should be supported through public policy changes and community action. Recommendations include reducing the term of copyright protection overall, making the process of identifying public domain works simpler by harmonizing rules of copyright duration and territoriality, and mandating that digital reproductions of works in the public domain should also belong to the public domain.
Another way to support the public domain is to highlight and champion community-generated norms. For instance, Creative Commons has been a longtime supporter of the Panton Principles, which advocates that scientific data should be made available in the public domain.
By open data in science we mean that it is freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. To this end data related to published science should be explicitly placed in the public domain.
We can also support the development of public domain policies where they make the most sense. Creative Commons and other groups have provided feedback to policy consultations on a variety of areas whereby the public could benefit from the adoption of public domain policies. For example, in the recent consultation in the European Union on public sector information (PSI), we argued that there should be no conditions attached to the re-use of PSI.
The best case scenario would be for public sector information to be in the public domain, exempt from copyright protection altogether by amending national copyright laws. If it’s not possible to pass laws granting positive re-use rights to PSI without copyright attached, public sector bodies should use the CC0 Public Domain Dedication (CC0) to place public data into the worldwide public domain to ensure unrestricted re-use.
In the United States, federal agencies are determining how they will support the President’s Directive requiring public access to federally funded research and data. In addition, the White House itself is trying to figure out how to guide implementation of another Executive Order on open data. We said that any data generated using federal monies should be marked clearly as being in the public domain (possibly using a tool like CC0) and immediately deposited in a scientific data repository. And the US Federal Government has heard from other public domain advocates for government information, who’ve drawn up the Best Practices Language for Making Data “License-Free.”
Building and defending a robust public domain requires work on multiple fronts–from the ongoing development and support of tools that can grow the pool of creative works in the public domain–to the active participation in policy change and copyright reform. While content in the public domain is owned by no one, the responsibility for strengthening this absolutely crucial resource should be shared by all who care about the future of creativity.
No Comments »Now Hiring: Web Developer / Systems Administrator
Spy Shot / Dan Mills / CC BY-NC-SA
Creative Commons is looking for a full-stack engineer to maintain our systems and websites. From the job description:
Creative Commons is looking for a full time Web Developer/Systems Administrator to develop and maintain the sites and systems that power CC on the Web.
This is a unique role which requires a focus on building scalable, rock-solid architecture to power our high-traffic websites, as well as an ability to move higher in the stack to implement new features or develop new websites and services.
Are you excited about powering the technical infrastructure of Creative Commons? Learn more and apply by visiting the full job listing.
2 Comments »
