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.

In your Kickstarter video, you explain that the Open Building Institute came about because of your inability to find adequate, eco-friendly housing when you moved to Missouri. Can you share more about that story?
A couple years ago, shortly after getting married, we moved to Marcin [my husband]’s farm in Missouri. A few months before that, Chris Reinhart [our friend] had built us a tiny house there (144 sq ft) and we were excited about moving into it. It quickly became evident that such a small house, by itself, was not adequate as a living and working space for two people. We talked to some contractors about expanding it and they provided us with budgets. Unfortunately, those budgets were all outside our price range—and didn’t even include the eco-features that were important to us: solar design, water catchment, local materials, etc. So we had to do it ourselves.
There was only one thing to do: we had to develop a method so efficient that it could be quickly learned and executed. Modular construction seemed to be the obvious solution. As we developed and prototyped these module designs, we also focused on streamlining them—to use locally produced and easy to source materials, to make the best possible use of available resources and to be easily built.
Very early in this process, we also became aware that we weren’t the only people facing challenges with adequate, affordable housing. Being open source advocates, it was very clear what we had to do: share everything that we had learned (including the mistakes) so that others could use it, build upon it, improve it. That’s how the Open Building Institute was born.

In 2011, you successfully raised money for the “Global Village Construction Set” through your project Open Source Ecology. How is this project an extension of your previous work? How is it different?
Open Source Ecology (OSE) is working on the Global Village Construction Set—a set of 50 open source industrial machines needed to build a small civilization from raw materials. Although OSE’s focus is very much on developing the technologies—and making them replicable by others—it’s also evident that they are tools, a means to an end to build houses. So the Open Building Institute is a direct application and extension of the Global Village Construction Set in that it uses our previous tools and techniques to manufacture local materials and build affordable housing. This, in turn, provides OSE with valuable test data that is used to refine the GVCS technologies. Building houses requires tools and technologies, and tools make no sense without an application—so the two projects perfectly complement each other.

The term open source is historically used to refer to software, but you’re using it for building modules. How does the Open Source ethos inspire other forms of creativity?
What we now call Open Source Hardware began mostly with electronics: creators who were accustomed to sharing their code decided it made sense to also share the designs and schematics for their devices. From small electronic devices it was only a hop to open source robots, aerial and aquatic drones, cars, wind turbines, tractors, industrial machinery, looms, laser cutters, 3D printers—the list is very long! And, from these, to open source garments, materials recipes and chemical formulas. And then houses and greenhouses, of course. Today, the term open source hardware can apply to any material object.

You’re building a physical space in which to construct these modular buildings and a training institute to teach the principles, but providing the designs for free, creating an interplay between virtual and physical space. Tell me more about this interaction between physical and virtual.
The interplay between physical and digital is one of the most exciting and promising aspects of this century. Today, most physical objects begin as bits: digital designs, specifications, schematics, etc. Add to that a means to quickly and cheaply share information with the whole world, and hardware starts to look a lot like software. In the case of OBI, this is manifest in 3D models and other digital representations of house components, utilities and machines. Before we build anything, we first model it using open source software and a library of virtual components/parts.
Of course, we still need a means to transform those bits into atoms. 3D scanners and printers are one of the most innovative ways of doing this. However, although we do use 3D printers extensively in our work, not all parts of a house can be printed (yet). For this reason, we also use old-fashioned ways of converting information into physical objects: build instructions and recipes.

Once you start thinking of material objects as embodied information, it becomes easier to see how they can be shared and remixed, just like any other digital creation.

How does the Open Building Institute encourage sharing and remix?
In this project, sharing and remix are not afterthoughts—they are essential to the system. Rather than offering only a few house or greenhouse designs for users to choose from, we offer a modular library of components that can be combined, like building blocks, to design a variety of structures. The modules themselves can also be remixed. This applies not just to things like walls and roofs, but also to utilities and machines. We basically take a complex object (a house, a machine, an appliance, a fixture) and keep breaking it down into modules—so that every single aspect of the object can be more easily remixed. A lot of work goes into creating 3D models and other digital representations of each module/component, as well as instructionals on how to use them. Then we publish this information online in standard formats (compatible with freely accessible software) to facilitate and encourage sharing.

Why is licensing important to this project? Why did you decide to use Creative Commons and why did you choose CC-BY-SA in particular?
Licensing digital designs for physical objects is complicated as we’re unsure whether any given design is considered a creative work (covered by copyright), an invention (covered by patents), or neither (public domain). Due to this uncertainty, applying free culture and free software licenses to open source hardware designs may end up being just a symbolic gesture. But it’s an important gesture. It’s important to take a stand and clearly tell the world how you wish your creation to be used. We think of licenses as pieces of information and signals of where a creator stands on the sharing spectrum.
We follow the Open Source Hardware Definition to select licenses for our work. Without getting too deep into details, this definition states that OSHWA-compliant licenses must allow everyone (without exception) to use, replicate and sell the designs and resulting physical objects. There are number of licenses that fit this criteria, but we love the CC system because it’s so easy to use and understand—thank you Creative Commons!

