Indonesian electronic duo Bottlesmoker has been making DIY, “open source” music since 2005. Founding members Angkuy and Nobie are the brains behind this rebellious, alternative project, blending and bending genre and expectation through their uncompromising approach. Their music is fun, danceable, and truly a product of the internet – a “let’s do it together” collaborative approach to music making that has won them international acclaim.

This year has been particularly successful for the group: in addition to being the first Indonesian group to break through at Singapore’s St. Jerome Laneway festival, they released several new tracks and videos and have been featured in diverse publications including Bandwagon, Vice, and Yes/No music. 

How did you first learn about Creative Commons? What made you want to use CC for your music?

The first time we learned about CC was in 2006, when we released our first album via the Netlabel Neovinyl Records. Baldo, director of Neovinyl, explained how Netlabel worked and suggested we learn about CC. CC makes easier for us to thank the label in our work, and for the label to use and to share. And we think CC is a good way to license our works – which have the principle of free music sharing, so CC is the light for our music to be shared widely and used wisely.

What is “open source music?” Why is open source music important for you?

For us, open source music is a method of music writing that allows people to contribute to creative production and to be free to express their idea in music. Open source music is important in how people collaborate in creative ways to express their ideas and imaginations – through open source there’s a lot of knowledge transformation, the participants will transfer their culture. And that’s important to transfer all the things to the one good thing, which is music. Music in open source music has a million codes of knowledge.

You’ve experienced global success with your unique sound – how does openness play into this? Why is openness an important value for you as musicians?

We’ve learned so many things through the internet from people who share anything important globally. We transfer information and knowledge on internet, we learn from people who open their skill and knowledge, we learn from new culture in internet, the free culture. So, openness is the most important value and we want to be musicians who participate through the sharing of music. So far, we mostly seek unity in our music, so when our music shared freely and widely, and people use and enjoy it, that’s the biggest appreciation for us. We can’t live without openness, so being open to share is really important for our creativity and society, maintains innovation in all parts of creative works, and the openness is the door to that.

On your website, you write that you choose to “live by the internet.” What does that mean for you? What does that mean for fans of your music?

From 2006 until 2008, our life was only on the internet. We were rejected by all sides in Indonesia, from the record label to mass media. They can’t accept the openness of our music, the way we distribute music. But the internet really helped our music to be shared. Through the internet, finally our music can reach any country in this world, can be played by people in any city in the world. Without the internet, our music is only a ghost, frozen in a folder and buried in the computer. For fans, of course, they can access our music with the holy internet, and we can interact and share about cultures, ideas, and knowledge.

What’s next for you? What kinds of projects do you most look forward to? How are you looking to collaborate with other musicians in Indonesia and beyond?

We still make music and share it for free, so we’ll be releasing a new album in April for free. And we look forward to make a project about audio library of Indonesian traditional music instruments that people can access for free. Indonesia has so many musical instruments and we need to archive the sounds for historical education and culture. Soon we will also collaborate with an American musicologist who has been traveled around Indonesia for years doing field recording of traditional music, and we will make something together for our new album.

The post Bottlesmoker: an Indonesian Electronic Duo that lives by the Internet appeared first on Creative Commons.

At the end of 2016, Creative Commons Indonesia held a discussion titled “Celebration of Freedom of Sharing in Indonesia” with support from the Awesome Fund. This event was also held to celebrate Creative Commons’s 15th anniversary.

Creative Commons Indonesia is a project under Wikimedia Indonesia that aims to spread the message about open culture in Indonesia, especially about open licenses like the Creative Commons license. This project started the 11th of November 2011 in Jakarta, and the Indonesian version of Creative Commons license was officially launched in Jakarta on the 11th of November 2012.

CC invited 2 speakers for this discussion. The first speaker was Alifia Qonita Sudharto (Nita), Project Leader for the 2016 Creative Commons Project, and Agung Damarsasongko from the Indonesian Directorate General of Intellectual Property. In this discussion, Nita confirmed that CC Licenses work legally in Indonesia according to article number 80 from Law Number 28 Year 2014 about Copyright Law. Regarding the license recordal mandatory issue in Indonesia, Agung responded that license recordal mandatory appeared in Indonesian Copyright Regulation only aiming at the exclusive type of licenses. CC Licenses, which are categorized as an open license, are mainly used for nonprofit purposes and are not the same with some exclusive licenses which has commercial purposes.

