We’re super excited to announce our keynote speakers for the 2018 CC Global Summit from April 13-15 in Toronto. The open call for submissions just closed, with more proposals than ever before, and it’s shaping up to be another excellent, community-driven event.

This year’s keynotes feature three brilliant, world-changing women who are experts in their field and members of the Creative Commons community, working for free and open knowledge globally.

Registration is now open. Last year’s event sold out, so don’t wait too long to get your ticket.

Katherine Maher is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. She is a longtime advocate for free and open societies, and has lived and worked around the world leading the introduction of technology and innovation in human rights, good governance, and international development. Katherine has worked with UNICEF, the National Democratic Institute, the World Bank, and Access Now on programs supporting technologies for democratic participation, civic engagement, and open government. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on Human Rights, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, a member of the advisory board of the Open Technology Fund, and a trustee of the Project for the Study of the 21st Century. In her keynote, Katherine will discuss “The Big Open,” — how organizations can leverage their shared missions and strengthen the broader free and open knowledge ecosystem.

Ruth L. Okediji is the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard University and Co-Director of the Berkman-Klein Center. A board member at Creative Commons, she is a leading expert on international IP law and international economic regulation. Last year, she published the book Copyright Law in an Age of Limitations and Exceptions with Cambridge University Press. She is the author of widely cited books on copyright and intellectual property and is regularly cited for her work on IP in developing countries. The recipient of numerous teaching, mentoring, and research awards, she is an editor and reviewer of the Journal of World Intellectual Property, and has chaired the Association of American Law Schools Committee on Law and Computers, its Committee on Intellectual Property, and its Nominating Committee for Officers and Members of the Executive Committee. She served as the Chief Technical Expert and Lead Negotiator for the Delegation of Nigeria to the 2013 WIPO Diplomatic Conference to Conclude a Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities (Marrakesh VIP Treaty). In 2015-2016, Okediji was appointed to High Level Panel on Access to Medicines at the United Nations. Professor Okediji’s remarks will consider the state of International Copyright, the recently implemented Marrakesh Treaty, WIPO, and international copyright law and exceptions in her keynote.

Note: Professor Okediji was scheduled to keynote in 2017 and was not able to attend due to last-minute weather related travel issues. We couldn’t be happier to welcome her back this year.

Chris Bourg is Director of Libraries at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also has oversight of the MIT Press. Chris is deeply involved with Open Access Initiatives, the future of research libraries, diversity and inclusion in higher education, and the role libraries can play in advancing social justice. Bourg’s Future of Libraries Task force recommendations, released in 2016, will play a crucial role in advancing the discourse and vision for the future of libraries. Bourg sits on the board of the Digital Public Library of America and co-chairs the MIT Task Force on Open Access. Her keynote will address issues of Open Access to research, the balance of privacy and openness, and diversity and inclusion in the open community.

Thank you to our Summit Program Planning Committee for their outstanding and collaborative work in helping choose our keynotes. Don’t forget to register for this year’s summit!

The post Katherine Maher, Ruth Okediji, Chris Bourg to Keynote Creative Commons Global Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.

Over the next few months, we will be talking to users and creators of CC images, text, and data as part of updating the usability of CC tools in 2018. For our purposes, we are defining CC usability as both enhancing the experience of sharing and collaborating with CC’s current toolset, and conceiving of new tools and features that unlock creativity and knowledge content.

You can read more about our process and plan here.

To get involved, we would like to invite you to submit a session proposal to the User-centered Commons track of the 2018 CC Global Summit in Toronto (April 13-15).

We will also be hosting an evening of drinks and discussion on February 15 in Los Angeles to explore how Creative Commons and open tools can increase the impact of emerging and immersive media and technologies for social good. You can learn more and RSVP for that event here.

We’ll keep you updated with major developments through our blog, Slack, and social media. In the meantime, you can ping me (jane at creativecommons dot org) with any questions, and follow me @janedaily.

Here’s to an exciting year ahead!

The post We are entering the Discovery phase of CC Usability appeared first on Creative Commons.

