Curious about what’s going on with European copyright? Need a refresher on what the Commission’s new copyright proposal means for you? Don’t worry! We’re here to help!

• Read our letter and blog post to encourage an improved proposal.
• Check out our summary of the proposal from last month.
• Follow our friends at Communia and read their policy recommendations for a more humane copyright in the EU
• Participate in Mozilla’s #cczerohero campaign by uploading your photos to Flickr with a CC0 license

If you are able to come, the Creative Commons community will be at the Mozilla Festival in London from October 28-30.

Come find us! Tweet @creativecommons during the event or follow the #mozfest hashtag to learn about how we’re coming together for copyright reform in the EU.

Let’s be sure the changes to EU copyright don’t break the web. Stand with us and our partners if you believe it’s time to #fixcopyright.

The post Commons-friendly EU copyright at MozFest 2016 appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Toronto summit will be a launchpad for the next phase of work for Creative Commons and its global communities. Earlier this year, we unveiled a new Strategic Plan, which focuses on collaboration, vibrancy, gratitude, and usability as our key principles. This is our first summit since this announcement, where we expect to draw together nearly 500 participants from a variety of disciplines including policy and law, arts and culture, open education, GLAM, free culture, open science, open access, and technology. This event is for the global open community, broadly construed, and its focus all aspects of “open” work in education, free culture, open data and research, open knowledge, and more.

Communities around the world are at the heart of our work. Without activists, advocates, professionals, and supporters around the world, Creative Commons would not be the globally recognized standard it is today. Our summits have historically kickstarted actions to help creators make connections and celebrate the commons, and the 2017 summit is poised to be our most successful yet.

We wholeheartedly invite you to join us in Toronto next April. For information about how to participate, please sign up for our special summit email list below. Thank you for your support.

The post Announcing the 2017 Creative Commons Global Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.

One of the greatest strengths of the Creative Commons organization is the dedicated volunteers worldwide who help build openly licensed projects and educate the public about CC in their local communities and internationally.

A few months ago, we provided mini grants to these communities through The Awesome Fund. A dedicated team of organizers evaluated all proposals and selected 19 awesome projects (out of 34 applications) that will take place in the second half of 2016.

That’s Awesome! What can I expect?

These grants fund projects that align with CC program areas like creative communities, policy, and business. They include a wide variety of activities across the CC spectrum including performance, free culture, translation, and copyright reform.

We are pleased to announce that the following projects have been granted financial support through the Awesome Fund:

Many of the projects focus on the collaborative nature of CC networks, with affiliates teaming up to create shared resources across their regions. For an overview of all these awesome projects, check this wiki page. We will be posting blog posts, photos, and celebrations of all this work in the upcoming weeks.

Missed out on this round? No worries! We’ll have another call for proposals in September.

You can also follow #ccisawesome on Twitter and Facebook for updates on these projects and more.

The post CC is Awesome! appeared first on Creative Commons.

On June 29th, a little over twenty of us met at the Singularity University on NASA’s Ames campus in Mountain View, CA to workshop when attribution, or “view source,” matters in 3D printing, and discussed at length CC’s role in a field rich with data and designs both restricted and not restricted by copyright.

Leading up to the meeting, the original challenge we had conceived of was split into two: while participants were interested in what happened to attribution information (such as author and license) once the design was physically printed into an object, they were also interested (if not more so) in how that information traveled with the digital design file.

Further still, as the discussion progressed, it became apparent that the larger issue was not the physical versus digital attribution of a design, but when attribution/view source actually mattered for designers, and users of those designs, across both physical and digital spaces.

We began with a panel of designers and design community representatives who presented use cases of 3D printed designs for cultural heritage, prosthetics, military, industry, mathematical models, and more. You can check out slides from the panel here, and a video here. Following the panel we discussed and identified four overarching categories where attribution/view source mattered for designers. These are not necessarily categories of needs that CC will or should address, but they were the ones we identified as pressing needs by the 3D design community as represented at this meeting. They were:

1. The ability to track use of the design file, unmodified, including: downloads of the digital design file; the number of times the design file was sent to a printer; and geographic distribution of its uses. The motivations for being able to track use of the original design included curiosity on the part of a designer, the desire for credit, potential future revenue from uses, and compilation of such uses as part of a portfolio for professional or advocacy reasons, eg. in the case of sharing the design file of a public domain sculpture, a designer could point to the number and diversity of uses as part of a case to a cultural heritage institution to make open its 3D public domain artworks. While such tracking can bring benefits, there was also a recognition that tracking has very real costs in terms of privacy and freedom of use for downstream users.

