Donate $50. Get a t-shirt.

Jane Park, November 30th, 2011

At your right is our t-shirt model, Timothy Vollmer, also CC’s Policy Coordinator. He is sporting the limited edition run of the teal “I Love to Share” t-shirt. Do you have one?

If you do, join our Flickr pool and show us you love to share.

If you don’t, you can give to Creative Commons today, and also show the world you love to share with a donation of $50 or more.

Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools, with affiliates all over the world who help ensure our licenses work internationally and raise awareness about our work. Our tools are free and our reach is wide.

Join us in our efforts to help make sharing online easier for everyone. Donate today to claim your awesome t-shirt!

Learn more about why CC runs an annual fundraising campaign.

Reminder: White House wants your input on Public Access to Data and Publications

Timothy Vollmer, November 30th, 2011

In the U.S., the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has released two Requests for Information (RFI) soliciting public input on long term preservation of and public access to the results of federally funded research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications. The deadline for responding to the RFIs is January 2, 2012.

Persons and parties interested in weighing in on the requests can find more information in the Federal Register announcements:

• Request for Information: Public Access to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research
  
• Request for Information: Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research
  

Our friends at SPARC offer some additional guidance, also listed below:

It is important that as many individuals and organizations as possible – at all levels – respond to these requests for information. For reference, the RFI specifically calls for comments from “non-Federal stakeholders, including the public, universities, nonprofit and for-profit publishers, libraries, federally funded and non-federally funded research scientists, and other organizations and institutions with a stake in long-term preservation and access to the results of federally funded research.” Both RFIs pose a series of questions, and respondents should answer those questions as specifically as possible. It should be emphasized that organizations beyond the U.S., with experience with open-access policies, are also invited to contribute.

The input provided through this RFI will inform the National Science and Technology Council’s Task Force on Public Access to Scholarly Publications, convened by OSTP. OSTP will issue a report to Congress describing: 1) Priorities for the development of agency policies for ensuring broad public access to the results of federally funded, unclassified research; 2) The status of agency policies for public access to publications resulting from federally funded research; and 3) Public input collected.

The main point to emphasize is that taxpayers are entitled to access the results of the research our tax dollars fund. Taxpayers should be allowed to immediately access and fully reuse the results of publicly funded research.

Again, the deadline for submissions is January 2, 2012. Submissions to the publications RFI should be sent via email to publicaccess [at] ostp [dot] gov. Submissions to the data RFI should be sent via email to digitaldata [at] ostp [dot] gov. Please note: OSTP will publicly post all submissions after the deadlines (along with names of submitters and their institutions) so please make sure not to include any confidential or proprietary information in your submission. Attachments may be included.

Free and unrestricted Public Sector Information: Study finds benefits outweigh costs

Timothy Vollmer, November 28th, 2011

Governments around the world are increasingly relying on open licenses to release public sector information (PSI). A September 2011 report titled Costs and Benefits of Data Provision, prepared by John Houghton for the Australian National Data Service, examines the immediate and wider economic costs and benefits to making PSI available.

The key takeaway from the study: “the direct and measurable benefits of making PSI available free and unrestrictedly typically outweigh the costs. When one adds the longer-term benefits that we cannot fully measure, cannot even foresee, the case for open access appears to be strong.”

The report offers an interesting and instructive analysis about the overarching cost-saving potential of making PSI available online for free and under open licenses (we assume the figures to represent Australian dollars):

[W]e find that the net cost to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) of making publications and statistics freely available online and adopting Creative Commons licensing was likely to have been around $3.5 million per annum at 2005-06 prices and levels of activity, but the immediate cost savings for users were likely to have been around $5 million per annum. The wider impacts in terms of additional use and uses bring substantial additional returns, with our estimates suggesting overall costs associated with free online access to ABS publications and data online and unrestrictive standard licensing of around $4.6 million per annum and measurable annualised benefits of perhaps $25 million (i.e. more than five times the costs).

The Houghton study suggests that open licensing is a key component to reducing friction in the downstream use of PSI:

It is not simply about access prices, but also about the transaction costs involved. Standardised and unrestrictive licensing, such as Creative Commons, and data standards are crucial in enabling access that is truly open (i.e. free, immediate and unrestricted) … The efficient economic solution for the dissemination of PSI is likely to be free libre and free gratis (i.e. making it freely available online and using unrestrictive licensing such as Creative Commons).

In a separate internal document noted in the report, the Australian Bureau of Statistics described the impact of adopting CC licensing. It says that CC licensing “meets public expectations with regard to open government, facilitates data sharing (including across government), allows for more timely reuse of statistics, facilitates innovation, [and] makes sense to a growing percentage of people who recognise and understand CC licence symbols and conditions.”