Beeple, AKA Mike Winkelmann, is a graphic designer, artist, and videographer whose popular video art and design work has largely been released free under CC. Every day for the past 10 years, Winkelmann has released a drawing online through his series of “Everydays,” which is now a personal archive of over 3000 CGI drawings and animations. His output is prolific in other genre as well – his hundreds of CC VJ loops are sought after by electronic musicians and artists looking for mashups.

Winkelmann’s short films have screened at a variety of festivals, and his Creative Commons illustrations and drawings have been used by artists such as Skrillex, Amon Tobin and Taïsto. He currently releases his work on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label.

Discover more of Winkelmann’s work at Beeple-Crap, Instagram, Tumblr, and Vimeo.

You’re a successful artist in a variety of genre on a popular label, yet you consistently release free VJ loops and other material under CC. How do you balance the two modes of creating? Why do you release your work into the commons? Why did you start using CC to begin with?

I think creating stuff and giving it away for free is something that just comes naturally to me for some reason. If there is something that I’ve worked really hard on, I want as many people to see it as possible so giving it away is the easiest way to facilitate that.

Of course, just like everyone else, I have a family and bills to pay and so I can totally understand wanting to charge money for personal work. For me though I’ve tried to draw a line between the freelance stuff that I do and purely personal work that allows me to still release things for free.

One of the arguments that skeptics sometimes deploy when talking about Creative Commons is, “Why would someone pay for this when they can get it for free?” How would you counter that assumption? What leads you to continue to use CC? How do you balance between free/attribution models and paid models as an independent artist?

I think the topic of art valuation is a very interesting subject. I think in some ways it comes down to issues of supply and demand, but is also further complicated with digital assets that can be copied at no cost. I honestly don’t think there are really any ‘right’ answers but personally I feel that there is room for both sides. While it is obviously true that most people will not pay for something that they can get for free, there exists a large amount of counter points to that argument on sites like Patreon where people give money free to people whose work they enjoy. I think sometimes people concentrate a little too much on trying to come up with some great business model when they should be focusing a bit more on their craft.

In terms of my own work, I don’t really have a paid model for the digital assets I create. All of the paid work I do is custom (freelance) work. At the moment I like having things be a but more cut and dry like that.

You’re on your 11th round of “Everydays,” in which you complete an art project every day, resulting in over 3500 pieces of original art. What’s the impetus for this project? How has it changed in 11 years? What have you learned, and what would you do differently?

I completed 10 years of everydays in May of last year without missing a day. The main goal of this project was to get better at art. When I first started out, it was to get better at drawing. After the first year of drawing I saw a huge improvement (while I was much better, I definitely still sucked) but saw this as a powerful tool to learn new techniques and continually improve.

Honestly I don’t think much has changed in 10 years. While I’ve seen a ton of improvements and benefits from the project, my skill set is really not even close to where I’d like it to be. I have so many different areas I’d love to focus more attention on so I don’t see stop anytime soon.

How has the rise of more visual, viral social media like Instagram and Facebook changed your work? How have you utilized other platforms as you’ve evolved as an independent artist?

These platforms have been great for helping me reach an audience especially given the format of work that I do. Putting out a picture a day or short little VJ clips, these are very small, easily digestible pieces that are perfectly suited for these platforms so I feel like I’m pretty lucky to be making work that is a natural fit for these mediums. I feel like being adept at utilizing these platforms and understanding the nuances of the audiences with each is pretty key to gaining a following today. On the flip side, I also think it’s something that you can get ‘too’ involved with and can be a bit of time hog. So I think you need to sort of find a balance between maintaining a presence on these platforms but not having it overtake your time.

What projects are you working on now that you’re most excited about? What kinds of projects are your favorite to work on?

Lately I have been doing some VR and AR work that has been really exciting. These are obviously very new formats that don’t have a lot of set rules so people are sort of discovering these things as they go along. I am also continuing everydays, VJ clips and working a short film. So working across a pretty wide range of medium which in itself has been a lot of fun since I get bored pretty easily doing the same things.

The post Art and the Every Day with Mike Winkelmann (AKA beeple) appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

Today’s topic for Copyright Week is Transparency: Whether in the form of laws, international agreements, or website terms and standards, copyright policy should be made through a participatory, democratic, and transparent process.