Through this discussion, Nita hoped that the Indonesian people’s knowledge about copyright could be increased, especially about CC License usage. “If someone uses a CC License, you don’t have to be afraid of losing your right when you share your works online. The tool is strong enough to protect the works,” Agung stated. “And for now the government has also been better at tracking down online copyright infringement,” confirmed Agung as a closing statement for this discussion.

Discussion from the CC Indonesia Event

Musical Selections from the Event

Podcast about the CC Indonesia Event

The post Watch/listen: a celebration of Freedom of Sharing in Indonesia! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Our Global Summit is three short months away, and today I am delighted to provide some exciting updates to our program: two keynotes (more to come), five tracks, and a one week extension for submissions (now due on Friday, February 3).

Keynotes

Our first keynote will be international copyright and intellectual property expert Ruth Okediji, William L. Prosser professor of law at the University of Minnesota. Professor Okediji is the author of several books on copyright and intellectual property and is regularly cited for her work on IP in developing countries. She is an editor and reviewer of the Journal of World Intellectual Property, and has chaired the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Committee on Law and Computers, its Committee on Intellectual Property, and its Nominating Committee for Officers and Members of the Executive Committee. In 2011-2012, she was a member of the National Academies Board on Science, Technology and Policy Committee on the Impact of Copyright Policy on Innovation in the Digital Era. In 2016, she received the prestigious McKnight presidential professorship and was a visiting professor at Harvard from 2015-2016. Ruth was also part of the process of negotiating the recently approved Marrakesh treaty; she joined the Nigerian delegation and helped lead the African Group. She has an upcoming book, Copyright Law in an Age of Limitations and Exceptions. Ruth will be speaking to our first summit goal: “To define sharing and the Commons for our generation.”

Our second keynote will be journalist and lawyer Sarah Jeong, a
contributing editor at Vice Motherboard who writes about technology, policy, and law. She is the author of The Internet of Garbage, and has bylines at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Verge, Forbes, the Guardian, and other publications. In 2017, she was named as one of Forbes’s 30 under 30 in the category of Media. Jeong graduated from Harvard Law School in 2014. As a law student, she edited the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, and worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She was a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale for 2016, and also currently a fellow at the Internet Law & Policy Foundry. Sarah will be speaking to our third summit goal: “To discuss the future of the Creative Commons network and grow the CC movement.”

Tracks and track leads

The CC Global Summit will be organized around five tracks:

1. Policy & advocacy (Copyright reform, advocacy strategies, OER policies, etc)
2. Community & movement (CC network strategy, appreciation culture, stronger ties for the community in different domains, mentoring, strong diversity, etc)
3. Spheres of Open (GLAM, Open Education, OER impact, open data, open design, open hardware, open agriculture/farming, etc)
4. The Future of the Commons (Future of the digital commons, future of digital archives, how does CC fit in the broader Commons movement, Commons and economy, open innovation, Open business models, etc.)
5. Usable Commons (health data, 3D printing, legal infrastructure, open infrastructures for collaboration, patent data, etc)

I would also like to congratulate the track leaders, a diverse group of experts from around the world who will be assisting in programming and curating the tracks.

Track	Track Leader	Contributors
Policy & advocacy	Lisette Kalshoven, Europeana, CC Netherlands	Claudio Ruiz, Timothy Vollmer, Cable Green, Delia Browne
Community & movement	Kelsey Wiens, CC Canada	Claudia Cristiani, Batbold Zagdragchaa, Simeon Oriko, María Juliana Soto, SooHyun Pae
Spheres of open	Scann, CC Argentina	André Rocha, Mahmoud Wardeh, Cable Green, Delia Browne
The Future of the Commons	Alek Tarkowski, CC Poland	Claudia Cristiani, Jane Park, Alexandros Nousias, Paul Stacey
Usable Commons	Jane Park, CC HQ	Ryan Merkley, André Rocha, Alexandros Nousias

If you want to get in touch with any of the track leaders, please email us at summit@creativecommons.org

Call for Submissions extended

Finally, we’re extending the call for submissions to Friday, February 3rd, so that everyone can have an opportunity to submit their proposals. You can find the Call for Submissions here.

