On February 7, 2017, Creative Commons released a public beta of CC Search. Our goal was to inspire discussion, debate, and ideas on how we can build a front door to the commons, and make content more discoverable and usable, and foster a culture of collaboration and gratitude. Now we’re looking for a Director of Product Engineering to lead that team at CC.

At Creative Commons it’s important to hire talented, diverse teams and advance women in leadership roles, and we’ve worked diligently this past year to ensure more of those voices are part of our team. You can help: if you know a bright, creative, technically-proficient woman or someone from a diverse community who wants to change the world with us, encourage them to apply. If that person is you, I can’t wait to hear from you.

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Every 1st of January, the Law and Technology Clinic and Creative Commons Israel celebrate the Public Domain Day. In Israel about 70 years after the death of the author, her works are released to the Public Domain.

This year on the 16 Jan. 2017 CC awesome fund helped us celebrate the Public Domain Day 2017 and Fair Use Week.

The celebration took place at Haifa University Faculty of Law. During the event we presented Creative Commons Licenses and explained about the Public Domain Day. We also talked about Fair Use Week which will take place on the 20-24 Feb. 2017.

What is Fair Use?

Copyright law creates a system of checks and balances that balance between the public domain and the granting of incentive for authors to create. Therefore, the new Israeli Copyright Act of 2007 includes permitted uses. Fair Use is one of them.

The new Israeli Copyright Act of 2007 replaced the old Copyright Act of 1911. The fair dealing clause was replaced by a Fair Use clause which is very much similar to the U.S. Fair Use clause:

“19. Fair Use
(a) Fair use of a work is permitted for purposes such as: private study, research, criticism, review, journalistic reporting, quotation, instruction and examination by an educational institution.
(b) In determining whether a use made of a work is fair within the meaning of this section the factors to be considered shall include, inter alia, all of the following:
(1) The purpose and character of the use;
(2) The character of the work used;
(3) The scope of the use, quantitatively and qualitatively, in relation to the work as a whole;
(4) The impact of the use on the value of the work and its potential market.
(c) The Minister may make regulations prescribing conditions under which a use shall be deemed a fair use”
There is another judicial criterion that has to be met before the use can be considered “fair” – attribution to the author.

However, the fair use clause is unclear and often impossible to say in advance whether a particular use should be considered fair or not.

This year we devoted the celebration to women authors.

Mr. Yair Even-Zohar (Zemereshet Israel) talked about women, authors, and performers whose works and performances are in the public domain. Mrs. Hana Yariv (Wikimedia Israel) talked about women as editors in the Hebrew Wikipedia and about the forgotten women who lack an entry in Wikipedia. The Israeli Creative Commons Coordinator Dalit Ken-Dror Feldman explained about the public domain and about CC Licenses. The Law and Technology Clinic read works that are in the Public Domain and that were written by women – Hannah Szenes, Rachel Bluwstein Sela and Mary Shelley.

It was awesome!!!

All photos via Dalit KD, Creative Commons Israel

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Private internet access is the lead sponsor of the 2017 CC Global Summit. Thank you for your support!

The post Thank you to our lead sponsor of CC’s Global Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons’ goal is a vibrant, usable Commons powered by collaboration and gratitude. That work has taken us beyond the licenses to explore new tools for discovery, reuse and collaboration.

We’re releasing CC Search today and inviting users to try out the beta, including our list-making features, and simple, one-click attribution to make it easier to credit the source of any image you discover.

One of the primary ways that our users find Creative Commons content is through our search page, which provides references to various repositories. The current CC search tool is accessed by nearly 600,000 people every month — but we can do better. There is no “front door” to the commons, and the tools people need to curate, share, and remix works aren’t yet available. We want to make the commons more usable, and this is our next step in that direction.

Our goal is to cover the whole commons, but we wanted to develop something people could test and react to that would be useful at launch. To build our beta, we settled on a goal to represent one percent of the known Commons, or about 10 million works, and we chose a vertical slice of images only, to fully explore a purpose-built interface that represented one type but many providers. For more details on our research and development process, you can read our developer’s notes and reflections over on Medium.

After a detailed review of potential sources, the available APIs, and the quality of their datasets, we selected the Rijksmuseum, Flickr, 500px, the New York Public Library as our initial sources. Later, after discussions with the Metropolitan Museum of Art regarding their collection of public domain works, which were released under CC0 on February 7, 2017, we incorporated their 200,000 CC0 images as well.

The new CC Search harnesses the power of open repositories, allowing users to search across a variety of open content through a single interface. The prototype of this tool focuses on photos as its first media and uses open APIs in order to index the available works. The search filters allow users to search by license type, title, creator, tags, collection, and type of institution.

CC Search Beta also provides social features, allowing users to create and share lists as well as add tags and favorites to the objects in the commons, and save their searches. Finally, it incorporates one-click attribution, giving users pre-formatted copy for easy attribution.

This is not our final product. It’s a beta, developed and released as early as possible in our development process to elicit discussion and conversation about the tool for its continued improvement. We’re in active development, and your comments and feedback will shape our work going forward as we add repositories, new media types, and new features.

This is a significant moment for CC, as we’ve always wanted to be able to do more to help people find and use the commons and make connections with each other as they create new things. We think CC Search is a good first step, and we welcome feedback on the tool via form, social (Twitter, Facebook,) Slack, or email.

The post Announcing the new CC Search, now in Beta appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announces that all public domain images in its collection will be shared under CC0, expanding their digital collection by over 375,000 images as well as providing data on over 420,000 museum objects spanning more than 5,000 years. CC0 allows anyone to use, re-use, and remix a work without restriction. This announcement will shape the future of public domain images online and underscores the Met’s leadership role as one of the most important open museum collections in the world.

Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley joined the Met to announce the release. The Met collection of CC0 images can be browsed on the new CC Search beta, also announced this morning.

“Sharing is fundamental to how we promote discovery, innovation, and collaboration in the digital age,” said Merkley. “Today, The Met has given the world a profound gift in service of its mission: the largest museum in the United States has eliminated the barriers that would otherwise prohibit access to its content, and invited the world to use, remix, and share their public domain collections widely and without restriction.”

Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas P. Campbell concurs: “In making images of our public-domain artworks available to audiences under CC0, the Museum is adapting its practice to make our collection available in a way that best meets the needs of 21st-century, digital audiences. We are excited to share with the public new pathways to creativity, knowledge, and ideas as manifest in the greater utility of its collections spanning 5,000 years of art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art thanks Creative Commons, an international leader in collaboration, sharing, and copyright, for beings our partner in this effort.”

At the announcement, Met partners also shared a series of other open initiatives, including the museum’s first Wikipedian-in-residence, a Github repository of the publicly accessible data, and a partnership with ITHAKA-Artstor and Pinterest to provide more extensive access to its collections. More information on these initiatives can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Image and Data Resources page.

Our profound thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for making this partnership possible. Today’s announcement is the result of the hard work and leadership of the incredible staff team at The Met, and Creative Commons is proud to have supported the development and implementation of this new policy. Through the power of the commons, billions of people will now be able to enjoy the beauty of the Met’s collections as well as participate in the continued growth of the commons, utilizing the infrastructure that makes greater collaboration possible.

Stay tuned to our social media and Slack for more updates and experience the collection yourself at the new CC Search beta.

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