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Creative Commons has been following the development of several multilateral trade agreements such as the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (now known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement, or CPTPP), and the EU-Mercosur Association Agreement (EU-Mercosur).

These sweeping and complex agreements attempt to introduce trade regulations on a wide variety of products, including goods and textiles, agricultural products, and automotive parts. In addition, the agreements introduce provisions regarding environmental regulation, pharmaceutical procurement, intellectual property, labor standards, and food safety.

These trade negotiations typically contain copyright provisions that would affect the commons and the public domain, creativity and sharing, and user rights in the digital age.

Secrecy ensures outcomes are serviceable to power

A fundamental flaw with NAFTA, CPTPP, EU-Mercosur, and nearly all other trade agreements is that the texts and negotiating meetings are entirely opaque to the populations those agreements would cover. They are developed and negotiated in secret—at least from the perspective of the public and civil society. Sometimes industry representatives and other business interests are invited to view texts or give recommendations on proceedings, typically  after they’ve agreed to a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) forbidding them from sharing the information with anyone else.

The draft text of a trade agreement is kept secret for a reason. If the public got a glimpse of what was in the document, they’d be totally opposed to it.

How does this play out? It means that  TPP was already complete and the text was published before we could accurately analyze (and rightly criticize) the provisions inside. Civil society organizations like Creative Commons and the broader public have been put at an extreme disadvantage, as only a privileged few stakeholders invited into the closed negotiation circle have had their interests fully considered. And civil society increasingly has to rely on leaks in order to discover what is going on behind closed doors.

It’s not surprising then that we see that when intellectual property is put on the bargaining table, there’s a significant push to drastically increase enforcement measures for rights holders, lengthen copyright terms, and demand harsh infringement penalties. If incumbent industries and rightsholder associations are the ones getting access instead of the public, the objectives of the negotiators will align with those parties that have the ability to shape it.

As we’ve written, this secretive copyright policy making process has a disconcerting effect:

Despite the various international agreements that aim to harmonize copyright, individual nations continue to use multilateral trade pacts as an opportunity to add increasingly onerous requirements and further lock up copyrighted works. This kind of venue shopping harms the commons and users by creating a “ladder effect”: increased IP protections are negotiated between a few countries, and then used to pressure other nations to adopt, rather than conducting a fair, public, and international discussion.

In a letter to NAFTA negotiators at the restart of that process, we demanded reforms to make the proceedings more transparent, inclusive and accountable. We said that it is unacceptable that binding rules on intellectual property, access to medicines, and a variety of other trade-related sectors will be reworked within a process that is inaccessible and often hostile to input from members of the public. All trade negotiations should be made through procedures that are transparent to the public and which include all stakeholders. Increased transparency and meaningful public participation will lead to better outcomes.

The lights are on, but nobody’s home?

Even though they rely on secrecy, , governments working on multilateral trade agreements realize they can’t keep the public out forever. Some have set up some sort of feedback mechanism to collect the views of stakeholders. For example, during the lead up to the re-negotiation of NAFTA, Creative Commons and thousands of other interested parties submitted comments to the Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. consultations regarding the negotiating priorities and objectives. Are they listening? It’s not clear that any of our concerns (or those of like minded organisations working in the public interest) are reflected in the priorities published by the member governments (for example, see the summary U.S. objectives).

The examples generalize beyond trade negotiations. The EU has downplayed input from the public regarding its review of the copyright rules, discarding some, ignoring others, and demonstrating bias for professionally-written, pro-business, and English language responses. In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was harshly criticized for a broken public consultation regarding its proposed rulemaking to repeal net neutrality, with evidence revealing responses from individuals who did not consent to it, and even comments from dead people.

Lather, rinse, repeat

At this point we feel like a broken record: the process of copyright policy making needs to drastically change in order to adequately take into consideration the rights of users and the public interest. It’s safe to assume that copyright and other intellectual property rights will continue to be included in bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations, so it’s imperative that the negotiations be radically reformed to make the proceedings transparent, inclusive and accountable. It’s absolutely crucial that negotiators lift the un-democratic and counterproductive secrecy that has pervaded most of the recent discussions.

