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

In keeping with this year’s Open Access theme “Open in Action”, Creative Commons and Authors Alliance are pleased to announce a new tool that empowers authors to learn about whether and when they have the right to terminate licensing arrangements they have made with publishers that prevent them from sharing their works openly.  All authors who transfer copyright under U.S. law have this right under certain circumstances. While many of these transfer agreements last “for the life of copyright” (which in the United States means seventy years after the author dies!), the law takes into account that these terms can ultimately be unfair to authors and artists, and so provides a mechanism for regaining those rights.

The tool, dubbed the Termination of Transfer Tool, is in beta form and now available for public feedback.

One early analysis estimates that control over more than 2.5 million works may be reclaimed by authors in the United States, but this is just a starting point. Anyone, including artists, photographers, scholars and scientists, can use this new tool to discover whether they have the right to take back rights they previously assigned away. While this tool is currently U.S.-based only, CC plans to internationalize it for use worldwide. Author Sidonie Smith of University of Michigan tested the tool with us just prior to its release. Check out our video demo to learn more. Feel free to test the tool, and contribute feedback via our public discussion forum. We’ll be taking feedback for the next month or so and hope to launch the final version of the tool in early December.

This is just one of several new tools that Creative Commons will be launching in the next two years in support of authors and other creators who want to retain and regain control of their copyright. Watch this space for more information as we roll out betas of our reinvigorated Scholars Copyright Addendum Engine (SCAE) and a new tool still in very early development that will allow time-based movement to more freedoms automatically. All three of these tools will be internationalized in collaboration with our affiliates around the world, and are being developed in part through generous funding by the Arcadia Fund.

Watch this space for more information. We look forward to receiving your feedback on this exciting new tool.

Happy Open Access week!

The post Regain Control Of Your Work — Announcing the Termination of Transfer Tool (beta) appeared first on Creative Commons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The principles of openness are embedded in everything we do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To recap, Great Minds created educational materials under a U.S. federal government grant that required them to be shared under a Creative Commons noncommercial license (specifically, CC BY-NC-SA). Public school districts—those that did not have the means or resources to make the tens of thousands of copies of the publicly-funded materials needed for use in the classroom—paid FedEx Office stores to make copies of some of this material. The copies were to be used by the school districts noncommercially. Great Minds claims that because FedEx Office charged its typical fee to make these copies at the direction of the school districts for use in the classroom, it violated the CC license.

We’re following up here with a few words about why we’re getting involved in this particular case, and why we believe it’s important for us to do so. Put simply, we believe that any entity—whether it’s you or me or a public school district—should be able to pay a copy shop to make copies of a work that has been published under one of CC’s noncommercial licenses, in order to use those copies noncommercially.

We feel that Great Minds’ interpretation in this instance is wrong. We also believe that this incorrect interpretation would dramatically reduce CC’s noncommercial licenses’ usability and usefulness. It would negate what Creative Commons—and more importantly, what innumerable users in our community—believes to be true about CC’s noncommercial licenses.

All around the world, people, companies, and institutions use our noncommercial copyright licenses to make their work available to the public for noncommercial use. They do so because they want to share and allow re-use of their work. There are uses that CC licensors clearly intend to allow and that licensees clearly expect to be granted through our noncommercial licenses. We strongly believe that one of those uses is the ability to have a company like FedEx Office make copies of that content so that licensees can make their own noncommercial use.

If this sort of use is not permitted by CC’s noncommercial licenses, then, in the real world, that means that anyone wanting to make copies of the content for noncommercial use must own a printing house, or a parcel delivery service if they want to send a hard copy by mail. We do not believe that this is a reasonable expectation or interpretation of the license. To keep the commons usable for all, we felt that we had to step forward on this case to help prevent a negative outcome.

For more on this case as it develops, please keep an eye on our blog and follow us on Twitter.

The post Why we’re fighting to protect noncommercial uses appeared first on Creative Commons.

Diane Peters and Michael Carroll
August 30, 2016

Creative Commons has requested permission to file an amicus brief in litigation between Great Minds and FedEx Office and Print Services, Inc.  At the center of the litigation is the proper interpretation of the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license, known as BY-NC-SA. The case is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York before Judge Hurley. While we rarely file amicus briefs, we feel strongly that the correct interpretation of the legal code here is essential to the utility of the NC licenses for both licensors and licensees, including those using any of the more than 370 million works that are licensed under one of CC’s NC licenses.

