In the unlikely chance you haven’t noticed, it’s Election Day in the United States. For the past few months, we’ve been sharing resources from the commons to help you get informed, get excited, and most importantly, get voting!

Below are some of our favorite election related resources from this year from the commons:

• Our profile of Creative Commons political photographer Gage Skidmore
• How to Vote in Every State: A project by Vlog Brothers
• Get Your Friends to Register to Vote: by CC board member Ben Adida
• The Conversation’s CC-licensed news coverage
• Internet Archive’s Political Ad archive
• An open source dataset of polling information from Pierre-Antoine Kremp
• We’ll miss President Barack Obama’s often CC-licensed Flickr page
• The Wikipedia articles that list the political stances of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
• Coral Project’s open source “Tell our next president” feature to encourage voters to share their feelings about the election.
• Emergency Kitten, a website that delivers a CC licensed photo of a kitten every time the page is refreshed, which is a perfect antidote to election news fatigue.

Open knowledge and intellectual freedom have been key issues this primary season. Creative Commons is proud to provide the tools to release the world’s knowledge through equitability and accessibility. We stand with the American people as they cast their votes today.

The post Election resources from the Commons: A guide for Election Day appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. The goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

Today marks the conclusion of another productive, informative Open Access Week. There were dozens of in-person workshops, online webinars, blog posts, and other actions from institutions and individuals all over the world aiming to educate and advocate for a more open system of producing and sharing research.

On Monday we took a look at the increasing drumbeat around improving access to publicly funded research. On Tuesday we published an interview with Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust, exploring the perspective of philanthropy in supporting open access publishing. Wednesday we launched a beta version of our Termination of Transfer Tool, a project that empowers authors to learn about whether and when they can regain rights from publishers in order to share their works on an open access basis. We also published an interview with scientist and advocate Erin McKiernan about her work for open science. On Thursday we hosted a Twitter chat with members of the library and scientific community to talk about some of the problems with the current scholarly publishing system, and what we can do about it.

It’s clear that our work and advocacy in open access can’t end today if we expect positive change in support of improved access to scientific and scholarly research.

As Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley wrote in WIRED:

If it wasn’t so well-established, the traditional model of academic publishing would be considered scandalous. Every year, hundreds of billions in research and data are funded, in whole or in part, with public dollars. We do this because we believe that knowledge is for the public good, but the public gets very little access to the fruits of its investment.

It’s a shame that our movement needs to argue with policymakers that the public should get access to research that it pays for. It’s a shame that instead of experimenting with an “open by default” approach to sharing scientific information, in much of policy and practice the status quo remains closed.

The work of open access needs to keep in clear view the ultimate goals of science and scholarship—a fundamental search for knowledge—that is now supercharged for sharing and collaboration to solve the world’s toughest scientific and social problems.

But open access is not just about working to flip the default from closed to open.

There are increasing threats to access to information, education, and freedom of expression. Just last week in Uruguay, 14 people were convicted and sentenced to prison for the crime of making copies of educational resources for noncommercial use. In Colombia, student Diego Gomez is being prosecuted for the crime of sharing a research paper online. A copyright “reform” proposal has been introduced by the European Commission, but many of its provisions do little to improve the rights of users and the public. Instead, much of the proposal reinforces protectionist measures for incumbent rights holders, while providing only limited benefits for researchers, teachers, internet users, and consumers.

The open access movement should cooperate and collaborate with related communities of action, including the important work to rebalance the underlying systems of copyright to benefit creativity, innovation, and access to knowledge.

We’d like to thank SPARC for leading this week’s activities, Authors Alliance for their partnership on the Termination of Transfer tool, and the countless libraries, universities, advocacy organizations, and individuals who participated in Open Access Week.

The post ‘Open In Action’ Requires Continuity and Solidarity with Fundamental Copyright Reform appeared first on Creative Commons.

According to Uruguayan copyright law 9.739, all copying of works under copyright—even if there is no profit-seeking motive—are criminal offenses. Therefore, anyone who makes copies for study or to access culture can be indicted with a single complaint.