The license we use most frequently is CC-BY-SA because it encapsulates the core offer and request that we make. The offer is simple: you are free to use, share, remix and sell our work—in fact, we really, really hope you’ll do all of these things. The request is equally simple: please share any improvements you make so we can all benefit and achieve faster development through information sharing.

This is the most important value of the project: our belief in the benefits of open knowledge and know-how. The problems the world currently faces are so massive than nothing short of mass collaboration can address them.

Environmental sustainability is a key aspect of the project. How do you see your project influencing the future of environmentally sustainable building as a whole? How is it influenced by your previous projects?
What we hope to do is make eco-building a standard by lowering the barriers—by making it cheaper and easier to achieve—through a triple approach. The first component is to design low-cost houses that make economical use of resources—this includes things such as high-efficiency refrigerators, structural elements that block out cold/heat and conserve ambient temperature, low-flow faucets, etc. The second is to think of houses not as consumers but as producers of resources—this includes solar energy capture, rainwater catchment, food production with attached greenhouses, biogas, etc). The third component is the production of local materials from abundant resources: bricks made from soil, insulation made from biomass, lumber made from local forests, bioplastic made from starch, and so on so forth.
Rethinking housebuilding in these terms is not only more sustainable from an environmental point of view, but also from an economic one. Can you imagine how much lighter your financial burden would be if your house was made from abundant/renewable locally-sourced materials, consumed significantly less resources, and produced most of its own energy, water and food? Eco-houses should cost less—not more—than standard houses. This is what we see as the future of environmentally and economically sustainable building.

The post The future of housing is here: CC Talks with the Open Building Institute appeared first on Creative Commons.

A few weeks ago we submitted comments to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) draft federal source code policy. The purpose of the policy is to improve access to custom software code developed for the federal government, and would require that:

(1) New custom code whose development is paid for by the Federal Government be made available for re-use across Federal agencies; and

(2) a portion of that new custom code be released to the public as Open Source Software.

We provided feedback on a few different areas of the proposed policy.

First, we suggested that software developed by U.S. government employees should be clearly marked as being in the public domain not only in the United States, but worldwide, and as a matter of both copyright and patent rights. Under U.S. copyright law, works created by employees of the federal government are not subject to copyright protection in the United States. But what about foreign copyrights? Clearly, this custom code produced by government employees—thus in the public domain in the U.S.—could be equally as useful to developers outside of the U.S. There is no indication that the U.S. government has wishes to enforce its copyright abroad, but rather allows and even encourages the worldwide public to reuse its works freely, including software.

We said that software created by federal government employees should be released under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, which waives any copyright that might apply, accompanied by a standard non-assertion pledge (“nonassert”) that indicates that the U.S. government will not to seek to enforce patent rights it may have against reusers of the software.

Second, we proposed that software funded by the federal government but developed by third party vendors should be released under free/open source software licenses that permit the greatest levels of freedom for reuse with the least number of restrictions. This will ensure that the public is granted rights to freely use, share, and build upon custom software code developed using public funds.

Third, we urged the federal government to consider setting a policy of “open by default” for custom software developed by third parties. Right now, the draft policy requires each covered agency to release at least 20% of its newly-developed custom code each year as open source software.

Finally, we urged the U.S. government to extending its open source licensing policy to the outputs of Federal grants and cooperative agreements. We discussed a precedent that support the adoption of a default open licensing policy for software—even for grants and cooperative agreements. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) adopted an open licensing policy for the outputs of its $2 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grants Program. As a condition of the receipt of a grant under this program, grantees are required to license to the public all digital content created with the support of the grant under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license. In addition to content such as digital education and training resources, DOL requires that all computer software source code developed or created with grant funds must be released under an open license acceptable to either the Free Software Foundation and/or the Open Source Initiative. DOL adopted this open licensing policy “to ensure that the Federal investment of these funds has as broad an impact as possible and to encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials.” As of December 2015, the Department of Labor has adopted a department-wide open licensing policy, which covers all intellectual property developed under a competitive Federal award process.

The public comment period is now closed. The U.S. government will analyze the feedback and revise the policy as necessary. You can view all of the comments submitted here.

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What does this mean in practice? If you come across a CC BY-NC licensed photo anywhere on the web, PicScout’s ImageExchange extension will recognize it and give you what it believes is the source URL on Flickr. Here’s a screenshot to give you the idea of the results from a search for “flowers” on Google Images:

The important part to understand is that PicScout’s extension can recognize photos anywhere on the web — from Google Image Search results to a blog you stumble across. When you click the round information button at the top right of the thumbnails that it recognizes, you’ll get a dialog box with more information. If PicScout believes the photo is CC BY-NC licensed and from Flickr, it will point you to the photo’s original page on Flickr. PicScout also recognizes rights-managed and micro-stock images from various industry databases as well. This allows image re-users to get in touch directly with the owner of the photo and secure commercial rights to use it.