The study urges us to try to understand and foster the unpredictable yet potentially powerful innovation that can be unleashed when PSI is made freely available online and released using unrestrictive licenses:

In the longer term, there may also be unforeseen uses and re-uses that simply cannot be accounted for, and again this may mean that the costs and benefits experienced in the early years of implementation tend to understate the longer-term advantages. Use and re-use can also have wider impacts, in terms of innovation and the development and introduction of new products, services and processes that, in turn, generate new economic economic activity, new business opportunities, better informed and potentially better government and business decisions.

The full report is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.

LRMI Specification version 0.5 released

Greg Grossmeier, November 21st, 2011

The Learning Resources Metadata Initiative (LRMI) Technical Working Group just released the latest draft of their specification. This version is another step on the road to the final public release and submission to Schema.org, the multiple search engine group that is maintaining a standard metadata specification for online content. LRMI intends to extend Schema.org’s documentation to include metadata that is important to the educational community; everyone from commercial publishers and OER producers to learners of all varieties (and of course, educators).

Please explore the 0.5 version of the specification and provide any feedback via the LRMI mailing list by December 9th.

First Spanish CC movie premieres in Spanish cinema: Interferències

Jane Park, November 18th, 2011

Today, marks the premiere of the first Spanish movie under a CC license (CC BY-NC-SA) in a Spanish cinema. Interferències, “an audiovisual and educational project launched from the Debt Observatory (ODG) and Quepo,” premieres in Barcelona at both the Alexandra and Girona cinemas. Interferències aims to educate and mobilize citizens, creating awareness of the world’s current financial and social situation. CC Spain has also covered the event, but here is the press release in English:

“The project includes a film and website regarding the causes and alternatives of the global crisis, putting names to those responsible and addressing issues of today’s debt crisis. The film comes from the need to disseminate the results of the research of a social entity; a task of dissemination that aims to create awareness of the existence of mechanisms and institutions inherent in the economic and political system in which we live, that impacts negatively on the life of billions of people. Interferències is the result of this anger and wishes to make accessible to the general public a new vision for understanding the reality around us.

Interferències arises as an open and shared project from its begining: through the participation and collaboration of more than 150 film professionals, audiovisual companies, social organizations and public institutions who contributed altruistically to make it grow, to the dissemination and distribution under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

The film is just the tip of an iceberg of a 2.0 comprehensive project which includes training and formal complaint dimensions, with a huge social transformation vocation. The project’s website provides educational materials, topics, chapters and teaching proposals for individual and collective action. The aim is not leaving the users by themselves with their own reflections on the film, but giving them the opportunity to enhance and participate in campaigns and alternatives for each of the issues proposed, becoming participants of the project. The internet premiere will start with the first chapter on November, 18th, the same day it premieres in cinemas. Coinciding with its period in Verkami’s crowdfounding platform, Interferències will be debuting weekly with a new chapter until the entire movie can be viewed online on December 20.”

Watch the movie trailer in English at Vimeo, and learn more at www.interferencies.cc.

German UNESCO Commission releases “Open Content Licenses – A Practical Guideline”

Jane Park, November 17th, 2011

The German UNESCO Commission has released the publication, “Open Content Lizenzen – Ein Leitfaden für die Praxis” (pdf) aka “Open Content Licenses – A Practical Guideline.” The publication is authored by Dr. Till Kreutzer, a member of the Commission’s legal expert committee and a founder of iRights.info, a legal information website for consumers. The publication explains how to make use of open licenses, featuring the CC license suite as its primary example. Though tailored towards companies, institutions and organizations, the guideline is also a compact how-to for anyone interested in CC licensing their work. The publication is available under CC BY-NC, and is a timely follow-up to UNESCO’s related publication with the Commonwealth of Learning, “Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education” — which also highlights the use of CC licenses for OER.

Read more about the German guideline at the press release (German), and download it from UNESCO (pdf).

Creative Commons at WIPO

Diane Peters, November 15th, 2011

This week, Andres Guadamuz (CC Costa Rica) is representing Creative Commons at the 8th Session of the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The agenda [PDF] promises review of several pending recommendations as well as a discussion of future work by the CDIP. Consistent with protocol, Creative Commons prepared a statement for the opening session, which you can read here, as well as find CC’s prior statements and presentations at the CDIP and other WIPO meetings and conferences.

This is one in a series of engagements by Creative Commons with WIPO, which commenced in 2005 through our then-subsidiary, Creative Commons International (since renamed iCommons, and now an independent organization). During those early years, our participation at WIPO meetings was largely focused on educating WIPO members about CC as an alternative licensing system that facilitates the distribution and reuse of materials around the world, and copyright in a digital age. In 2009, Creative Commons became an ad hoc observer to the CDIP, and has since participated directly in several meetings and conferences. As well, CC founder Lawrence Lessig keynoted last year’s WIPO conference on Facilitating Access to Culture in the Digital Age. Prof. Lessig’s remarks highlighted the role that CC licenses play in enabling the sharing and reuse of creativity under the existing copyright regime, and called for the creation of a blue sky commission to consider copyright reform.

