Please Support Creative Commons

It's not too late.  If you haven't already done so, please help support Creative Commons.   Find out how you can help support open education, open culture, open government, open science, and much more.

To donate: https://donate.creativecommons.org/

Creative Commons Licenses 4.0

 

After a significant international public consultation process spanning two years, Creative Commons has released Version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses.  This effort, led by Creative Commons General Counsel Diane Peters, and the CC legal team of Sarah Hinchliff Pearson and Kat Walsh, with significant engagement and input from the fantastic Creative Commons Affiliate community has produced a robust and elegant license suite that should serve the commons well for years into the future.

For details of what's new and why, I think Diane says it well here.

This is just a heartfelt thank you to Diane, Sarah, Kat, and to all of the affiliates and Creative Commons supporters who gave so generously of their intelligence, legal expertise, and good common sense to make the improvements we now have.  Working with this community of talented, dedicated lawyers who have kept the public interest at the forefront of their thinking has been among the greatest professional pleasures I have been privileged to enjoy.

Congratulations! ¡Felicitaciones! 御目出度う！Parabéns!  Herzlichen Glückwunsch!  تهانينا!
Gefeliciteerd! 恭喜！Felicitacions! 축하합니다! Binabati kita! Félicitations! बधाई हो! Grattis! מזל טוב! Tillykke! Baie geluk! Hongera! Congratulazioni! مبارک ہو! Gratulerer! ขอแสดงความยินดี 
Gratulacje! Tebrikler! Συγχαρητήρια! Selamat! Til hamingju! Поздравляем! Շնորհավորում եմ!
Čestitamo! Onneksi olkoon! Gratulálunk! Xin chúc mừng! Blahopřejeme! Palju õnne! অভিনন্দন!
Вітаємо! Apsveicam! សូមអបអរសាទរ! გილოცავთ! Честито на печелившите! تبریک می گویم! 
Blahoželáme! Tahniah! ຊົມເຊີຍ! Vobis congratulor! अभिनंदन! Felicitări! Təbrik edirik! வாழ்த்துக்கள்!
Prosit! Алал да му е! Sveikiname! అభినందనలు! Ngiyakuhalalisela! Ndiyavuyisana nawe!
Kuttyktaimyn! Баяр хvргэе Asengamhlophe! Vadaiyaan! E ku ori ire! Imelu Nke Oma! Arahabaina! Comhghairdeas!

World Bank Open Access Policy

As many may know, on April 1, 2012, the World Bank adopted an important open access policy for formal publications by World Bank staff.  This is a very important step for the open access movement and for Creative Commons.

Two aspects of the policy that deserve special mention: (1) deposit is required; and (2) the policy focuses on the terms of reuse in addition to online availability.

The key features are that World Bank staff are required to deposit their research into the Bank's Open Knowledge Repository. Internally published research will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Externally published articles will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported License unless the publisher accepts the CC BY license.

On May 21, 2012, I participated in a panel discussion about how this policy will contribute to the Bank's pro-development mission.  The video from that is here:

YouTube and Creative Commons

So, this blog has been dormant for some time.  I've been swamped, but it's time to get back to business.  Here's a short post just to make sure not to let this development go unmentioned by me.  YouTube has embedded the ability for users to license their videos under the CC Attribution Only license (a.k.a. CC BY)! Details here. Already a repository of more than 10,000 videos under this license are available.

From the day Creative Commons launched, we've sought to work with companies that provide content platforms to embed CC licensing as a choice for creators who want a different deal than the one that all-rights-reserved copyright law offers.  It's been a long time coming, and I'm personally grateful to the staff at CC and at Google for making this happen.

The CC By license allows others to translate, mash-up, or otherwise adapt these videos as long as credit is given as directed by the copyright owner.  I hope that the creative folks out there make use of the freedom that the CC license offers.  Stay tuned . . . .

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!

The "How To" Web - El Cocinero Fiel

Whenever Internet theorists want an example of how the Internet changes the world and makes possible things we never could have had before, Exhibit A is almost always Wikipedia. Now, I also think Wikipedia as a social phenomenon and as an information resource is pretty incredible. But, often I think this talk drifts into a kind of Wikipedia-exceptionalism. Even when one sweeps in free software as another form of peer production, I think the discussion about building an "it" misses what I think is the more fundamental human urge to teach one another.