2. The ability to compare modified versions of the design file for safety, efficacy, provenance, and productization. Safety means ensuring that printed works perform safely as expected; efficacy means ensuring that works print well in different media and perform effectively as expected; provenance means being able to track different versions of the file, including versions with different instructions for printing and also with different processes for application; and productization means being able to track when a design is productized commercially for industry.

3. The ability to indicate original intent for use of the design file, in order to prevent or preempt unwanted, unethical, or commercial uses if applicable. A strong motivation is to ensure the free use of any released design files by preventing their commercial enclosure. Unethical uses relate to safety and efficacy motivations cited in 2.

4. And last, but not least, the ability to provide credit or attribution as a normative practice, because credit provides a sort of gratification for those credited, and accountability for those who credit. Several reasons were cited for providing credit for its own sake, including: building a credible portfolio; reputation; attribution as generative for the commons (incentive for more design contributions); also as generative for growing a robust, collaborative community; for organizing multiple contributions under a single project; a source to find additional designs by the same designer; and to teach about the normative practice of attribution, eg. giving credit where credit is due, in the first place.

Keeping these four categories in mind, we moved on to the legal presentation of the applicability of copyright to 3D designs, which distinguished between functional and creative designs, and the gray space between. We discussed the lack of copyright protection for many functional designs and design files in the 3D printing space, and what that meant for CC’s role, since CC licenses and the obligation to provide attribution and source information generally apply where copyright and similar rights exist. We termed those design files that are sufficiently creative to be covered by copyright as “born closed” and those that are not as “born open.” For “born closed” design files, CC licenses enable permissions as they do for any other copyrighted work. For “born open” design files, CC licenses don’t properly apply because copyright doesn’t apply; in these cases, use of such design files is not encumbered by copyright, even if they may be controlled by other means, eg. patents, contracts or use licenses. We also discussed the lack of awareness of this distinction by most 3D designers and users and the difficulty of enabling average users to reliably draw the distinction on a case-by-case basis. And we considered the implications for designers, design communities, and CC itself of the inevitable misapplication of CC licenses to non-copyrightable designs.

We lit upon an issue that is relevant not just to 3D designers, but all kinds of creators of content generally. The group recognized that CC licenses are sometimes misapplied to works that are not restricted by copyright or similar rights. This misapplication is one that CC seeks to avoid even though their use with all types of content can result in raising awareness about CC licenses and educating users about the importance of a shared commons. One question the group explored was, how might CC be more intentional about these imperfect applications, improving awareness around how and where CC licenses should be used? Furthermore, can CC play a greater role by automating ways to give credit and enabling expressions of gratitude for contributions? Should these features be enabled just for the subset of the copyrightable 3D commons or for all 3D works where an attribution norm (as opposed to attribution as a legal requirement) is desired?

Note: CC is exploring the development of an open ledger, aggregating data from publicly available repositories of open content, possibly starting with 3D printed works. One could imagine a public listing of 3D printed works containing provenance and other relevant metadata that gets edited and curated over time, by both verified institutions and a community of users. All participating platforms could add new data, and draw on data from other projects using the ledger.  

Setting these questions aside for a moment, we moved into the technical session after lunch, which included presentations on current ways attribution/view source is being included in the physical objects; potential technical solutions and the benefits/drawbacks of each; and current file standard formats that allow for attribution metadata to be included in the digital design file. You can check out these presentations here.

Due to the variety of function, size, and design of physical objects, it seems less likely that a physical standard for attribution would be universally adopted. That said, such a standard would not be impossible, at least for a subset of objects within a given field, for example, sculptural public domain art works. More likely is the adoption of a digital metadata standard to be included with the design file that would express attribution information, such as author and license. Such standard metadata could be tied to its physical expression later on, and also feed into the open ledger.