In this case, Great Minds claims that FedEx Office violated the terms of the BY-NC-SA license Great Minds applied to educational materials when FedEx Office copied material at the direction of school districts for non commercial use in classrooms. While it is undisputed that the use of these materials by public school districts is non commercial (as defined in the CC license), the claim against FedEx Office is that it cannot make copies for the school districts—even if it does so at the direction of the school districts and solely in service of that permitted NC use. CC disagrees with this interpretation and has requested permission to explain to the court why the license clearly allows this activity under these circumstances.

Entities using CC-licensed works must be free to act as entities do—including through employees and the contractors they engage in their service. To preclude an entity from using contractors to carry out otherwise-authorized work is not supported by the law, and is not prohibited by the terms and conditions of the NC license. A contrary understanding would mean that in many cases, a bona fide noncommercial licensee could not engage any service that charged a standard fee in the course of the non commercial user’s exercise of its legitimate rights under the license. Instead, only those with the means and resources to own all points in the reproduction and distribution chain could use NC-licensed material.  If that were so, the value of the license would be significantly diminished.

As a result, we believe this litigation is important to the usability of the NC licenses, which feature prominently in the OER ecosystem at present. Moreover, we pledged to our community during the 4.0 versioning process we would do more to clarify how the NC limitation works in the practical world. We will continue to work closely in collaboration with CC United States as this litigation unfolds. Watch here for updates as this case progresses.

The post Defending Noncommercial Uses: Great Minds v Fedex Office appeared first on Creative Commons.

 كانت السنتين الماضيتين مفعمة بالنشاط و الحيوية خصوصا في منطقة الشرق الاوسط و شمال افريقيا من خلال العديد من المشاريع المتنوعة مثل:  مشروع الكتاب المفتوح، ندوة اليونسكوالاقليمة للمصادر التعلمية المفتوحة في دول مجلس التعاون الخليجي و اليمن، توقيع مذكرةتفاهم مع جامعة سيدة اللويزة في لبنان، تنظيم فيديوهات بث مباشر على اليوتوب في مختلف المناسبات للحديث عن المسالة التقنية الملحة المتعلقة بحق المؤلف في العالم العرب، إضافة الى قيام الجزيرة الانكليزية بترجمة كتيب البيانات الصحفية الى اللغة العربية. وكذلك إطلاق حملة دعم للمطالبة بحرية باسل خرابيط؛ والقيام بإجتمعات حيوية للمجتمعات التابعة للمشاع الابداعي في لقائين تاريخين: اللقاء الاقليمي لاعادة الهيكلة, بناء القدرات و مشاركة افضل التطبيقات العملية للمشاع الابداعي في المنطقة, و لقاء الترجمة لوضع اللمسات الاخيرة على الترجمة الرسمية لباقة رخص المشاع الابداعي  4.0 الى اللغة العربية. و من المتوقع ان تشهد سنة 2016 تطوارت مثيرة و نمو متسارع  لمجتمع المشاع الابداعي في العالم العربي أيضا

اليوم و بعد عملية مطولة و جهد شاق و مكثف قام الفريق القانوني و اللغوي بانهاء ترجمة النسخة ٤.٠ النهائية لرخص لمشاع البداعي الى اللغة العربية وهي جاهزة الان للمشاورة العامة

المشاورة العامة هي مساحة مفتوحة للجميع – من المحامين الى مستخدمي رخص المشاع الابداعي, من اللغويين الى المترجمين – للمساهمة برأيهم. إذا كان لديك تعليقات او مساهمات جوهرية حول الجوانب المختلفة للرخصة سواء الجوانب القانونية أو اللغوية او قابيلة الاستخدام فان تعليقاتك و مساهمتك مرحب بها و سنكون سعداء بمشاركتك لنا برايك و أفكارك من خلال الرد على هذه الرسالة باللغة العربية. ينبغي ارسال التعليقات في اقرب وقت ممكن حتى يتاح للفريق الوقت لممراجعة, لذلك نرجو منكم ارسال تعليقات قبل ٢١ يوليو/تموز 2016

مع استمرار الجهود لتوسيع و حشد الدعم و التعاون بين الأقران في العالم العربي فإننا نامل ان تكون هذه المشاورة العامة فرصة لتعزيز التعاون عبر الحدود. هذا الدعم و التعاون القضائي و القانوني لهو نموذج  قوي وفعال في المنطقة و من المرتجى ان يصبح منهجية قابلة للتطبيق في المشاريع المستقبلية

كل التهاني للمشاع الابداعي في العالم العربي و نتطلع لسماع تعليقات الجموع العربي حول الترجمة

The post النسخة النهائية من الترجمة العربية لرخص المشاع الابداعي متاحة للمشاورة العامة الآن CC4.0 appeared first on Creative Commons.