It is a strong impulse learned in the nuclear family to teach others so that they may grow. In my view, it is this impulse that leads folks to contribute to Wikipedia, to essentially provide free software support or customer service to producers through user forums, and to share practical tips and knowledge through all manner of blogs. Taken together, all of this advice and sharing of practical knowledge forms the "How To" web.

(Of course, sometime this exercise comes off the web. At Campus Party 2009, Patricio Lorente of the Wikimedia Foundation taught a group of astronomers f2f at Campus Party 2009 how to create a Wikipedia entry.)

A case in point is the growth of video blogs or posts to YouTube that provide all manner of instructional video. While in Columbia, I had the good fortune to get to know Txaber Allue Marti, otherwise known in the Spanish-speaking world as El Cocinero Fiel (the funky cook). Living in Spain, but increasingly engaged in gastronomic tourism, Txaber's video blog is essentially an interactive cooking show hosted on YouTube. An important part of his success is that he interacts with his audience through the comment feature. He also posts his blog under a Creative Commons license.

Having been an occasional viewer of television cooking shows, I find Txaber's videos refreshingly direct and fun. In part, he makes the food the star of the videos, not the cook.

Below is Txaber, Carolina Botero (Creative Commons Colombia), and Patricio.

Bogota - Campus Party 2009

On July 11, I gave a keynote on Creative Commons and the principle of copyright neutrality at Campus Party 2009. Many thanks to Carolina Botero of Creative Commons Columbia and the folks at CampusBlog for the invitation. Pictured at the right are Carolina and Jaime Rojas, two of the four founders of CC Columbia.

Below is a scene from Campus Party.

Lessig on Helprin

There's a cottage industry of naysayers who seek attention by deriding all things Internet. A member of this crew, Mark Helprin, has put together a collection of pages bound together under the title Digital Barbarism which was printed by Harper Collins. I say printed rather than published because the book could not have passed through any meaningful peer review or editorial process. It appears that at least in this case, Harper has decided that its future is as a vanity press.

In the book, Helprin presents a largely fictional account of copyright law and takes some pot shots at Creative Commons along the way. If you happen to come across someone who has been taken in by Helprin's account, please refer them to Larry Lessig's meticulous refutation of Helprin.

YouTube Tests Creative Commons Licenses

Very exciting news, as reported by Eric Steurer on the CC Blog:

Eric Steuer, February 12th, 2009

YouTube just made an incredibly exciting announcement: it’s testing an option that gives video owners the ability to allow downloads and share their work under Creative Commons licenses. The test is being launched with a handful of partners, including Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV.

We are always looking for ways to make it easier for you to find, watch, and share videos. Many of you have told us that you wanted to take your favorite videos offline. So we’ve started working with a few partners who want their videos shared universally and even enjoyed away from an Internet connection.

Many video creators on YouTube want their work to be seen far and wide. They don’t mind sharing their work, provided that they get the proper credit. Using Creative Commons licenses, we’re giving our partners and community more choices to make that happen. Creative Commons licenses permit people to reuse downloaded content under certain conditions.

Visit YouTube’s blog for information. And if you’re are a partner who wants to participate, fill out the YouTube Downloads - Partner Interest form.

Can You CC License Music and Still Make Money?

Yes. Nine Inch Nail's Ghosts I-IV was released under a CC license and was the best selling album in 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store. As Fred Benenson writes on the Creative Commons blog:

NIN’s Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.

First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that.

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.

The Digital Public Domain

Whatever one thinks about the rest of the Google Book business, I think it's important to focus on the digitization of public domain books by both Google and the Open Content Alliance and to use these efforts as the basis for conceiving of the Digital Public Domain as a more robust version of the traditional public domain.

Here's the gist of the argument:

1. Copyright and the Encouragement of Learning.

Copyright law is at the heart of concerns about using the Internet to provide universal access to learned and cultural works. These concerns arise in particular with respect to two related issues: access to books and other printed materials that can be digitized and shared over the Internet, and access to scholarly works yet to be produced, which could be shared over the Internet but routinely are not.

The purpose of copyright law has been to promote learning and the progress of knowledge. Two features of copyright law should provide the guide for how to respond to access concerns. First, copyright is an author's right. This is definitional. Prior to 1710, the law provided exclusive printing rights to printers, leaving authors with no rights other than ownership rights in a physical manuscript. The first copyright act, the Statute of Anne, fundamentally changed this relationship by giving rights to authors, who could then make choices about with whom or how to publish. Since that time, copyright law has consistently remained an author's right.