In our last hour, we revisited the question about CC’s role in the 3D commons, as related to and not related to copyright. Our renewed vision and strategy focuses on increasing discovery and enabling collaboration around the commons. Do we limit ourselves to just CC licenseable content when it comes to the commons? Or does increasing discovery and collaboration of CC licensed content necessitate increasing discovery and collaboration of all content generally? If by increasing discovery and collaboration, we want to enable automatic attribution and ways to express gratitude for contributions, how do we distinguish between contribution credit (to recognize work put into creation, but not necessarily copyright ownership) versus authorship credit (copyright ownership)? What are the dangers for encouraging attribution norms for content that is not copyrightable in the first place? Eg. do we risk expanding copyright or copyright-like restrictions to areas that were never governed by copyright in the first place? Could we navigate this space as we do other spaces, by, as a policy matter, insisting that CC licenses only apply where copyright applies, and increasing efforts to educate users about the black, white, and gray areas?

We didn’t come to any hard and fast conclusions, but we did manage to outline some next steps. They are:

1. Solicit feedback from additional stakeholders, including you, our community.

2. Pilot test a few ideas with a platform and related partners, starting with a standard attribution metadata format for the digital design file. Also identify education needs and create resources for users on when CC licensing applies to 3D designs as pertains to a specific platform, eg. Thingiverse.

3. Explore additional convenings focusing on solving for one specific challenge identified above, eg. a technical standard for metadata file formats.

4. Start talking to potential funders to see if there is an interest in these issues, especially in an open ledger, specifically for the 3D commons or more broadly for all CC licenseable works.

5. Explore the development of another tool or expression that is not a copyright license but that addresses the four categories of designer needs identified above.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts:

• When and where does attribution/view source matter to you in the 3D design space (if at all)? Do the four categories of designer needs around attribution/view source capture your own particular needs as a designer and user?
• What’s more important — being able to view the source on a printed 3D physical object or find the source information on the digital design file?
• Given copyright does not apply to many types of 3D designs, the attribution requirement of the CC licenses does not apply in those instances. CC has historically been focused primarily on copyright-related tools. Does CC still have a role to play in this space around enabling automatic types of attribution, credit, or gratitude for contributions as a community norm through the development of a specialized tool(s) or otherwise?

Lastly, what other organizations or projects should we be aware of and work with when exploring possibilities for developing collaboration mechanisms? Please provide any feedback in this form.

The post Meeting debrief and next steps: The Challenge of Attribution, or “View Source,” in 3D Printing appeared first on Creative Commons.

Photo: Cancer Immunotherapy by National Institutes of Health, CC BY 2.0

Under the direction of Vice President Joe Biden, the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative seeks to make ten years of progress on cancer research in half that time, with a goal to end cancer in our lifetime.

Today, Creative Commons will participate in Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Summit in Washington, D.C. I will join the Summit, which is aimed at creating action and fostering collaborations around the goals of the Cancer Moonshot. The event will bring together a wide spectrum of stakeholders, including researchers, oncologists, nurses and other care providers, data and technology experts, philanthropists, advocates, patients, and survivors.

Changing Policy to Improve Access to Cancer Research

We need a new approach that will give cancer researchers broad, unencumbered access to scientific literature and data. Even with significant investments in cancer research, the scientific publishing environment hampers innovation and discoveries. In 2016 alone, $5.21 billion of public money was allocated to the National Cancer Institute for cancer related research. Other major agencies such as the National Institutes of Health fund billions more. Despite this massive public investment, research articles remain hidden behind paywalls, delayed from release by long, unnecessary embargo periods. Research data remain unavailable, or are restricted from being machine-readable, an essential element needed to allow deep analysis by new technologies. If all publicly-funded cancer research was required to be shared, and researchers had unfettered access to the underlying data, it would allow everyone to cooperate and lead to new discoveries, analysis, cancer treatments, and ultimately a cure.

Recently, Creative Commons made recommendations on how the federal government can accelerate the speed and probability of discovery 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.

We also asked our community to share their personal stories about the need for open access in cancer research. There stories are powerful and important, and they make a compelling case for immediate open access. Read some of their stories on Medium.