The past two years have been specially vibrant, with a wide range of projects including the Open Book Project , a UNESCO regional seminar on OER in the GCC and Yemen,  Notre Dame University—Louaize in Lebanon signing an memorandum of understanding as an affiliate, Google hangouts on various occasions to tackle pressing issues in the digital ecosystem, and the Al Jazeera English translation of the The Data Journalism Handbook  to Arabic.

Other projects include #FreeBassel campaign support and the two historic meetings: the Regional Meeting to restructure, build capacity, share best practices, and the translation meeting to officially translate the 4.0 version of the CC license suite into Arabic. 2016 is also projected to have more exciting developments for the rapidly-growing CC community in the Arab world.

After an extensive process, the legal team finished the CC4.0 Licences Arabic Translation Draft for public consultation.

The public consultation is an open forum where everyone, including lawyers, active license users, linguists, translators, and others are invited to contribute to the project. If you have comments about different aspects of the licenses, particularly in regards to legal, linguistic or usability issues, please feel welcome to provide feedback and share your thoughts by replying to the thread in Arabic.

Comments should be submitted as soon as possible to allow enough time for review, so we encourage you to post here or to the CC Arab World list before the 21st of July 2016.

As efforts across the Arab world continue to expand and gather peer support, we hope that the this public consultation will foster more collaboration. Inter-jurisdictional support is a model that is particularly strong in the region, and hopefully it can become a viable approach for future projects.

Congratulations to the CC Arab World! We look forward to your public comments.

*An Arabic version of this announcement was posted to the CC Arab World list as well.

The post CC 4.0 Arabic Translation Draft Open for Public Consultation appeared first on Creative Commons.

Fair Use Week 2016 is here, and we’re happy to celebrate it alongside many other organizations and individuals who believe in the importance of flexible exceptions to copyright law.

There are now over 1 billion CC-licensed works available, and these will always be free for anyone to use and share. CC licenses work because of the existing contours of copyright. We sometimes complain about the numerous negative aspects of our collective copyright rules—such as absurdly long terms, disproportionate infringement penalties, and a pervasive permission culture. At the same time, we also need to support and expand the features of our copyright law that make possible increased access to information, educational activities, and freedom of expression. We all can use the Creative Commons licenses to create our own commons of content that can be freely reused and shared. But we still rely on the fundamental checks and balances to copyright law to do things that would never be possible using open licensing alone. This is why we celebrate Fair Use Week.

Fair use “permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders…[including for] commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship.” Fair use is categorized as an exception to the exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder. A fair use is not an infringement of copyright.

The legal doctrine of fair use continues to get stronger. In the U.S., a court case held that creating copies of copyrighted works for the purpose of search is a fair use. Scholarly and creative disciplines like documentary filmmaking rely on collaboratively-developed best practices guides that steer fair use norms for their respective communities. The power behind fair use lies in its flexibility, which allows for changes in technology and how we interact with and use copyrighted works for creative production, teaching, and learning, as well as new practices in research and journalism.

There are still threats to realizing the full potential of flexible limitations and exceptions to copyright. For example, there are currently trade agreements in play that diminish the importance of limitations to copyright. Instead of securing mandatory limitations and exceptions for uses of copyrighted works under the TPP, all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are voluntary, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding. Some scholarly publishers are trying to impose licenses that would restrict how researchers are able to conduct text and data mining. These licenses and contracts are problematic because they attempt to require permissions under the law where no permission would have been necessary otherwise. As we mentioned above, U.S. case law has already clarified that activities such as text and data mining will remain outside of the purview of copyright, while other countries are introducing specific legislative exemptions for it. Communia has written about how limitations and exceptions to copyright in the European Union should not be able to be moved aside by contract or license. Of course, Creative Commons licenses respect fair use and other exceptions and limitations to copyright. CC licenses end where copyright ends, which means you don’t need to comply with a CC license if you don’t need permission under copyright.

It’s clear that fair use and other limitations and exceptions are vital to a healthy copyright system. During Fair Use Week and the rest of the year, let’s continue to support and expand these critical user rights.

The post The flip side of copyright appeared first on Creative Commons.