Second, copyright law explicitly balances the need to reward authors for their contributions to society with the public's interests in having access to works created by others and the rights to reuse such works. For this reason, copyright is a time-limited right. Copyright expires so that the public may ultimately gain unlimited access and use rights. This also is definitional. The Statute of Anne created the public domain, and the English courts held in favor of the public domain in the Battle of the Booksellers, in which English publishers argued that perpetual common law printing rights survived the creation of copyright law.

Therefore, by design, all copyrighted works are destined for the public domain. But, the public domain as a legal concept means only that a work is free from copyright restrictions. There is no positive commitment by the law to make such works available to the public other than the deposit requirement under U.S. law. Nonetheless, removing copyright restrictions gives those who would publish or publicize works an incentive to do so for works still deemed relevant or interesting to the public. See, e.g., Paul Heald's article.

2. The Digital Public Domain

In the age of the Internet, we need to reconceive the public domain as the Digital Public Domain. In the Digital Public Domain, it is not enough that a work is free from copyright restrictions. A positive commitment to universal access to the public domain requires first that public domain works be digitized or at least be subject to a protocol that enables digitization when cost effective.

Second, works free from copyright restrictions should be made accessible over the Internet. Mass digitization of the public domain promotes the goals of universal access, improved learning, and the progress of science.

Third, works free from copyright restrictions should not be subject to technological measures or contractual restrictions or "terms of use" that in any way inhibit members of the public from exercising their usage rights in public domain works.

Fourth, access and the absence of legal restrictions alone are insufficient. Those who search the Internet for information often do so for active purposes. It is not sufficient to find information that is topically relevant. The information also must be useful for the researcher's purposes. Marking and tagging works with their use rights enables computers to search for information that is both topically relevant and useful. I've argued more extensively about use relevance here.

From this principle follows the corollary that the digital public domain should be tagged and marked as such. An important purpose for making copyright a time-limited right is to make the work more useful to the public, who may now republish or repurpose the work without fear of legal liability. To further this purpose in the digital age, computers must be able to parse the public domain status of a work to communicate its usefulness to researchers.

Consequently, those public and private bodies that laudably have been investing in efforts to digitize public domain works should increase the returns on their investment by marking and tagging public domain works as such. Creative Commons provides a metadata standard for digitally marking works with their use rights, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL). Specifically, Creative Commons provides a means of marking a public domain work as such. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/. Creative Commons requires support to implement plans to update this protocol to provide more robust information about public domain works.

3. The Open Access Connection

Looking forward, how should the features of author's rights and balance between author and public influence the availability of contemporary and future learned works, particularly scholarly research reported in peer-reviewed journals? Here, the open access movement has an answer.

Faculty authors and other professional researchers have a responsibility to manage their copyrights in a way that ensures public access to the scholarly record well before copyright expires in these works. Why? Because the standard justification for granting author's rights does not neatly apply to these scholarly authors. They are motivated by the desire to be read and are not remunerated by journal publishers for publishing their work.

When authors have no need to limit access to their work for purposes of remuneration, they should make their work freely available to promote the progress of science. When researchers have been funded by the government or by private charities, it is inexcusable not to ensure reasonable and timely free public access to the fruits of this research consistent with copyright.

Progress has been made recently in improving free public access to recent scholarship. As directed by the United States Congress, the National Institutes of Health now requires researchers who accept NIH funds to ensure that NIH receives a copyright license to make peer-reviewed articles publicly available on the Internet no later than 12 months after the date of publication. Many public and private science funders in Europe, Canada, and Australia have similar policies, with 6 month deadlines.

Faculty authors are coming to the realization that the way they manage their publishing rights should reflect their core values and the university's core commitment to disseminating knowledge. A number of faculties have adopted resolutions recommending open access, but these have led to very few results. Just as was the case when the NIH policy was voluntary, authors at these institutions generally continue to sign away their rights to make their work available on the Internet or fail to use such rights when they have them by depositing manuscripts in an open access repository.