Our Commitments to the Cancer Moonshot Initiative

In response to the Vice President’s call for open access to cancer research publications, Creative Commons is committing to provide open educational resources and tools that will support researchers, funders, medical professionals, professors, and patients as they build open and collaborative communities for cancer research. These materials will include guides for adopting and implementing open licensing policies, training materials regarding working openly and using licensed materials, and technical tools for applying licenses to shared works.

As with all of Creative Commons’ programs, these materials and tools will be freely available and openly licensed for all who need them, and can also be remixed and repurposed by anyone to serve each community’s needs. Sharing resources ensures that the best materials are available to everyone to increase the effectiveness and impact of the cancer community as a whole.

In addition to providing educational resources and open licensing assistance to researchers, CC will engage, educate, and support federal departments and agencies, cancer research centers, universities, nonprofits, and foundations that fund cancer research to adopt and implement open policies that require knowledge to be openly licensed and freely-available without restrictions or embargoes.

We applaud the bold goals of the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative. Its success will depend both on breaking down barriers of access to research by promoting information sharing and scientific collaboration. One way to do this is to require full, immediate open access to government-funded cancer research, data, and educational resources. Creative Commons is committed to aiding federal agencies in the development and implementation of policies that meet these requirements. We are thrilled to participate in today’s Cancer Moonshot Summit. We look forward to providing leadership, training, and educational materials that will help open up research, enable collaboration, and put an end to cancer.

The post Supporting Open Collaboration to Achieve Cancer Cures appeared first on Creative Commons.

In support of the #FreeBassel Day Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at the EFF, the Creative Commons Arab World will organize a virtual Arabic Wikipedia Edit-a-thon to translate and expand pages that cover topics of interest to him.

• Updating Arabic Creative Commons Wikipedia Page
• Updating Arabic Creative Commons Licenses Wikipedia Page
• Creating a Wikipedia Page about Copyright law of Syria
• Creating an Arabic Wikipedia Page for Bassel
• Add resources to Arabic Open Content Wikipedia Page
• Create an Arabic Wikipedia Page for Patent Troll
• Enhance Arabic Wikipedia Page for EFF
• Create an Arabic Wikipedia page for Open Music Model
• Create an Arabic Wikipedia page for Smart Contract

The virtual Edit-a-thon will take place on Sunday the 15th of March from 5pm to 8pm GMT. The list of topics can be viewed in Arabic on this Google Doc

The activity will be coordinated through the @ccArabWorld twitter

The post This is not a protest! Edit for #FreeBassel appeared first on Creative Commons.

CC Toolkits Hackathon / by Gino Cingolani / CC BY-NC-SA

Building momentum for sharing resources about CC

This month, affiliate groups in Argentina, Paraguay, Nigeria, and Poland will be running local events bringing people together around openness in law, government, education, and cultural works. Though the events will be about much more than open copyright licenses, volunteers in our community will be sprinting and hacking to gathering and create useful videos, guides, and other content on the web that make it easy for others to learn about the importance of CC.

CC Toolkits Homepage

The toolkit template developed by the design team is composed of a WordPress theme built from the ground up, with media panes for embedding and linking and viewing content about CC that various affiliate groups have created. The goal is make it easier for creators and curators in the CC community to frame interesting and useful content into toolkits that can support conversations about CC. But beyond the tech, the regional events happening this month will help set the stage for new ways we can share about open.

Here is a rundown of events being run by affiliates this month:

CC Nigeria will be hosting an event at the University of Lagos to talk about CC, address offline and low-bandwidth components of toolkit bundles, and translate the current version of the Basics of CC toolkit into local languages.
 

CC Argentina will be running a multi-day event in Capital Federal (Buenos Aires), Resistencia (Chaco), and Cordoba, focusing CC and it’s importance in education. Two days of hackathons will take place in late February, bringing together members of CC and other open organizations to discuss how CC licenses can improve education.
 

CC Paraguay will be hosting a 2 day “CCthon” in late February to produce toolkit materials to support CC in government. The group has invited participation from the Open Government of Paraguay to guide the toolkit, and is coordinating the event with local translators and bloggers.
 