Following the copy shop raid in 2013, the Uruguayan Student Federation presented a draft bill on educational and library exceptions to copyright. The proposed text would remove the criminal penalties for infringements that are not commercial in nature. The bill has been preliminary approved by the Parliament, but still needs to be finalized. As expected, collecting societies and the Uruguay Publishers Association oppose the bill, arguing that copyright exceptions will destroy creators.

Creative Commons Uruguay, along with a large group of social organizations, are urging legislators to give early approval to the copyright reform bill, before more people like students, librarians, and internet users are convicted of making non-commercial copies of educational resources.

Jorge Gemetto is co-director of Ártica and team member of Creative Commons Uruguay. 

The post In Uruguay, 14 people convicted for making copies of educational resources appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today Vice President Biden announced a comprehensive plan for his Cancer Moonshot initiative, which seeks to achieve a decade’s worth of progress on cancer research in five years.

As an invited participant in the Moonshot, we commend the Vice President’s radical approach to solving this crucial issue. In April, Biden referenced Ryan Merkley’s viral article in Wired, citing a need for better collaboration and the sharing of cancer data. Today’s announcement underscores the initiative’s commitment to open data, open access, and research. The “audacious, creative, and disruptive approaches” to innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and information sharing through crowdsourcing are a direct result of the advocacy work from the open community.

The Cancer Moonshot report acknowledges existing challenges to making progress against cancer, including “a lack of open access and rapid sharing of research data and results.” Biden’s report recognizes the need for open collaboration, open access to research and data, and the need for education and incentives to change existing models.

In June, we made four recommendations to the Cancer Moonshot to accelerate the speed and probability for new cancer treatments and cures:

1. Make open access the default for cancer research articles and data.
2. Take embargo periods on research articles and data to zero.
3. Build and reward a culture of sharing and collaboration.
4. Share cancer education and training materials as open educational resources.

As Biden writes, the Moonshot seeks to “unlock scientific advances through open publication,” including the creation of a Genomic Data Commons, which has already accumulated 32,000 patients in a few months. The Genomic Data Commons holds great potential for a more open data landscape and the number of people served has already proven its efficacy.

At today’s presentation, Vice President Biden reiterated the importance of access to information about cancer for researchers, doctors, patients, and families. Further, he said that cancer has now reached an “inflection point,” and that the research and treatment system needs to be reimagined for the 21st century.

It is crucial that this transformation involves reforms that truly support free, immediate open access to publicly-funded cancer research and data. We believe that open sharing and collaboration can begin to address many of the inefficiencies in the existing research and dissemination cycle that the report addresses and seeks to solve.

As the Moonshot Initiative continues, we look forward to joining the many voices involved in order to ensure that we reach our shared goal: Eliminating cancer within our lifetime.

The post Help us make a giant leap against cancer: Biden presents five-year Cancer Moonshot plan appeared first on Creative Commons.

In an ideal world, the Directive would have provided for progressive policy changes to serve the goals of a unified digital marketplace across Europe. It would have jumpstarted economic activity, championed innovative digital technologies and services, and protected consumers and access to information. It would have expanded opportunities for European businesses, cultural heritage institutions, educators, and the research community.

The Commission’s plan does little to advance these goals, instead making the European copyright framework more complex and unfit for the digital age. With the proposal from the Commission on the table, the legislative focus shifts to the EU Member States, the European Parliament, and the Council of the European Union. Several Member States are currently engaged in brief national-level public consultations in response to the Commission’s proposition.

Creative Commons published a letter that outlines the primary areas of concern, discusses potential policy solutions, and offers continued support to Member States as they solicit public input that will inform the forthcoming legislative proceedings.

Over 30 of our international affiliate teams and associated organizations are signatories to the letter. We are working with CC affiliates across Europe to provide feedback and ideas to the ongoing consultations.

Let’s work together to improve the Commission’s disappointing proposal. Now is the time for Europe to redouble its efforts to make positive changes to copyright that will benefit all stakeholders, including creators, users, and the public interest.

