Today the U.S. Department of State released the Federal Open Licensing Playbook, a list of considerations, use cases, and recommendations for federal departments interested in developing and implementing open license requirements on federally-funded grant projects. It is designed to assist federal efforts to maximize the impact of grant funds, and create opportunities for innovation and collaborative practices using federally-funded resources.

Each of the nine “plays” contains common features, including a checklist, key questions, and examples of use.

Of particular interest is Play 1: Use widely accepted open licenses.

“Whenever possible, you should require grantees to use widely accepted and interoperable open licenses rather than create agency-specific or permit grantee-specific licenses. Customized licenses should only be considered if no existing open license meets the program’s needs. Custom licenses can inadvertently limit the usability of content, because they are often incompatible with each other and with common open licenses. By using widely accepted open licenses, agencies can ensure that their content can be remixed with content from many other sources, including other grant programs and other federal agencies. This also promotes consistency with existing standard practice outside of government. Common open licenses also enable attribution to content creators.

See also Play 3: Make resources adaptable and remixable.

“One of the goals of open licensing is to ensure members of the public are able to create derivatives of openly licensed resources, including by remixing content, translating content, localizing content, and creating accessible versions. There are two key factors for enabling adaptation: ensuring that the open license selected is broadly compatible, and ensuring that the openly licensed materials are in file formats that can be easily edited and tagged.

Creative Commons and other civil society organizations provided key input on the creation of this new open policy tool. The Federal Open Licensing Playbook draws inspiration from similar products developed by other federal agencies, such as the Digital Services Playbook.

The Federal Open Licensing Playbook has been released into the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, which means it can be freely reused, customized, and updated by anyone, anywhere in the world, with no restrictions. CC plans to repurpose the Playbook for use with other governments who also want to ensure publicly funded resources are openly licensed.

Open Licensing Playbook (.pdf)

Open Licensing Playbook (.doc)

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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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At her talk at this year’s Mozilla Festival, Maggie Vail made a strong case for artist-driven media, stating, “Artists create. Artists innovate. It’s what they do, even in business.” According to Vail, artist-driven media will help drive out the industry-backed corporations who seek to lock down the web, maintaining a stranglehold on the important projects that make creativity on the internet thrive. Democratizing creation in both platform-based and independent media means providing open licensing structures that support artists and promoting creativity and innovation. In the words of our mission statement, these structures will “realize the full potential of the internet.”

I feel lucky that I get to spend a good deal of my time seeking out and talking to brilliant 21st century creators, from Joost deCock, a self-proclaimed “sewcialist” who provides bespoke CC-licensed sewing patterns on his website to the Public Lab, which infuses science with art to inspire a generation of citizen scientists. I’ve spoken to fine artists, data scientists, journalists, and even actors, all of whom believe that through the power of sharing, another world is possible. For me, the commons represents this dream of another world. Our digital commons has now reached well over a billion works – the free exchange of knowledge is dependent on its growth and maintenance, but it takes creators and mission-driven projects to make that possible.

At the core of CC is our licenses, which makes sharing clear and simple across platforms, but I know that we are much more than just licenses – we’re a group of creators, scientists, lawyers, musicians, photographers, and sometimes all of these identities at once. We’re global, we’re multilingual, and most of all, we’re a community.

21st century creation means embracing the commons and the messy, collaborative form of open creativity that makes digital media so special. It means utilizing tools that question the status quo, and most of all, it means sharing and gratitude for the community that makes it all possible.

Our core of community is not a series of disparate projects, but instead a network of people driven by the desire to share their creativity with the world. What is creating in the 21st century? It’s remix, it’s reuse, and it’s collaboration, made possible by the dream of the global commons.

Read more of our commons profiles here.

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Want to make using CC even easier? Today we’re excited to announce the public beta and feedback period for our One Click Attribution Tool for WordPress. Using the plugin is simple: just install the plugin on your site by uploading the zip file containing it, choose your license (using our handy license chooser) click the button, and voila! You’ve added a license to your content.

WordPress powers almost 25% of the web, and CC powers over a billion pieces of content, so this collaboration is fulfilling our mission to make the web and the commons more usable, more discoverable, and more delightful every day.

Big thank yous to Rob Myers (Creative Commons’s software developer), who worked on finishing the new features, refactoring older code, and getting the project ready for this release. Previous work on this version of the code was done by Matt Lee (Creative Commons’s former Technical Lead). The original project was authored by Bjorn Wijers and Tarmo Toikkanen.

How to use the tool

We would like people to download and try the new version of the plugin and provide us with feedback.