Recognizing commons content and identifying its original source is an important part of our community and it’s something we’ve been thinking a lot about. Take for example, the vigilant editors and administrators of Wikimedia Commons, which serves as the multimedia backend for all of the Wikipedia projects. A good portion of their time is spent weeding out copyright violations from the newly uploaded content to the project. If they had an easy way to determine whether an incoming photo was freely CC licensed, public domain, or All Rights Reserved, their jobs could be a lot easier. While PicScout’s ImageExchange is only indexing CC BY-NC licensed photos (which Wikipedia doesn’t accept anyway), we’re looking forward to seeing the database expand its reach into other domains in order to serve more and more communities.

For now, if you’re a creative professional searching the web for new images to use in your day-to-day work, sign up with Pic Scout’s ImageExchange beta program today!

The post PicScout Looking for Creative Professionals to Beta Test ImageExchange appeared first on Creative Commons.

Starting today, when you donate $50 or more to Creative Commons ($25 for students), you’ll be sent an e-mail with a link will let you either renew your current CC Network account, or sign up with a new one.

This promo code can be used by you, or if you want, you can gift it to a friend by just forwarding them the email with the link.

Just remember, individual promo codes can only be used once so use them wisely!

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Users are encouraged to upload both art and sounds, which can then be commented on and discussed by the community. Creators can ability to license these assets under the CC license of their choosing, making them available for the public to use in their own creations.

Kongregate Collabs just launched, so now is an opportune time to jump in, upload works, and see where the collaborative platform takes you.

UPDATE: Apologies to Kongregate and our community for the broken links – they now feed directly to the Kongregate Collabs live site.

The post Kongregate Collabs: CC-Licensed Online Gaming Development appeared first on Creative Commons.

This surrounding text also contains RDFa, though this is of limited utility to search engines since Facebook profiles are not yet publicly indexed.

Users also have the option to allow the application to update their status so that news of their license choice will appear in their friends’ feed. Selecting this option will help grow our application’s audience exponentially, so we would encourage you to choose it.

There are some limitations to this application and you should consider it in beta, so apologies in advance if things break or don’t work properly. Perhaps the largest limitation is that works can only be licensed on a per-profile basis. This means that you must make the decision to license all of your work of a given media type (e.g., all of your photos) under a particular CC license or none at all. Unless Facebook integrates CC license choices into their Photo application, licensing works on a per-photo basis (as users have the freedom to do on sites like Flickr and Wikimedia Commons) is not possible. Thus, this implementation of a CC licenses on Facebook is a stop-gap solution to true integration into the service. If you’ve got other ideas or find other bugs for our application, please head over to our wiki and post them.

Otherwise, go now and install the Creative Commons License Application and let your friends know that you’ve chosen a CC license for your content on Facebook!

Thanks to everyone who helped me conceptualize and test this application, and especially to the “Creative Commons on Facebook” group of 5,000+ users who kept encouraging us to move forward.

The post The Official Unofficial Creative Commons Facebook Application appeared first on Creative Commons.

Perhaps the most exciting feature in the future Firefox 3.5 for the commons is built-in support for the new <audio> and <video> tags and open audio and video codecs. Admittedly it isn’t easy to explain why open multimedia formats are so important for the open web — they are infrastructure, lowering a number of costs and enabling interoperability for everyone — so the benefits of widespread adoption of open formats (and opportunity costs of their lack) is systemic and largely invisible. We’re pretty comfortable with making such an argument and appreciate the challenges of doing so — though there are many concrete use cases enabled by Creative Commons licensing, we know those are the tip of the iceberg.

We’ve linked a few times to explanations of why open formats in particular are important, and back in 2004 a rant on fixing web multimedia by making audio and video on the web addressable like other items published on the web instead of opaque, which is essentially what the new tags and open formats drive at.

You can also see a few times over the past year where we’ve snuck <video> tags into blog posts for the entertainment of people on the cutting edge running Firefox 3.1 alpha and earlier betas at the time.

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• A beautiful, all-new widget based interface
• Browse while you watch– pop out any video to an external window (our number one requested feature)
• Miro is now faster, more responsive, and lower memory use
• You can add streaming sites like Hulu to your sidebar
• You can add download sites like Archive.org or legaltorrents.com to your sidebar and download to Miro with a single click
• Improved playlists
• New compact, sortable list view
• Better audio support

On top of the new release, Miro is rolling out a great new Miro Guide, which helps users find and download great content such as TED talks and NBC Nightly News.

Download Miro 2.0 for Windows, OS X, or Linux here.

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By offering a platform that exists not only as open source software but also allows for CC licensing of material, Koblo has set an exemplary model for their community to follow as it grows in regards to the sharing of content. Related is the Koblo Shop, an online store that will allow community members to sell their remix packs, plugins, loops, and beats in the coming months – the store is already live with preliminary content, including a CC BY-NC-SA licensed remix pack from Sweedish pop band Ace of Base.

Koblo joins an ever growing list of great online music platforms that are enabling unintended and unique collaboration through the use of new technologies and the permissive licensing allowed by CC licenses.

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