CC Poland will be focusing on the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, museums), holding a meeting between among CC community members, Wikimedians and other open culture supporters. The two-day summit will take place February 20-21 in Krakow, Poland, crafting a toolkit about CC licence use for cultural heritage institutions.
 

To keep up with the working groups, check out the About page on cctoolkits.com, and the hashtag #cctoolkits on social media channels, and uploading photos to flickr with the same tag. If you’re interested in seeing how the pieces of the toolkits are being threaded together, the Collaborate page has more information about creating toolkits with our design files and media.

The post Next phase of the CC Toolkits project: Regional events appeared first on Creative Commons.

Gino Cingolani / CC BY 3.0

This past August’s celebration of the Creative Commons Global Summit in Buenos Aires impacted the free culture movement of this city. Only one month after the Summit, the first CC Argentina Hackathon was held with around 25 volunteers giving up their weekend to help. On a Sunday in October, programmers, translators, graphic designers, illustrators and people curious or interested in CC from all the country gathered around to work on the creation of template for the CC toolkits project.

During the event, we strategized content and drafted designs that would help spread the word and implement the CC licenses in cultural and scientific environments. The toolkits will exist in multiple formats (web, print) and will live online, each kit containing open content created by CC’s global community; the template includes video, narrative and fact sheet documents about CC licenses, and a set of cards with sentences for starting discussions around issues of copyright & free licensing. Each kit will also feature case studies and success stories of people that have already implemented CC licenses.

The CC Toolkits global initiative was initially presented at the Global Summit by a team made up of Billy Meinke and Teresa Sempere, describing the overall goal for the toolkits to help explain how CC licenses can be used in places like education, government agencies, culture and science. From that moment on, the initiative passed on to different working groups that took care of making the content, translating it, and present in the different formats mentioned.

“CCToolkits Hackathon” / Gino Cingolani / CC BY-NC-SA

The hackathon, organised by a working group established during the summit, was held at the Cultural Center Tierra Violeta in downtown Buenos Aires. Alongside hacking to build the toolkits, we also had the chance to work with a DIY book scanner, take part in a Wikipedia editathon, involving various members of the area’s local DIY/Open Hardware community. The event had the support of Wikimedia Argentina & CC Argentina and we hope it will be only the first of many more similar events to come, that have the aim of sharing open principles like those of Creative Commons to more local communities of creators and artists.

For more information about the CC Toolkits project and how to get involved, see wiki.creativecommons.org/Toolkits.

The post Guest Post: Design Hackathon held in Buenos Aires to kick off the CC Toolkits Project appeared first on Creative Commons.

Wave 2 Kick-off Event, Minneapolis MN

Round 2 Grantees from the US Department of Labor’s (DOL) Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College & Career Training (TAACCCT) program were invited to attend last week’s Kick-off Conference, hosted by OPEN Partners: CC, CMU’s OLI, CAST, and SBCTC. This was a unique opportunity for the Gates-funded OPEN Partners to explain services made available to grantees at no cost, supporting the building of Open Educational Resources (OER) that meet current standards of accessibility, pedagogically-sound and technology-supported design, as well as legal openness. Creative Commons is leading the OPEN Partner services and support, lending expertise in legal and technical aspects of open education to the project. Representatives from forty seven Round 2 TAACCCT projects attended workshops to understand service basics, and a showcase to hear from select Round 1 Grantee projects that made use of the complementary services offered to all grantees.

Photo by Cable Green / CC BY

Highlighted Round 1 Grantees included The National Stem Consortium (NSC), the Colorado Online Energy Training Consortium (COETC), and the Missouri Online HealthWINs program, sharing their experiences in the program thus far. All grantees are funded to support the building of community college-level and technical training courses that will provide opportunities for unemployed and under-employed adults to gain certificates and degrees in high-skilled industries. The OPEN partners offer expertise to grantees around accessibility frameworks, open-licensing and technical interoperability, and quality standards for online education. All of the courses and learning materials created in this four year $2 billion DOL grant program are being licensed for reuse with a Creative Commons (CC BY) license, making this the largest OER production effort to date. The pool of courseware will include lessons, videos, images, and interactive content for learners in health care, information technology (IT), advanced manufacturing, and other industries that need high-skilled workforce support. It’s a big deal.

