Lecture at Bucerius Law School

I will be giving a lecture on copyright law and Creative Commons tomorrow (Friday, December 11, 2009) at the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany. Dean Niva Elkin-Koren from the University of Haifa in Israel will also speak. Should be great fun!

White House - Open Access - Request for Information

Publicly funded research outputs should be freely accessible by the public absent compelling reasons to withhold access. That's a simple, perhaps obvious, principle that is slowly gaining ground in the digital environment. The NIH Public Access Policy makes important strides in the right direction, although the delay in public access is too long.

Now, in an important development, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has launched a public consultation on the question of whether the executive branch should adopt a more general public access policy for all federally-funded research outputs.

The window for comments is not open for long, so please take a moment to let the White House know that public deserves access to the research it funds absent compelling reasons to keep such research secret.

Please help me support Creative Commons

Gentle reader,

'Tis the season to ask for support for Creative Commons, and this year I have to make it personal. I have my own fundraising page, and anything you can give to help out would be most appreciated.

As many of you know, I have served on the Board of this organization since its founding in 2002. My primary motivation throughout these years has been to find ways to make it easy and understandable to legally share knowledge, creativity, and discovery. I’m a lawyer and my way of contributing to this effort is to help the organization craft standardized legal licenses and technical tools designed for these purposes. I hope that’s a goal you will support as well.

The organization is staffed by energetic, devoted folks who embrace the mission today with as much passion as when we launched. That’s a hard thing for most non-profit organizations to say, and it speaks to the power of the fundamental idea that we can accomplish more by working together to build a shared culture than by working apart. Just this year, a number of CC’s initiatives have produced these results:

• Wikipedia Officially Converts to CC BY-SA
• Google and Yahoo integrate CC licensing
• Ridley Scott to Use CC BY-SA for Blade Runner Web Series
• Open Data and More -- Getting Copyright Out of the Way With CC Zero
• CC and the Public Sector
• Creative Commons to Produce Open Patent Licenses – Nike, Best Buy, Yahoo!, and others to use
• Marking and Finding Open Educational Resources

Follow the links for more details, and don't forget to make a donation on your way out!