Creative Commons regularly works with governments, foundations, and other institutions worldwide to help them create, adopt, and implement open licensing policies. These policies typically require grant recipients to openly license and freely share the work they create with grant funds. We do this to ensure publicly (and privately) funded works are openly licensed and freely available to be accessed, used, and remixed by the public.

Over the past two years, we’ve been working with USAID, the Global Book Alliance, the Global Digital Library, and the Global Reading Network on early childhood reading programs, with a focus on helping these programs to recognize the potential of open licensing to increase the reach and efficacy of resources that promote youth literacy. In the course of doing that work, we all realized that additional materials needed to be created for grantees of the programs to not only understand the open license grant requirements, but to undertake the practical steps of implementing open licenses. To respond to that need, we collaborated with USAID and the Global Reading Network to write and co-publish Open Licensing of Primary Grade Reading Materials: Considerations and Recommendations, a guide to open licenses that includes an introduction to the basics of copyright, an overview of the benefits of open licensing, and suggestions for choosing and implementing open licenses.

The document is licensed under CC BY 4.0, meaning that it can be freely used by the public, including government agencies, policy makers, and grant making institutions looking to educate their constituencies about the benefits of openness and best practices in implementing open licensing.

Collaborations like this are some of the most important and rewarding work CC is involved with. If you’re affiliated with a government or institution that could use our help in making the case for open licensing, please get in touch with us at info@creativecommons.org.

See also: USAID’s Open Licensing Policy Rationale

The post Creative Commons and USAID Collaborate on Guide to Open Licensing appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Paris Musées’ recently released more than 100,000 works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the works into the public domain. They also released their collections’ Application Programming Interface (API), allowing users to “recover, in high definition, several royalty-free images and their records from cross-searches on the works.”

Users can scroll through the collection via the museum’s portal, discovering hidden gems like this photograph of French feminist Caroline Rémy and this beautiful illustration from an early edition of Les Misérables. This collection is a unique treasure trove for anyone interested in French history, art, and culture.

This announcement by the Paris Musées is a cause for celebration as it marks the continuation of a growing trend among GLAM institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, that are recognizing the importance of open access to artistic and cultural artifacts. 

We applaud the Paris Musées for this great contribution to the public domain, and we encourage other GLAM institutions’ to follow suit! 

If you are affiliated with a GLAM institution and would like guidance on using CCØ, or any of our CC licenses, please email us at info@creativecommons.org. We’re here to help!

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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reaffirmed Creative Commons’ interpretation of activities that are permissible under the NonCommercial (NC) licenses, which allow bona fide noncommercial reusers to hire out the making of copies of NC-licensed content, even to profit-making businesses such as Office Depot and FedEx Office. Below is an excerpt from the decision:

“Under the License, a non-commercial licensee may hire a third-party contractor including those working for commercial gain, to help implement the License at the direction of the licensee and in furtherance of the licensee’s own licensed rights. The License extends to all employees of the schools and school districts and shelters Office Depot’s commercial copying of Eureka Math on their behalf.”

This is the second time a federal appellate court in the United States has adopted CC’s interpretation of NC. The first decision was published by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit last year (summarized here) and involved copying by FedEx Office at the behest of school districts admittedly using the works for noncommercial purposes. 

CC’s position has been clear in both of these cases: so long as commercial actors are not acting independently for their own commercial gain but solely on behalf of noncommercial actors, they are protected by the license granted to the noncommercial actors.

After all, entities must act through employees, contractors, and agents as a necessity. To require every teacher, employee (including part-time student employees), and third-party contractor making copies of NC licensed works to forego payment for their services would make it impossible for those types of licensees to use the works and facilitate sharing for noncommercial purposes.

This is a huge win for educators, school districts and, most importantly, students.

All students deserve access to effective open education resources (OER) and meaningful, inclusive learning opportunities. These NC-licensed OER will help ensure students have access to the effective learning resources they need by allowing schools to seek assistance in making copies when they do not have sufficient resources to do so on their own. Further, because these resources were created using public funds received by the New York State Education Department from the U.S. Department of Education, it’s important that they remain openly licensed.

In October, Creative Commons requested permission to file an amicus and participate in oral argument. Our requests were granted, and our amicus brief (friend of the court brief) with the 9th Circuit became part of the record. Andrew Gass of Latham of Watkins argued the case on behalf of CC (video). 

A very special thanks to Latham & Watkins for their hard work and diligence over the course of both the 2nd Circuit and 9th Circuit cases.

The post U.S. Appellate Court Enforces CC’s Interpretation of NonCommercial appeared first on Creative Commons.

This is part of a series of posts introducing the projects built by open source contributors mentored by Creative Commons during Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019. Mayank Nader was one of those contributors and we are grateful for his work on this project.