Keynote and Plenary Sessions

CC’s Director of Global Learning, Cable Green, provided the opening keynote for the conference titled Online Technology, Open Licenses, and Open Educational Resources – The Opportunity for DOL TAACCCT Grantees. The Center for Accessibility Supportive Technology’s (CAST) Samantha Johnston provided an overview of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, and spoke about accessibility in distance education, which most TAACCCT courses are being developed for. Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) Boyoung Chae offered a session about creating and managing OER, targeted at new grantees that will likely be collaborating on content in the coming year. CC, CAST, and the Washington State Board of Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC) offered multiple hands-on sessions to familiarize grantees with DOL-mandated aspects of their course design, and describe how the OPEN Partners are offering continue support. CC’s Jane Park led sessions on the CC-BY license and best practices for applying CC licenses to work.

As a special service to grantees, Giulia Forsythe joined the OPEN Partners to provide visual recording (see image above) for the major talks. The creation of visual notes offered another way for participants to understand the big ideas of the speakers’ messages, using sketch-based keywords and symbols to describe connections. During a lightning around for new grantees, participants from over forty of the funded college and consortia spoke briefly about their projects and plans. Visual representations of these descriptions will soon be posted to the OPEN4us.org site.

Photo by Cable Green / CC BY

OPEN Supporting TAACCCT Grantees

Creative Commons and the OPEN Partners will continue to support TAACCCT Grantees in the upcoming months, maximizing the value and reusability of this amazing pool of OER. Handouts, visuals, webinar recordings, and additional grantee information can be found on the OPEN Partner website, Open4Us.org.

The post OPEN Partners Host U.S. Department of Labor TAACCCT Grantee Kick-Off Conference appeared first on Creative Commons.

An Education Sprint

The future of Open is a dynamic landscape, ripe with opportunities to increase civic engagement, literacy, and innovation. Towards this goal, the Science Program at Creative Commons is teaming up with the Open Knowledge Foundation and members of the Open Science Community to facilitate the building of an open online course, an Introduction to Open Science. The actual build will take place during a hackathon-style “sprint” event on Open Data Day on Saturday, February 23rd and will serve as a launch course for the School of Open during Open Education Week (Mar 11-15).

Want to help us build this?

The course will be open in it’s entirety, the building process and content all available to be worked on, all to help people learn about Open Science. Do you know a thing or two about Open Access? Are you a researcher who’s practicing Open Research? Do you have experience in instructional or visual design? This is an all-hands event and will be facilitated by representatives at CC, OKFN, and others in the Community. Open Science enthusiasts in the Bay Area are invited to the CC Headquarters in Mountain View for the live event. Remote participants will also be able to join and contribute online via Google Hangout.

The day will begin with coffee, refreshments and a check-in call with other Open Data Day Hackathons happening around the globe. The Open Science Community is strengthened by shared interests and connections between people, which we hope will grow stronger through networked events on Open Data Day. The Open Science course sprint at CC HQ will build upon open educational content, facilitate the design of challenges for exploration, and provide easy entry for learners into concepts of Open Access, Open Research, and Open Data. It will be done in a similar fashion to other “sprint-style” content-creation events, with lunch and refreshments provided for in-person participants. We’re literally going to be hacking on education. Sound like something you’d be interested in?

Join us.

For details about the ways you can participate, see the Eventbrite page here.
To see the draft (lightly framed) course site on Peer to Peer University, go here.
For information about other Open Data Day events, see the events wiki here.

Developers

We need you, too! Basic skills for working with open datasets is important, and can be difficult to grasp. Who better to develop great lessons about working with data than you? Similarly, for those interested in building upon apps and projects from other Open Data Events, updated source code and repository information will be posted to a public feed (for now, follow hashtags #ODHD13 and #opendataday on Twitter).

For other information, contact billy dot meinke at creative commons dot org or @billymeinke.

This event is being organized by the Science Program at Creative Commons with support from the Open Knowledge Foundation, PLOS, and members of the Open Science Community.

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