Today, CC is pleased to announce the appointment of two new members of the Board of Directors, both prominent leaders and advocates in their fields. Congratulations to Amy Brand, Director of the MIT Press, and Delia Browne, National Copyright Director for the Council of Australian Government’s (COAG) Education Council and Copyright Advisory Group.

Amy Brand is Director of the MIT Press, one of the largest university presses in the world, and an important figure in open access publishing. The MIT Press is well-known for its publications in emerging fields of scholarship and its pioneering use of technology. Brand’s career spans a wide array of experiences in academia and scholarly communications. She received her doctorate in cognitive science from MIT and has held a number of positions in scholarly communications, publishing, and open information access at MIT, Digital Science, and Harvard before returning to the press in 2015 to serve as director. She is an Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and serves on the boards of Crossref, Duraspace, Altmetric, and Board on Research Data and Information of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. She’s currently working on her first documentary film, on women in science.

Delia Browne is a highly respected copyright lawyer and policy advocate who leads the National Copyright Unit (NCU) providing specialist copyright advice to Australian Schools and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutes with a focus on the rapidly changing digital teaching environment. A long time member of the Creative Commons Global Network, Delia is the Education Sector Lead of Creative Commons Australia and has attended every Creative Commons Global Summit since 2007 and she was an essential member of the community strategy team that authored CC’s Global Network Strategy. Delia is a strong advocate of the open education movement and has drafted a number of declarations and pieces of legislation including the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education and the Copyright Amendment on Disability Access and Other Measures Act 2017. She is a sought-after speaker and participates in many international conferences and think tanks on Copyright Law Reform and OER. She has represented Creative Commons at the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights and is dedicated to furthering the WIPO Limitations and Exception agenda particularly with regard to education. Delia is a co-founder and the President of Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) and a board director of the Australian Digital Alliance. She is also a member of the editorial board of Media and Arts Law Review and has taught Intellectual Property at the University of New Wales, Griffith University and the University of Auckland (her alma mater.)

These two women are excellent additions to our Board of Directors, joining with CC to fulfill our vision for open access to knowledge and a vibrant, usable Commons powered by collaboration and gratitude. We look forward to seeing all that they accomplish in their new appointments.

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The Lithuanian translation of the 4.0 CC licenses and CC0 is now completed. Both the licenses and CC0 translation can be viewed on the Creative Commons website.

The 4.0 translations are much anticipated by local heritage institutions as an online tool for evaluation of validity of rights and labelling content in the process of creation. The possibility to link the users directly to CC licenses and tools in Lithuanian is particularly welcome.

The Lithuanian translations were written by volunteer lawyers from the CC Lithuania team: Jurga Gradauskaitė; Rėda Pilipaitė, Paulius Jurčys, and Olegas Juška. The process was supervised by Prof. Vytautas Mizaras from the Faculty of Law at the University of Vilnius, Lithuania.

The CC Lithuania team will proceed with seminars and notifications to let potential users know of the possibility to use 4.0 in their local language and to reinforce the message of the benefits of labeling and sharing content.

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As the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament is nearing a vote on the proposed reform of the EU copyright rules, time is running out to make your voice heard. The vote will take place on June 20.

The final copyright directive will have deep and lasting effects on the ability to create and share, to access and use education and research, and to support and grow diverse content platforms and information services. As it stands now, the copyright reform—especially Article 13—is a direct threat to the open web.  

Article 13 is the proposal that would require online platforms to monitor their users’ uploads and try to prevent copyright infringement through automated filtering.

If you’re in the EU go to https://saveyourinternet.eu/ and tell Members of the European Parliament to delete Article 13 from the copyright directive. From the website:

Article 13 will impose widespread censorship of all the content you share online, be it a parody video, a remix, a meme, a blog post, comments on Reddit, a piece of code, livestreaming your gaming experience, or even a link in a tweet.

The filtering requirement violates fundamental rights enshrined in existing EU law, such as the provision in the E-Commerce Directive that prohibits general monitoring obligations for internet platforms.

One example of the negative consequences of Article 13 is that it will limit freedom of expression, as the required upload filters won’t be able to tell the difference between copyright infringement and permitted uses of copyrighted works under limitations and exceptions. Article 13 fails to uphold rules that protect the ability of EU citizens to use copyright-protected works in transformative ways. And it puts into jeopardy the sharing of video remixes, memes, parody, and code, even works that include openly licensed content.