As mentioned before, we would like to see: public release of text proposals by governments before negotiations with clear processes established for members of the public to comment on them; consolidated versions of negotiating texts published between negotiating rounds; locations and times of key meetings announced well ahead of time; and the establishment of consultative trade groups that are broadly representative of both business and public interest stakeholders with a commitment to conducting deliberations openly.

The post Secret negotiations, empty promises: Copyright policymaking needs sunlight for better outcomes appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

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Today’s topic for Copyright Week is Public Domain and Creativity: Copyright policy should encourage creativity, not hamper it. Excessive copyright terms inhibit our ability to comment, criticize, and reworkour common culture.

Creative Commons licenses help authors keep and manage their copyright on terms they choose. Our public domain tools, on the other hand, enable authors who want to dedicate their works to the worldwide public domain to do so (by using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication), and facilitate the labeling and discovery of works that are already free of known copyright restrictions (by using the Public Domain Mark).

Creative Commons cares deeply about the public domain, and we’re not alone. There are many incredibly impactful, important, and simply interesting organisations and projects out there working to highlight, protect, and expand the public domain. Here are just a few of our favorites!

Wikipedia

Not only does Wikipedia provide the starting point for anyone who wants to learn about what the public domain is, it’s also an excellent educational resource for Wikipedia editors (and anyone) to dive deeper into the theory, history, and country-specific rules surrounding copyright and the public domain. Wikimedia Commons (the media repository that hosts the images, sounds, and videos you see in a Wikipedia article) contains thousands of public domain works, helpfully reviewed and tagged by editors. The Wikimedia Foundation has also been quite active in policy advocacy in defense of the public domain.  

Internet Archive

Everyone knows Internet Archive because of the mighty Wayback Machine, the sprawling web archiving tool that has saved over 310 billion (!) web pages so far—searchable by anyone. But you might not know that the Internet Archive is a massive digital library—home to 11 million books and texts, 4 million audio recordings (including 160,000 live concerts), 3 million videos (including 1 million Television News programs), 1 million images, and 100,000 software programs. The archive contains likely tens or hundreds of thousands of public domain media files, and users can create an account and upload their own creative works and put them into the worldwide public domain using CC0.

Communia Association

The Communia International Association on the Public Domain is a collective of organisations and activists working to strengthen and enrich the public domain (Creative Commons is a founding member). The current focus of the association is policy analysis and advocacy within the context the European Commission’s proposal for a new Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market. The current association was created at the completion of the eponymous research network, funded by the European Commission from 2007 to 2011. A major initiative of the project was the Public Domain Manifesto, endorsed by more than 1500 organisations and individuals, as well as a book-length study on the digital public domain, showcasing the major outputs of the research group.

Public Domain Review

The Public Domain Review is an online journal that showcases works that have entered the public domain, “that vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction.” It was launched by Open Knowledge in 2011. The site includes dozens of long-form essays which “seek to offer insight and reflection upon public domain works and the oft overlooked histories which surround them.” The website also includes browseable collections of public domain media, and also publishes an annual “class of” series around the new year to highlight works of authorship which will enter the public domain at the stroke of midnight on January 1.

Center for the Study on the Public Domain

The Center for the Study on the Public Domain is a research group started at Duke Law School in 2002. Its aim is “to promote research and scholarship on the contributions of the public domain to speech, culture, science and innovation, to promote debate about the balance needed in our intellectual property system and to translate academic research into public policy solutions.” The center was co-founded by James Boyle, a renowned copyright scholar and author who also was a founding board member of Creative Commons. In 2008 Boyle wrote a seminal work called The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. The center conducts legal and cultural research, and also has released several comic books on copyright issues, including Bound By Law and Theft! A History of Music.

Thanks to the tireless work of these organisations, the commons continues to strengthen and grow, improving access to our shared cultural and creative works in the public domain.

The post 5 Awesome Organisations Working to Protect and Expand the Public Domain appeared first on Creative Commons.