Our engagements with WIPO have been constructive, and educated us on the importance of being active in this and other fora where important policy discussions are taking place. This year, Creative Commons gained permanent observer status with WIPO on the CDIP, allowing us to regularly participate in the conversations and activities that WIPO hosts. Among other things, we plan to participate in select CDIP meetings and other activities where our experience and expertise can best be leveraged for maximum impact.

You can follow CC’s involvement in this meeting of the CDIP and otherwise vis-a-vis WIPO on this blog as well as via Andrés’ blog.

Urgent: Stop [U.S.] American censorship of the Internet

Mike Linksvayer, November 11th, 2011

November 16 the U.S. Congress will hold hearings on a bill that would unfairly, recklessly and capriciously enable and encourage broad censorship of the Internet in the name of suppressing distribution of works not authorized by copyright holders. As Public Knowledge aptly summarizes, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” would seriously “threaten the functioning, freedom, and economic potential of the Internet” by:

• short-circuiting the legal system, giving rightsholders a fast-track to shutting down whole websites;
• creating conflicts between Domain Name System (DNS) servers, making you more vulnerable to hackers, identity theft, and cyberattacks;
• sanctioning government interference with the Internet, making it more censored globally.

SOPA threatens every site on Internet, but would especially harm the commons, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, focusing on free software. The same applies to free and open projects beyond software, which often use CC licenses. While standard public licenses have lowered the costs and risks of legal sharing and collaboration, SOPA would drastically increase both the costs and risks of providing platforms for sharing and collaboration (think sites ranging from individual blogs to massive community projects such as Wikipedia, from open education repositories to Flickr and YouTube), and vaporize accessibility to huge swathes of free culture, whether because running a platform becomes too costly, or a single possibly infringing item causes an entire domain to be taken down.

The trend that one can plot from the DMCA (1998) to SOPA, and continued extensions and expansions of copyright and related restrictions around the world, also demonstrate the incredible importance of the commons for healthy information policy and a healthy Internet — almost all other “IP” policy developments have been negative for society at large. The DMCA was decried by advocates of free speech and the Internet, and has over past 13 years had many harmful effects. Now, in 2011, some think that the U.S. Congress ‘struck the right balance’ in 1998, while big content is dissatisfied, and with SOPA wants to ratchet the ‘balance’ (watch out, 2024!) much further to their short-term advantage.

Techdirt has excellent coverage of the gritty details of SOPA, its ill effects, and the many constituencies alarmed (such as librarians and sports fans).

Sign up at American Censorship Day to be alerted of actions you can take against SOPA. Demand Progress, EFF, and PK have forms you can use to write the U.S. Congress right now.

Please take action! If you aren’t already sharing works under a CC license and supporting our work, now is a good time. Bad legislation needs to be stopped now, but over the long term, we won’t stop getting new bad legislation until policymakers see broad support and amazing results from culture and other forms of knowledge that work with the Internet, rather than against it. Each work or project released under a CC license signals such support, and is an input for such results.

Wired.com now releasing photos under CC Attribution-Noncommercial

Jane Park, November 7th, 2011

We are thrilled to relay Wired.com’s announcement that from now on all Wired.com staff-produced photos will be released under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC)! Wired.com’s Editor in Chief Evan Hansen says,

“Creative Commons turns ten years old next year, and the simple idea of releasing content with “some rights reserved” has revolutionized online sharing and fueled a thriving remix culture. At Wired.com, we’ve benefited from CC-licensed photos for years — thank you sharers! Now we’re going to start sharing ourselves.”

We want to return the thanks to Wired.com for recognizing the power of open! Wired.com is a leader in covering the world of technology and a pioneer in commercial online publishing. We hope that others will recognize the value of both borrowing from, and contributing to, the richness of our shared commons.

To immediately sweeten the pot, Wired.com is celebrating their new licensing policy by releasing a CC-licensed gallery of 50 iconic photos from past stories including portraits of Steve Jobs, Woz, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, Trent Reznor, JJ Abrams, and others. Check out Wired’s Flickr stream for high resolution formats of the photos.

Trent Reznor / Jon Snyder/Wired.com / CC BY-NC

We believe that there are incredible opportunities for publishers and news organizations in open licensing. With this commitment, Wired joins other prestigious news and content organizations who are sharing interesting and important resources with the world under CC, incluing Al Jazeera, Propublica, and GOOD. Thanks Wired.com!

CC license use in journalism and other domains, in addition to numerous other activities, are made possible thanks to donations from people like you. We are a nonprofit organization; please consider contributing to our annual campaign going on now! Thank you.

CC News: Our Annual Campaign & CC License Version 4.0

Jane Park, November 4th, 2011

Banner "CC Line" by Shinjirou – CC BY.