“… Civile” / umjanedoan / CC BY

It’s a fitting start to CC’s second decade as a license steward that we are publishing for comment the third and final draft of version 4.0.

This draft has been long in the making, but we think it’s all the better for the extended discussion and drafting period, and therefore that much closer to finalization and realizing its full potential as an international license suite.

New in Draft 3

Much of our attention since publishing draft 2has been focused on improving the license in ways tied to key objectives we had in mind whenthis process started a little more than a year ago.

Sui generis database rights – a weighty factor in our decision to version – are now handled more thoroughly and clearly. The changes introduced in draft 3 will be of particular benefit for data projects and communities forced to manage the complexities of licensing those rights in addition to copyright. The 4.0 suite will provide more certainty about application of the license and the obligations of re-users of data where those right apply. The revisions also reinforce CC’s policy ofcombatting the expansion of sui generis database rights beyond the borders of the few countries where they exist. Those rights and obligations remain safely confined.

Interoperability has been a second, important objective of this versioning process. Our BY and BY-NC licenses have never specified how adaptations may be licensed. This is a source of confusion at times for users, especially for those remixing materials under a variety of licenses whether within or external to the CC suite. In draft 3, we have introduced provisions specifying how contributions to adaptations built from BY and BY-NC licensed material must be licensed. The rule we introduce should be intuitive for most (and has always been true), and will be easily recognized by others because of its foundation in copyright. We are eager to hear feedback on whether it’s a workable rule in practice. If so, then these new provisions will clear the way for increased interoperability between those two licenses and other public licenses.

We have also introduced a number of features to better ensure that works can be reused as the licenses (and licensors) intend. We recognize that licensors are often required or encouraged to apply technological protection measures when distributing their works through large platforms, and that those TPMs can prevent the public from using the CC-licensed work as the license permits (reproduce, modify, share, etc.). The license is now clear that if users choose to circumvent those measures in order to exercise rights the CC licenses grant, the licensor may not object. In some situations others (such as the platform provider) may have the right to object, and in some circumstances and jurisdictions doing may still be a criminal offense. Our licenses do not help in those situations (and should not be relied upon to protect users in those cases). But at least between licensors and those reusers, circumvention is expressly authorized.

Several other changes have been introduced to improve the smooth functioning of the licenses, including a few worth highlighting here:

• Although we have decided not to pursue a proposal that would have required licensors to offer representations and warranties, we now prominently highlight important before-licensing considerations that encourage rights clearances and proper marking of third-party content. These practices and considerations have long been promoted by CC. Placing them in closer proximity to the licenses educates licensors and encourages responsible licensing practices, and alerts the public to the limitations of the licenses.
• The license now includes a mechanism that allows for automatic reinstatement of the license when a violation is cured within 30 days of discovery, while preserving a licensor’s right to seek remedies for those violations. This was a popular request, particularly by institutions wanting to use high-quality CC-licensed content in important contexts but who worried about losing their license permanently for an inadvertent violation.

Public Discussion – Featured Topics

In this third discussion period, we will be returning our attention to ShareAlike compatibility, the centerpiece of our interoperability agenda. We will take a harder look at the mechanism necessary to permit one-way compatibility out from BY-SA to other similarly spirited licenses like GPLv3, and whether one-way compatibility is, in fact, desired. We will also develop compatibility criteria and processes, though that may not conclude until after the 4.0 suite is launched. We expect to explore the introduction of a compatibility mechanism in BY-NC-SA similar to that already present in BY-SA. Draft 3 incorporates the changes that would accomplish all of this, if the decision is made to pursue these actions following vetting with our community.

Internationalization will also be a highlight of this discussion period. We will be making a final push with our legal affiliates to fine tune the legal code so the licenses operate as intended and are enforceable around the world. As part of this, we expect a full discussion on the new interpretation clause that establishes a default rule for how the license should be interpreted.

Other topics we will be covering include attribution and some finessing of those requirements. And as publication time draws nearer, we will also be having discussions about the license deed and related matters. You can find a complete list of open topics, a list of changes in draft 3 and a side-by-side comparison of Draft 2 and Draft 3 (237 KB PDF) on our 4.0 wiki, as well as downloads and links to all six draft licenses.

We look forward to hearing from you in this final comment stage. Check out all six of the 4.0d3 licenses, and join the CC license development and versioning list, or contribute ideas directly to the4.0 wiki.

Thanks again for a productive comment period. Thanks for the many valuable contributions to date!

The post 4.0 draft 3 published – final comment period underway appeared first on Creative Commons.