As always, we’re available for questions, discussions, or feedback on our Slack, on social media, or at summit@creativecommons.org.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in this process, and we look forward to seeing you all in Toronto in April.

The post Announcing first Keynotes, Tracks, and an Extended Call for Submissions appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Library of Congress in an incredible institution in the United States, serving as the research library for Congress, and stewarding an unparalleled collection of books and cultural works of all types. Over the last several years, groups have called on the library to make technology and policy changes to remain relevant in the 21st century, in order to meet its mission “to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.”

We’ve already mentioned a fews ways the Library of Congress could better support public access to information and cultural heritage materials, including opening up the Congressional Research Service so that the useful and timely reports are publicly shared with everyone (in addition to members of Congress), and developing a “digitization swat team” to ensure that all relevant government information and resources are accessible and discoverable online.

Now that Carla Hayden is the new Librarian of Congress, there’s been significant interest and hope that she will re-infuse the institution with excitement and digital vitality, and help address some of the technological challenges faced by the Library for many years.

One of the key roles overseen by Hayden is the director of the U.S. Copyright Office; this position is called the Register of Copyrights. Upon the departure of the most recent register Maria Pallante, Hayden initiated a public consultation to solicit information on the knowledge, skills, and expertise necessary for the next Register.

Creative Commons submitted answers to the survey questions (reproduced below). You can share your thoughts to the questionnaire through January 31, 2017.

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What are the knowledge, skills, and abilities you believe are the most important for the Register of Copyrights?

The Register of Copyrights should put the public at the center of the Copyright Office’s strategy and work plan. The Register should support and uphold key principles such as evidence-based policy analysis and development, nimble and user-focused technological improvements, open-minded public information gathering, and transparent decision making.

The Register should also have a firm grasp of technology and understanding of how creators and users share over the internet, and be willing to reconsider policies that impede the sharing of content in the digital era. The Register should also be able to engage with the broader community in ways other than a formal request for information and comments. The register should talk with and understand the challenges and opportunities of creators of all types, and listen to feedback and ideas from those who are generating new types of creative works.

What should be the top three priorities for the Register of Copyrights?

Regarding authors’ rights, copyright policymaking should uphold a principle of “copyright neutrality”. This means that when copyright policy is made, it needs to treat all stakeholders (authors) equally and take all authorial needs into consideration, not just those who wish to maximize their protection under the law, or who have an outsized ability to influence the policy-making process. Some authors are interested in commercialization, while others wish to share widely under permissive terms. The Register and the Office should develop and implement processes to make it inexpensive and simple to declare authorship and public license status, and for authors to dedicate works to the public domain. Copyright Office policy and practice should contain features that address the needs of all types of authors, whatever their choices along the copyright spectrum.

Regarding users and the public, the Register and Office should redouble its strategic priority to “make copyright records easily searchable and widely available to authors, entrepreneurs, and all who need them”. The Register should prioritize making collection metadata freely available in digital form, preferably by releasing an API or a similar approach so the public can build tools and interesting applications around the content. The public’s interaction with the copyright registration, recordation, and other systems should operate as 21st century users expect.

The Register and the Office should focus on overhauling the DMCA 1201 exemption-granting process by committing to reforms in the public interest. Changes should make the process less complex, less expensive, and less burdensome to those parties seeking an exemption. These could include—but are not limited to—a presumed renewal where no opposition exists, making particular exemptions permanent, and refusing to consider concerns not focused specifically on copyright. In addition to positive changes that can be made from within the Copyright Office, the Register should call for Congressional action to address these and related problems.

The post New Register of Copyrights should put public at the center of technology and policy goals appeared first on Creative Commons.

Hoy, la comunidad de Creative Commons está abriendo el proceso de consulta sobre el borrador de su estrategia para apoyar un movimiento global fuerte y en crecimiento. La propuesta es parte de un proceso liderado por la propia comunidad que comenzó en la Cumbre Global en Seúl, Corea del Sur, en octubre de 2015. Hoy estamos abriendo un período de consulta de dos meses con la comunidad más amplia de CC. La propuesta final será revisada y finalizada en la Cumbre Global en Toronto, del 28 al 30 de abril de 2017.