Creative Commons Letter to European Member States on Commission Copyright Proposal [PDF]

Screwdriver And Wrench by To Uyen, CC BY 3.0 US
Copyright by Marek Polakovic, CC BY 3.0 US

The post EU Member States Should Push To Improve Commission’s Disappointing Copyright Proposal appeared first on Creative Commons.

Photo by Saša Krajnc, CC BY 4.0.

Last week at the Creative Commons Europe Meeting in Lisbon, COMMUNIA organised a “School of Rock(ing) Copyright” workshop. Creative Commons affiliates from Poland, the Netherlands, and Portugal joined efforts in sharing knowledge about the current European copyright reform. We examined the political process for updating the copyright rules, and asked for help from other CC Europe affiliates in advocating for positive copyright changes. We were pleased to have around 15 participants from as many EU countries attend the session. Since we’re at a crucial stage within the European legislative process, we were eager to discuss the ins and outs on how we can create a better copyright for Europe.

Why does the CC community care about copyright reform? We all stand for creativity, innovation, access to knowledge, and development. Copyright can both boost or limit these goals, so we are actively involved to make progressive changes to copyright to benefit users, education, and the commons.

What we presented at the workshop

At the ‘school’ we focused on four different areas that people need to know about when engaging in advocacy for copyright reform in Europe. First, we provided a quick overview on ‘Brussels’ and how the different institutions such as the European Commission and Parliament interact. Second, we explained how the legislative process works. The Commission proposal is out, but it’s far from the end of the process! Third, we shared tactics and tips for getting involved in advocacy activities. These often seem obvious, but are very important when interacting with politicians. For example: never ask for anything people can’t give you, and come to the table with clear, concise suggestions. Few politicians have the time to read a 200 page research report, no matter how riveting we think it is! The fourth and last part of our workshop dug into a few key topics within the current copyright reform proposal, including areas such as cultural heritage, education, and research.

Photo by Saša Krajnc, CC BY 4.0.

What’s in Commission’s proposed Directive on copyright?

You can read the entire proposal here, and read COMMUNIA’s high level analysis about it here.

In short, the Commission’s copyright proposal fails to meet the needs of citizens, educators, and researchers across Europe. Instead of strengthening the information economy, the proposal preserves a status quo defined in the analog age. In the process, it hinders education, research, and cultural expression.

The Commission’s proposal focuses on a wholly different goal: to minimize the impact of the fundamental changes brought about by digital technologies and the internet on legacy business models. Publishers get an ancillary copyright that already has proven itself worthless in practice. Access to most audio-visual content will continue to be hampered by geo-blocking (which the Commission had earlier committed to end), and online platforms might be forced to collaborate with rights holders on censoring content that is shared by users on these platforms. The whole package lacks forward-looking, innovation-friendly measures that embrace digitization as an opportunity for users, creators, businesses, and public institutions in Europe.

During our workshop, we explored three aspects of the proposal in greater detail: 1) text and data mining (with a limited exception that limits research to official institutions), 2) cultural heritage (which does not solve the problem heritage institutions have with making their collections available online), and 3) education (where the proposal overcomplicates the situation, making it even harder for teachers to focus on providing excellent education.

We need more advocates to push for positive change

Creative Commons is committed to advocating for a better copyright across the globe, including Europe. Several affiliates at the School of Rock(ing) Copyright event stepped forward to help advocate for positive change. We need to engage in a variety of tactics, including educating MEPs about what’s at stake, responding to consultations on the copyright reform, and organising events and actions to raise public awareness. We look forward to collaborating even more with our fellow affiliates to make sure we get a copyright reform for Europe that’s fit for the digital age.

What you can do now!

1. Keep up-to-date with the European Copyright Reform process. Follow along with the COMMUNIA blog and twitter, and CC blog and twitter.
2. Take part in the national consultations now being held in many Member States. Check to see the consultation deadline of your national ministry responsible for copyright. Do your best to motivate other organisations to take part in the consultation.
3. Talk to your representatives within your national government, your European Parliament Representatives, and fellow advocates at other organisations. And remember, the most important is to make your voice heard about why this matters to you.
4. Share information with others. Let’s keep each other in the loop about our advocacy activities, meetings, and best arguments. You can also become a member of COMMUNIA (highly recommended!) Let us know.
5. Engage with your local communities. Inform your friends and social groups about what’s at stake. Organise debate nights, salons, and share interesting resources.
6. Think about how you want to engage: for the topics that you love, create a factsheet, organise a meeting, write happy (or angry) tweets to Commissioners.