Change is on the way. Taking the lead in the United States, the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences has adopted a policy through which faculty authors commit to deposit their peer-reviewed articles in the university's new digital repository and to grant the university an advance copyright license to any scholarly journal articles written by faculty members, subject to the author's right to waive the license on a per-article basis. Under the policy, faculty authors must manage their copyrights to ensure that their publication agreements are consistent with the university's public access license. Some faculties or departments at universities around the world have adopted similar open access mandates.

4. The Role of Universities

It is time for faculty and university administrators to get serious about the Internet as a knowledge medium. They need to organize a campus-wide process for developing a policy on knowledge dissemination in the digital environment. At most institutions it would be unwise or impractical for university administrators to impose an open access policy on faculty authors, unless the university were to take the position that peer reviewed journal articles are works made for hire and are therefore owned by the university. But, administrators should show leadership by organizing an ad hoc task force on scholarly communication comprised of leading scholars from major departments.

This should not be done by the library committee because the issue goes to the heart of the university's mission and is not merely a departmental budgetary concern. And, it should be made clear that experience teaches that if the task force recommends only adoption of a hortatory resolution requesting that faculty authors provide for open access, that is tantamount to a decision to do nothing to improve access to the scholarly record. Mandates work. Requests do not.

Those studying open access should take note that some authors have gone further to use public licensing as a means of giving the public broad use rights along with free access. Scholars who publish with publishers such as the Public Library of Science, BioMed Central or Rockefeller University Press grant the public a Creative Commons license that provides generous rights to translate, adapt and republish (with proper credit) their articles.

In sum, the initiatives to digitize public domain works and to provide open access to contemporary learning share the common goal of making the Internet a repository for human knowledge and a more powerful resource for researchers, students, teachers, and learners of all kinds around the world. Three principles derived from the purposes of copyright law, should guide these efforts: (1) the works should be freely available; (2) public domain works should be free from any contractual restrictions on use; and (3) the works should be marked with their use rights.

This post is derived from my presentation at the Boston Library Consortium's Universal Access Digital Library Summit in September with the aim of showing connections between book digitization projects and the open access movement.

Jesse Dylan and Creative Commons/Science Commons

Jesse Dylan, who directed the Emmy Award-winning "Yes We Can" Barack Obama campaign video in collaboration with rapper will.i.am., has donated his talent to make two videos for Creative Commons.

"A Shared Culture", explains the goals of Creative Commons.

Today, the release of the "Science Commons" video was announced in connection with a letter of support for Science Commons from Richard Bookman, University of Miami's Vice Provost for Research, Executive Dean for Research and Research Training.

Please Support Creative Commons

Creative Commons is asking for your support this year to enable us to continue the work we've been doing in promoting openness in the cultural, educational, and scientific fields. http://support.creativecommons.org/

If you support the vision, please help to staff the vision. Why? You might ask. How hard is it to host a web site?

Well, first of all, running a site that needs constant updating is more work than you might think. But, there's also much more to the organization. For example, CC staff, most of whom are professionals, promote the commons through a series of activities such as fielding inquiries from organizations that want to implement CC licensing, explaining CC licenses through public speaking engagements, working with communities - such as the open education community - to understand copyright law and CC licenses.

Some of that work is the more visible aspects of what we need support for. We continue to work with creators and other owners of copyrights in cultural works, our ccLearn division is promoting the use of CC licenses as a tool to support open education, and our Science Commons division is engaged in pathbreaking work on a number of fronts.

Here, I want to write about some of the less visible work that is hard, important, and really requires your support to continue.

Most people know Creative Commons through the licenses. We have been busy on that front. With support from the Mellon Foundation, CC is in the midst of a study about people's understandings and intuitions about commercial and non-commercial use to see if more should be done to clarify the non-commercial term of some CC licenses.

In addition, CC staff have worked with the network of affiliated professionals around the world to create a legal tool that will enable a person to waive copyright or dedicate their work to the public domain anywhere in the world. Because copyright law is national, and varies by nation, creating standardized tools that are effective on a global scale is challenging. Every copyrighted work is on its way to the public domain because all copyrights expire.

But around the world, the law makes it difficult for copyright owners to speed up that process by putting works into the public domain ahead of time. The CC zero tool is a substantial refinement of an existing tool that enables copyright owners to dedicate their copyright to the public domain in those countries that accept this and to otherwise waive or promise not to assert copyright-related rights against anyone.

One use for this tool is to help clean up the boundaries of copyright. Because copyright has become so expansive, this tool will be useful to those who want to put works at the edge of copyright that are connected to public domain information into the public domain. A prime example is arguably original database structures wrapped around factual data.