In particular we would like to know whether:

• The documentation is sufficiently detailed.
• Installation and activation work as expected.
• The plugin works as expected.
• The plugin works with your version of WordPress.
• The plugin works with your WordPress theme.
• The plugin works with your other WordPress plugins.
• The plugin does everything you would like it to.

The downloadable, installable Zip file of the software can be found here.

The software project can be found here on the “develop” branch.

Bugs and other issues can be reported here.

You can also discuss the software with us via Slack on the #cc-developers channel, or via irc on #creativecommons-dev on Freenode.

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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 “You Bought It, You Own It, You Fix It”, which means that copyright law shouldn’t interfere with your freedom to own your stuff however you see fit: to repair it, tinker with it, recycle it, use it on any device, lend it, and then give it away (or re-sell it) when you’re done.

Many rights holders are saddling their content with digital rights management (DRM) or restrictive licensing agreements that attempt to limit the use, modification, and distribution of copyright-protected works. In some instances, copyright law being misused in service of controlling access and use of legally-acquired content.

One recent example concerns the agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere. John Deere attempted to use U.S. copyright law to restrict access to the software code on their tractors. Specifically, the company contended that provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows them to limit farmers’ ability to inspect and modify software code to fix or enhance the equipment they already own.

Every three years the Library of Congress entertains arguments from stakeholders wishing to receive an exemption from the anti-circumvention rules of the DMCA. If the exemption is granted, the farmer would be able to legally (within their technical limitations,) bypass the DRM in order to examine and fix their equipment. However, the Library of Congress process is far from ideal. The list of categories of exemptions is quite limited, and requires interested parties to submit new evidence every three years in order to be granted a renewal.

But the principle behind “You Bought It, You Own It, You Fix It” extends beyond our ability to repair, tinker, and fix the technologies to which we have legal access. We see a parallel in the policy work and advocacy that publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources. Just as we need rules that protect people in accessing and using content and technologies they’ve already paid for (like a John Deere tractor), we need public policies that guarantee access and re-use rights to things we pay for together, like scientific and medical research, educational resources, job training materials, and public sector data.

There are multiple benefits to the public of requiring open licenses on publicly funded resources. For example, it enables collaboration between researchers because the materials are legally “open” for working together, and for continuous improvement. It makes access easier and cheaper over time because the materials are shared widely instead of being locked down under copyright and proprietary licenses that benefit only a small number of rights holders. It increases the efficiency and overall impact of the grant funds stewarded by government agencies.

There are already implementations of the principle that publicly funded materials should be openly licensed materials. One specific example is a grant program at the U.S. Department of Labor. It’s a big program funding up to $2 billion for the creation and dissemination of education and training materials. The difference between this grant program and those that have come before it is that grantees must agree to license and publish the digital content they create under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (Note, the open licensing policy has been extended to apply department-wide). This way, the public, and anyone around the world, are free to re-use the materials for any purpose, as long as they give credit to the author of the materials.

Outside of government, we know that philanthropic foundations are learning toward adopting similar policies for their grantmaking. For example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation adopted a liberal open licensing policy (which went into effect as of January 1, 2017) for its science funding programs whereby all peer-reviewed published research and underlying data sets must be published immediately (meaning: without embargo) under a CC BY license.

Tomorrow for Copyright Week: “Transparency and Representation”. Copyright policy must be set through a participatory, democratic, and transparent process. It should not be decided through backroom deals, secret international agreements, or unilateral attempts to apply national laws extraterritorially.

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We are so happy to announce our official translation of 4.0 into Swedish. Now all Swedish speakers can benefit from the 4.0 licenses in their own language.

Creative Commons Sweden coordinated the translation process. The translation draft was prepared by the CC Sweden’s legal team. The draft was put to public consultation from 1 Jan 2015 July to 31 August 2015, and at the same time translation was sent directly to the people involved in the earlier translations of CC licenses, IP lawyers, librarians and representatives of cultural heritage institutions. Blogs, social media, and the mailing list were used to inform about the translation process.

Thank you to the members of CC Sweden involved in the translation process:
Catharina Ekdahl – lawyer, coordinator of the translation process responsible for managing the process of translation of 4.0 for Creative Commons Sweden.
Olle Pettersson – lawyer, coordinator of the translation process responsible for managing the process of translation of CC0 for Creative Commons Sweden.
Karl Jonsson – lawyer, legal lead of Creative Commons Sweden.
Kristina Alexanderson, project manager for Creative Commons Sweden, responsible for process of comments from CC Legal, final publication and contact with CC Legal.
Jonas Öberg – Creative Commons Sweden.

We want to also thank for invaluable help, comments, and support to Stefan Högberg and Lennart Guldbrandsson.

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