Making your voice heard is fundamental, the way you do it is up to you. Let us know how we can help!

The post ‘School of Rock(ing) Copyright’ at the CC Europe meeting appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today the Marrakesh Treaty—the international agreement to improve access to copyrighted works for the blind and visually impaired—goes into effect.

The treaty has been discussed at the World Intellectual Property Organization since 2008 and was signed in Marrakesh in June 2013.  It was finally ratified by the required 20 states , and today, three months later, it goes into effect.

Countries that have ratified the treaty must provide for a domestic copyright exception law that allows for the creation of accessible versions of books and other copyrighted works for visually impaired persons. In addition, the treaty permits the import and export of accessible versions of copyrighted works.

According to the World Blind Union, only 1-7% of the world’s books are ever made available in versions accessible to the visually impaired. Copyright law has contributed to this problem because the default rules typically prohibit such adaptations.

The implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty is a vital step to improve access to books and other copyrighted material for those who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise print disabled. These protections are long overdue; the right to read should be guaranteed for everyone.

The post Securing the right to read for the visually impaired appeared first on Creative Commons.

As connectivity continues to increase globally, more people than ever live in a ubiquitous and nonstop media environment. In light of these changes, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s work has never been more important. Founded four years ago after the exposure of government collusion to create a financial blockade against Wikileaks, the Freedom of the Press Foundation develops tools and processes to advocate for journalists to fight against censorship to call for more transparency and accountability in both government and media.

From technical tools that allow news organizations to support the privacy and security of their sources to their public work for a more engaged and political press, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has received international acclaim for their important work in both disrupting and supporting both traditional and alternative journalism.

Trevor Timm is the co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Learn more about how you can support their work at their website.

How does the Freedom of the Press Foundation work to create a more equitable world? How can openness drive significant change both in the press and the work of your organization?

Our overarching mission is to protect and defend journalism that’s dedicated to transparency and accountability. A lot of that work revolves around government transparency and wanting to help journalists and whistleblowers connect in a more secure environment so that information that the public should know but the government’s keeping secret can eventually become public and we can force a more open and transparent government.

This happens in a variety of ways. We advocate for reforms to the Freedom of Information Act. We build tools like visual security tools to help journalists and sources communicate securely. We train journalists how to use encryption tools in the newsroom and we have a variety of lawsuits going on right now dealing with government transparency.

When you say “government transparency” do you mean specifically in the realm of journalism or do you work for transparency in other realms as well?

We certainly focus on [other forms of transparency]. For example, our two lawsuits right now involve transparency as relates to journalists specifically, but what we want to do is facilitate journalists to make government more transparent across different fields. While our specialty area definitely involves journalists themselves, the idea is that journalists are often the conduit for accountability inside government whether we’re talking about the environment or civil rights or healthcare. We want to make sure that journalists can do their job without interference to the best of their abilities.

You work a lot with encryption and privacy tools. How can organizations that are concerned with transparency be transparent and also work smart in terms of privacy and encryption?

There are a few cases where privacy rights and free speech rights collide and these are difficult questions that I think a lot of people have strong opinions on. When we’re talking about the government, I think that they are held to a higher standard of openness than private citizens.

We are generally in favor of strong privacy rights for private individuals, especially vis a vis the government, but when we’re talking about government officials it’s different. The apt term is the difference between secrecy and privacy. Government officials essentially work for the public and so they should be transparent as possible about what they’re doing behind closed doors. Unfortunately, a lot of officials in the United States government have an opposite view—that it’s okay to violate the privacy of private citizens but it’s okay for the government to keep information secret.