With your support, we would like to also improve on the tool that allows a person to assert that a work already is in the public domain, such as older works and works produced by U.S. government employees within the scope of their employment.

The CC tech staff also do amazing and important work. From the beginning, CC licenses were designed to be machine readable. Not all search tools currently fully exploit the machine-readable aspects of CC licenses, but one day they will. I've argued at length that copyright is an example of "use relevance" and anyone searching for information on the web with the question "What can I do with this" cares about use relevance. CC licenses provide an answer, and the Flickr search engine, which does use the license metadata, organizes the information according to its use relevance.

CC metadata has also become a case study for the future of the web, what some people call Web 3.0. CC people have been essential and instrumental in promoting a flexible technical standard, called RDFa, within the World Wide Web consortium. The vision behind this standard supports the decentralized architecture of the web while providing a means to enable machines to make better sense of the information published to the web.

The goal of this work is to enable tools to develop to support the commons by making works in the commons easier to find and to use. Importantly, these standards are also designed to support the role of attribution in the gift economy. With the right implementation, machines could do a better job at identifying the source material and its creators in mash-ups, remixes, and the like.

All it takes is you. http://support.creativecommons.org/

Creative Commons Ecuador

On Tuesday, April 22, 2008, I spoke at the launch of Creative Commons Ecuador, which was held in the context of a conference on measuring quality in distance education hosted by the Universidad Technica Particular de Loja. It was a great event attended by about 300 people. Video is here.

There's great enthusiasm for CC here, and the project team, led by Dr. Juan Jose Puertas, has done a great job. In the photo, Juan Jose is accompanied by the other team members, Veronica Granda Gonzalez (left) and Dra. Patricia Pacheco, all from the UTPL legal department. Carlos Correa Loyola, Director of the IT program, also provided support as did the Chancellor and Rector of the university, Fr. Luis Miguel Romero.

The university also announced its "Open UTPL" program, through which it will be putting course materials online under a CC Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.

Ecuador joins an active Creative Commons community in Latin America. Check this out.

Felicidades!

Please support Creative Commons

This has been a big year for Creative Commons:

• The amount of cultural works shared under a CC license continues to grow rapidly;
• Volunteers from more countries have ported CC licenses to work within their respective legal systems;
• Technology companies increasingly want to incorporate CC licenses into their business models;
• Our Science Commons project has made substantial progress on a tool for standardizing the exchange of biological materials for research and on demonstrating the power of the Semantic Web for open access; and
• We launched our ccLearn initiative with generous support from the Hewlett Foundation to give particular focus to the role that CC licenses play and can play in the creation and sharing of educational materials.

All of this requires the time and energy of our very talented staff, who, it turns out, require food, clothing, and shelter in order to do the great work they do. For that reason, I ask that you please contribute to the Creative Commons annual campaign and help spread the word. http://support.creativecommons.org/supportcc

We have great projects in the pipeline, but we can only bring these to fruition with your support. Thank you and seasons greetings.

CC Learn - Employment Opportunity

Creative Commons is looking for an Executive Director to head up our newly launched division, CC Learn. The position is located in the San Francisco office, working with the astounding CC staff. Details are here. http://creativecommons.org/about/opportunities#ccl Please pass this information along to the networks you are a part of and encourage qualified people to apply.

CC Learn - Announcement

Creative Commons is pleased to announce that we are launching a new division called CC Learn, which will extend the work we've been doing to support open educational material and repositories - kindergarten through lifelong learning. This initiative is made possible by the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.

CC Learn's immediate goal is to work with those who already provide open educational resources to remove or mitigate barriers to combining or remixing content from different open collections. In other words, our goal is to make material more "interoperable," to speed up the virtuous cycle of use, experimentation and reuse, to spread the word about the value of open educational content, and to change the culture of repositories to one focused on "helping build a usable network of content worldwide" rather than "helping build the stuff on our site."

Please help us spread the news!

We Need You!

The annual fundraising drive for Creative Commons is in its final days. Progress has been good, but we need a final push to make our goal. If you're looking for last-minute holiday gifts, there are some nice shirts and swag in the store. http://creativecommons.org/support/.

This has been a big year for the commons, and there's more exciting news expected in the new year. For those who have already shown their support, thank you!