Creative Commons (CC) is working towards providing easy access to CC-licensed and public domain works. One significant step towards achieving that goal was the release of CC Search in 2019. Through this search and indexing tool, we’re making a plethora of CC-licensed images accessible in one place. As CC Search expands to include more than just images, CC is also developing a suite of applications and interfaces to help users across the world interact, consume, and reuse open access content.

The CC Search Browser Extension is one such application. This browser extension is an open-source, lightweight plugin that can be installed and used by anyone with an updated web browser.

Why did we create this browser extension?

Browsers are the gateway to the web, and users often install browser plugins to improve productivity and overall experience. With the CC Search Browser Extension, users can now search for CC-licensed images, download them, and attribute the owner/creator without needing to head over to Flickr, Behance, Rawpixel or any other source of CC-licensed content. The other great feature? The CC Search Browser Extension works across different browsers, providing a familiar and intuitive experience for all users.

Key features of the CC Search Browser Extension: 

• Search and filter CC-licensed content

You can use the extension filters to filter the content by the source website, types of licenses, and/or use-case.

• One-click attribution

One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Attributing the owner/creator of CC-licensed content found using the extension is easy with one-click attribution. Both the Rich-text and HTML versions of the attribution are available.

• Download images (and attribution)

Download the image to use it in your works through the extension itself. You can also download the attribution information as a text file along with the image; this can be helpful when downloading multiple images in a single session.

• Bookmark images

Bookmarking the images will save them in the extension. You can view and remove your bookmarks from the bookmarks section.

• Export and import bookmarks

As a user, you can easily archive and/or transfer your bookmarks. This feature makes sure that the process of archiving and transferring bookmarks is uncomplicated and straightforward.

• User-interface (UI) options available for custom settings

The extension also allows for setting default filters, etc. The “Options” page helps declutter the main popup of the extension, ensuring that it shows only the most necessary information. In the future, this “Options” page will also host additional and updated features.

• Sync your custom settings and bookmarks across devices

Chrome and Firefox have a built-in feature that syncs browser settings and preferences across your logged-in devices. The extension leverages this feature to sync your custom settings and bookmarks. This will make your experience more pleasant and familiar. 

• Dark Mode

The extension also has a dark mode that you can toggle “on” by clicking the icon in the header. This reduces screen glare and battery consumption. You can set the dark mode as default in the “Options” page.

Future plans and development

• Find and fix bugs
• Add a review and feedback tab on the “Options” page
• Integrate Vocabulary into the extension
• Develop usability enhancements
• Remove infinite scrolling and replace it with pagination or voluntary loading
• Add search syntax for better specificity of results and a search syntax guide
• Make the code more modular and add more tests
• Port the features of the CC Search web application that are relevant in the context of the browser plugin

Installation

The latest version of the extension is available for installation via Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera.

Join the community

Community contribution and feedback is an essential part of the development process, so we encourage you to contact us if you have feedback or a specific suggestion. This is an open-source project, you can contribute in the form of bug reports, feature requests, or code contributions.

To install the development version of the extension, read the installation guide on Github.

Finally, come and tell us about your experience on the Creative Commons Slack via the slack channel: #cc-dev-browser-extension.

The post Introducing the CC Search Browser Extension appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is doubly excited to announce the publication of two official Chinese language translations of version 4.0 of our license suite: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. These translations will enable approximately 1.2 billion persons (more than 15% of the world’s population) to understand our licenses in their first language. We could not be more pleased to see this effort reach a successful conclusion after more than five years of collaboration among experts and communities.

Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese are different in important respects, but also have many similarities and overlapping communities. Even within each language, variances occur depending on region and cultures. While all official translations are faithful linguistic translations of the original English language 4.0 licenses, CC and its community account for these variations and document the rationale for those differences on our website.

Uniquely, this effort spanned volunteer legal experts and community members across the following jurisdictions: China Mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Chunyan Wang led our efforts on the Simplified Chinese translation, and Tyng-Ruey Chuang led our efforts on the Traditional Chinese translation. They were assisted by a large group of volunteers, to whom CC extends its profound thanks, including the following individuals:

Xingzhi Xin
Yi Zheng
Beibei Sun
Ben Cheng
Li Yahong
Ying Chan
Benjamin Chow
Haggen So
Lucien C.H. Lin
Yi-Hsuan Lin
Shun-Ling Chen
Ally Wang

This accomplishment is a testimony to the strength of our community and our shared vision for supporting the growth of the global commons. A special thanks to the Ford Foundation for a grant through their Global Travel and Learning Fund to support a meeting of the 4.0 translation teams in 2015 and 2016, and to the Wikimedia Foundation for supporting the teams’ translations efforts in 2016.

Congratulations!

The post Our 4.0 License Suite Is Now Available in Simplified and Traditional Chinese appeared first on Creative Commons.