La propuesta recomienda cambios significativos pero necesarios al actual modelo de afiliados de CC, que originalmente se desarrolló para apoyar el proceso de adopción de las licencias a las estructuras legales de cada país. Hoy, el movimiento de CC es amplio y diverso, involucrado en educación abierta, reforma al derecho de autor, acceso abierto, datos abiertos y más. El nuevo modelo está diseñado para empoderar a los individuos y a las organizaciones que quieran contribuir a nuestros valores compartidos, construir equipos más fuertes y flexibles y coordinar objetivos y actividades para tener mayor impacto. Los colaboradores de CC y los afiliados serán parte del núcleo de esta nueva estructura, que esperamos crecerá y florecerá en un nuevo modelo liderado por la comunidad.

CC nunca emprendió una revisión semejante de nuestra red, pero mientras celebramos nuestro 15avo aniversario, llegó el momento de renovar el foco sobre la comunidad y la colaboración. Con un empuje fuerte de nuestra comunidad y con el apoyo del Directorio para renovar el movimiento, iniciamos un proyecto con un comité voluntario de afiliados de todo el mundo. Este proceso requirió investigaciones nuevas, análisis y horas de contribuciones de este diversos grupo de líderes globales. Trabajamos por consenso y todos contribuyeron activamente. Estoy orgulloso de lo que escribimos juntos y entusiasmado de apoyar al movimiento de CC a construir esta red juntos.

Los elementos claves de la propuesta incluyen:

• Una estructura de membresía para los miembros individuales de la red y las organizaciones partner o aliadas para tomar el liderazgo en el movimiento y participar en la gobernanza y en los procesos de configurar los objetivos de manera comunitaria.
• Habrá un Consejo Global de la Red (GNC, Global Network Council), implementado con representantes locales para proveer gobernanza al movimiento, localizar recursos financieros y definir áreas de interés y posicionamientos políticos globales.
• Los colaboradores, los miembros de la red y las organizaciones partner o aliadas estarán organizadas en equipos nacionales, con un coordinador nacional y un representante electo para el Consejo Global de la Red (GNC).
• El desarrollo de nuevos fondos para proveer recursos a los equipos de la comunidad para aquellos proyectos que hagan avanzar los objetivos del movimiento.
• La creación de áreas definidas de trabajo, llamadas Plataformas, para las actividades globales de CC, como reforma al derecho de autor, educación abierta y administración de las licencias. Cada plataforma incluirá objetivos, posiciones y un coordinador.

La consulta a la comunidad estará abierta hasta el 24 de marzo de 2017. Necesitamos escuchar comentarios por parte de la comunidad más amplia de CC para asegurarnos de que haya un amplio apoyo a los cambios propuestos. Nuestra investigación nos recomendó que trabajemos en múltiples idiomas, por lo que hemos traducido las propuestas al español, árabe y francés (versión en inglés). Posteamos una página en nuestro sitio con la información de contexto, la investigación, la propuesta y abrimos la oportunidad para hacer y compartir comentarios. Abrimos un canal de Slack (#network-consultation), y vamos a estar moderando discusiones en línea y reuniones presenciales. Se puede averiguar más aquí.

Para finalizar, quiero terminar este post con una expresión de gratitud. Mucha gente ha contribuido a este trabajo y quiero agradecerles. Aún queda mucho por hacer, pero no podríamos haber llegado tan lejos sin todas estas personas:
* La comunidad de afiliados de CC, el directorio, el consejo consultivo, los coordinadores regionales y el staff de CC
* El Comité de Estrategia y su vice-presidente, Alek Tarkowski
* Anna Mazgal y los investigadores detrás de los reportes de “Los rostros de los comunes”
* Paul Stacey y Kamil Sliwowski, nuestros talentosos facilitadores
* La Fundación Hewlett por su aporte generoso y su profundo compromiso con la comunidad de Creative Commons alrededor del mundo
* Nuestros donantes y seguidores, que eligen financiar el trabajo vital de CC

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