The biggest display of this is in the past few years has of course been the Snowden revelations. Edward Snowden worked with reporters to expose a government mass surveillance system that essentially nobody outside of government knew about. This meant that the government was essentially vacuuming up all sorts of information from private citizens yet keeping this information completely secret. We think that principal should be flipped on its head. That its the private citizens that deserve privacy and it’s the government that should be much more transparent about what they’re doing.

At Creative Commons, one of our tenets is to work open and to work transparent. How can open organizations support your work in privacy and encryption for journalists and for publishing and for creation?

The principles of openness are embedded in everything we do.

For example, our high profile work on SecureDrop, which is essentially a document submission system for news organizations that allows sources to securely send them documents and information. All of our tools are completely open source and free software. We think when you’re talking about security tools it’s incredibly important for the code to be completely open so that other outside experts can make sure that the tools are actually living up to their promises.

For us, Creative Commons licenses are incredibly important for the advocacy we do as well. All of our blog posts are licensed with Creative Commons licenses by default and it allows us to be able to get our message out a lot more broadly because different websites are allowed to essentially repost everything that we post on our website. CC allows our message to spread farther and we’re not losing anything by doing so.

When it comes to copyright and censorship, oftentimes we see ourselves as an advocate for news organizations to be more open licensed as well. Copyright claims can often lead to censorship in a lot of cases when information is clearly newsworthy and should be shared as widely as possible. While Creative Commons and Freedom of the Press Foundation are working on two different tracks, we certainly see those tracks as parallel.

How do you feel like other journalists and media outlets could use CC in their work?

I think especially for non-profit news organizations, which there are more and more of these days, it’s more important for them to have their stories be read as widely as possible than it is for them to get clicks on a particular website.

By licensing stories with CC licenses, this is an incredible way to have your stories published on many more platforms and also retain the recognition and respect you get for producing journalism in this way.

I’m not sure how much news organizations think about this. Unfortunately, a lot of news organizations and their lawyers are often maximalist when they think about copyright solely because that’s the only way that they’ve ever done things. I hope that with more news organization’s disrupting the space that people will see that being copyright maximalists can actually be a detriment and not necessarily a help to getting the word out about the work.

Switching gears a bit, one aspect of the Freedom of the Press Foundation that’s particularly interesting is how you utilize crowd’s funding in your work to support other organizations. Do you feel like this model is extensible to other non-profits and do you feel like other non-profits can support each other in this way? How do you balance your own funding needs in conjunction with supporting other organizations?

That’s a really good question. I don’t think that crowdfunding is necessarily a long-term answer for sustaining news organizations that may employ dozens of people.

I think it is a great way to (excuse the expression,) kick start an organization that may not have a lot of notoriety. It can give new organizations seed funding to get themselves on their feet and be the spark for growth in the future. But it is, quite honestly, very expensive to run a news organization, and crowdfunding can certainly be a supplement to a lot of what they do. But ultimately to be sustainable, other sources of funding are certainly needed, unless you’re talking about an organization that only has a handful of people working for it. I’m certainly a big believer in crowdfunding, but I don’t think it’s the be all end all for solving monetary woes inside news organizations.

How do you work both within and outside traditional journalism by crafting tools that are used by mainstream media while still supporting an active and engaged alternative media?

I think it’s an important balance to strike. We are huge fans of independent media and non-profit media.

There needs to be more voices that can be heard by millions and millions of people and the only way for that to happen is to get their name out there and have ordinary people show their support.

But on the other hand, as many problems as I have with legacy news organizations, a lot of them still do important work. I can list ten criticisms of The New York Times or The Washington Post, yet there are dozens and dozens of journalists who work at both those papers who are among the best journalists in the world and that the public would be much poorer off if they didn’t exist. When we’re talking about defending reporters’ rights, we want to make sure that we’re defending the rights of journalists at The New York Times and The Washington Post, but we will also want to make sure that we are defending the rights of independent media, individual bloggers, citizen journalists, and any organization that crops up that some people may be uncomfortable with, but that their rights are still protected as much as the most mainstream outlet out there.

The post Embedding openness in everything we do: Freedom of the Press Foundation appeared first on Creative Commons.