Now the European Parliament is the last line of defense that can put the copyright reform back on track—or at least remove the most harmful parts of the draft legislation, particularly Article 13.

To provide a little background, for the last several years the EU has been working on revising its rules on copyright. Ever since the European Commission released its lackluster draft Directive on copyright in 2016, Creative Commons and dozens of organisations have been engaging policymakers to make crucial changes in order to protect user rights and the commons, enable research and education, and promote creativity and business opportunities in the digital market.

A few weeks ago the ambassadors of the EU countries agreed to a version of Article 13 that fails to address the biggest shortcomings of the Commission’s original proposal, and in a number of ways actually makes it worse.

Contact Members of the European Parliament now!

Send your representatives an email, tweet, or phone call before June 20 and tell them you need copyright laws that protect an Internet where you can share news and culture with your friends and family, where you can expect to be treated fairly, and where your rights as EU citizens are protected. Tell them to delete Article 13.

The post Act now to stop the EU’s plan to censor the web appeared first on Creative Commons.

Like the rest of the internet, it seems, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) that comes into effect today has given us a good opportunity to pause and do a comprehensive review of the ways in which Creative Commons collects and uses the personal information of its community. As an organization, our data processing activities are pretty minimal. But given our event planning, fundraising, and other core functions, we do collect and use some data on a regular basis. We have rewritten our privacy policy to make it easier to understand how, when, and why that data collection happens.

The full new policy is here. We have strived to make it simpler and more human-readable, all while ensuring it is as precise and legally robust as possible. (Just like our legal tools!) Substantively, the most significant changes are:

• We rewrote our privacy principles to better reflect the ideals that motivate CC’s current practices.
• We provided a more detailed explanation of our analytics tools and the instances in which the information they gather may be tied to your other personal information.
• We described our retention practices, which reflect CC’s recent effort to begin to streamline and centralize data storage practices internally.
• We added a simple process for you to request to access the data CC holds about you.

Most of CC’s data collection happens when you voluntarily and knowingly provide CC with data, for example, by signing up to join the CC Global Network or donating money to our programs. There are, however, three ways in which CC collects and uses some data indirectly: Google Analytics, fundraising analytics, and email analytics. Our privacy policy describes those processes and how to opt out if you choose to do so.

If you are already on our mailing list, we are not requiring you to opt back in to continue to receive CC email updates. We decided that measure was not necessary given that CC has been consistently strengthening its mailing list sign-up procedures over the years, up to the double opt-in mechanism we use now. As always, you should feel free to update your preferences or unsubscribe entirely at any time by going to this link.

CC will continue to monitor privacy regulations around the world and look for ways to improve our privacy practices.

The post Update to our Privacy Policy appeared first on Creative Commons.

Happy Africa Day 2018!

Every year on 25th May, Africans join together to remember the launch of the Organisation for African Unity (now rebranded to African Union) on May 25, 1963 in Ethiopia.

For years, many CC members across the African continent have expressed interest in collaborating on African Creative Commons initiatives.

On the sidelines of the recent CC Global Summit in Toronto, the African participants gathered, proposed and discussed areas of collaboration. We agreed to develop and complete projects by December 2018 in the following four categories:

1. Open Policy – Led by Elizabeth Oyange (CC Kenya) and Seble Baraki (CC Ethiopia)
2. Open Education Resources – Led by Aristarik Maro (CC Tanzania) and Hildah Nyakwaka (CC Kenya)
3. Arts & Culture – Led by Mohamed Rahmo (CC Morocco) and Asma Al-Amin (CC Kenya)
4. Open Access – Led by Kamel Belhamel (CC Algeria) and Helen Chuma-Okoro (CC Nigeria)

Some of these groups have already began working on their ideas:

1. The Open Policy group is targeting a project at the African Union. Details here.
2. The Open Access group project details are here.

In addition to these categories, Raphael Berchie (CC Ghana) and Simeon Oriko (CC HQ) will help to lead the creation of chapters across the continent. Obianuju Mollel (CC Tanzania/Canada) will coordinate follow up work across the four categories.

We welcome you to join us and contribute your skills and knowledge towards realizing the potential of these projects.

How do you join in?

Join the CC Africa WhatsApp group where many discussions on these and other topics are taking place. Also, join the CC Africa Slack Channel.

Not on CC Slack yet? Sign up here to join: https://slack-signup.creativecommons.org/

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