We believe that this is a timely opportunity to introduce positive changes to copyright that will support users and the public, such as adopting a flexible use exception like fair use. Our community looks forward to providing ideas and feedback during the reform process.

Letter of support for balanced Colombian copyright law reform [English]
Carta para apoyar una reforma equilibrada al derecho de autor en Colombia [Spanish]

The signatories below are writing to you regarding the proposed updates to copyright law in Colombia that will be introduced in order to implement the U.S.-Colombia Trade Agreement. We are concerned that these changes will only further tip the balance of copyright toward the interests of rights holders, while ignoring necessary protections for the public domain, as well as for users, consumers, and the general public.

We understand that the proposed changes would include increasing copyright terms  for some types of rights holders, and adopting an instrument to mirror the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We urge the Congress to take this opportunity to provide for crucial balances to copyright that protect the rights of users. In the fast-changing digital and online environment, the Congress should consider introducing a flexible exception to copyright that echoes the regulation of countries that have adopted “fair use” or “fair dealing” exceptions.

It has been our experience that to ensure the maximum benefits to both culture and the economy in this digital age, the scope and shape of copyright law need to be reviewed. Now is the time for the Congress to ensure that appropriate and necessary exceptions and limitations are updated in order to protect and support users, access to information, and creativity.

Creative Commons Colombia
Creative Commons
Fundación Karisma
COMMUNIA International Association on the Public Domain
Centrum Cyfrowe
Creative Commons Peru
Creative Commons Uruguay
Kennisland
Creative Commons Netherlands
Creative Commons Ireland
Creative Commons Ukraine
Creative Commons Indonesia
Creative Commons Portugal
Creative Commons UK
Australian Digital Alliance
Creative Commons Chile
Creative Commons Australia
Creative Commons Nigeria
Creative Commons Belarus

Screwdriver And Wrench by To Uyen, CC BY 3.0 US
Copyright by Marek Polakovic, CC BY 3.0 US

The post Copyright reform in Colombia should focus on supporting users’ rights appeared first on Creative Commons.

Copyright policy should benefit everyone, not just legacy rightsholders

Today the European Commission released its legislative proposal for changes to EU copyright law. The proposal has been introduced as a Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market.

The Directive fails to deliver on the promise for a modern copyright law in Europe.

In an ideal world, the Directive would have provided for progressive policy changes to serve the goals of a unified digital marketplace across Europe. It would have jumpstarted economic activity, championed innovative digital technologies and services, and protected consumers and access to information. It would have expanded opportunities for European businesses, cultural heritage institutions, educators, and the research community.

This is not the world presented to us by the Commission. Instead, the copyright proposal introduces protectionist measures for incumbent rightsholders while providing only lip service to Internet users, teachers, new businesses, and consumers. The proposal contains the same problems we saw in the leaked impact assessment and draft directive, including:

• An ancillary copyright (aka “link tax”) for press publishers to extract fees from search engines for incorporating short snippets of—or even linking to—their content. This would undermine the intention of authors who wish to share without additional strings attached, including Creative Commons licenses.

• A copyright exception for education covering digital content that Member States can ignore if there’s a content licensing option available for the educational materials.

• A limited exception for text and data mining available only to nonprofit research institutions. This will restrict the potential for text and data mining discoveries and innovation because it specifically excludes the private sector.

• A copyright exception for cultural heritage institutions to digitize their collections, but not put them online.

• A mechanism that would require Internet platforms to proactively monitor user uploaded content in order to identify and remove copyright infringing content.

The Commission’s proposal does not represent the interests of the public or the recommendations from tens of thousands of internet users, consumers, teachers, startups, and activists. It’s now up to the Parliament and the Council to reshape this flawed copyright proposal in a way that benefits everyone.

Photo by Paul Green via Unsplash, CC0
Copyright symbol by Marek Polakovic, CC BY 3.0 US
European Union stars by anbileru adaleru, CC BY 3.0 US

The post European Commission Copyright Proposal Leaves Users In The Dark appeared first on Creative Commons.