Today the JURI (legal affairs) committee of the European Parliament approved the compromise text of the proposed directive on collective rights management in the EU (478 KB PDF, passages in bold are changes from the original proposal). The main objective of the directive is to facilitate the licensing of music throughout Europe (which is currently being done on a country-by-country basis) and to increase the transparency and accountability of collective rights management organisations operating in Europe.

Creative Commons has been following the discussions about the directive. Many collecting societies for authors of musical works prevent their members from electing alternative licensing frameworks, such as Creative Commons licenses, for their work. The directive provided an opportunity to change this situation by establishing clear rules for all European countries.

Over the past few years Creative Commons and its European affiliates have teamed up with Collecting Societies to allow, on a controlled basis, pilot projects that allow members of the participating societies to use the NonCommercial CC licenses. Such pilot projects have been launched in the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and France, and they have demonstrated that collective rights management and the use of Creative Commons licenses can go hand in hand.

During the discussion of the directive, Creative Commons advocated (together with others) that the directive should include provisions that would ensure that members of collecting societies can individually license their rights. As a result, the European Parliament introduced language in the directive that requires collecting societies to allow their members ‘to grant licences for the non-commercial uses of the rights, categories of rights or types of works and other subject matter of their choice.‘

We are happy to report that this new provision (article 5.2.a) has made it into the final text that was voted on in the European Parliament today. This means that once the directive has been adopted (there is one more vote in Parliament which is basically a formality), members of all European Collecting Societies will have the rights to grant licenses for non-commercial use of their work, opening the door for the use of the three Creative Commons licenses that allow non-commercial use of the licensed work.

Creative Commons applauds the European lawmakers with this step. The new directive will strengthen the rights of members of collecting societies, and we are looking forward to a future where musicians all over Europe enjoy more flexibility in sharing their creations.

Download the press release (67 KB PDF).

Creative Commons launches Version 4.0 of its license suite
Refreshed copyright licenses function globally and cover new rights

Mountain View, CA, November 26, 2013: Creative Commons (CC) announced today that Version 4.0 of its licensing suite is now available for use worldwide.

This announcement comes at the end of a two-year development and consultation process, but in many ways, it began much earlier. Since 2007, CC has been working with legal experts around the world to adapt the 3.0 licenses to local laws in over 35 jurisdictions. In the process, CC and its affiliates learned a lot about how the licenses function internationally. As a result, the 4.0 licenses are designed to function in every jurisdiction around the world, with no need for localized adaptations.

In a blog post celebrating the launch, CC general counsel Diane Peters acknowledged the role that CC’s affiliates played in developing the new licenses. “The 4.0 versioning process has been a truly collaborative effort between the brilliant and dedicated network of legal and public licensing experts and the active, vocal open community. The 4.0 licenses, the public license development undertaking, and the Creative Commons organization are stronger because of the steadfast commitment of all participants.”

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Creators and copyright holders can use its licenses to allow the general public to use and republish their content without asking for permission in advance. There are over half a billion Creative Commons–licensed works, spanning the worlds of arts and culture, science, education, business, government data, and more.

The improvements in Version 4.0 reflect the needs of a diverse and growing user base. The new licenses include provisions related to database rights, personality rights, data mining, and other issues that have become more pertinent as CC’s user base has grown. “These improvements may go unnoticed by many CC users, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important,” Peters said. “We worry about the slight nuances of the law so our users don’t have to.”

Additional Information:

• Launch announcement
• List of new features

We proudly introduce our 4.0 licenses, now available for adoption worldwide. The 4.0 licenses — more than two years in the making — are the most global, legally robust licenses produced by CC to date. We have incorporated dozens of improvements that make sharing and reusing CC-licensed materials easier and more dependable than ever before.

We had ambitious goals in mind when we embarked on the versioning process coming out of the 2011 CC Global Summit in Warsaw. The new licenses achieve all of these goals, and more. The 4.0 licenses are extremely well-suited for use by governments and publishers of public sector information and other data, especially for those in the European Union. This is due to the expansion in license scope, which now covers sui generis database rights that exist there and in a handful of other countries.

Among other exciting new features are improved readability and organization, common-sense attribution, and a new mechanism that allows those who violate the license inadvertently to regain their rights automatically if the violation is corrected in a timely manner.

You can find highlights of the most significant improvements on our website, track the course of the public discussion and evolution of the license drafts on the 4.0 wiki page, and view a recap of the central policy decisions made over the course of the versioning process.

The 4.0 versioning process has been a truly collaborative effort between the brilliant and dedicated network of legal and public licensing experts and the active, vocal open community. The 4.0 licenses, the public license development undertaking, and the Creative Commons organization are stronger because of the steadfast commitment of all participants.

With the 4.0 licenses published, we will be turning our attention to official translations of the legal code in partnership with our affiliate network and larger community. Translations of our new deeds are also underway, with a significant number already completed.

Thank you and congratulations to everyone who participated in making 4.0 a reality!

There are over half a billion pieces of Creative Commons–licensed content in the world. That’s an impressive number, but it only hints at how powerful and widespread CC licenses have become. The real impact is in the stories of how people like you use CC licenses. When you use a CC-licensed photo in a presentation or share your latest song under CC, you’re a part of the story of CC’s impact in the world. We’re proud to share in this amazing journey with you.

Today, we’re excited to launch Team Open, a new initiative of our staff and community. We’ve been spending the past few months talking to the CC community, looking for its favorite stories of how CC licenses benefit real people. You’ll meet a young scientist fighting cancer with free research, an entrepreneur who’s putting the public back in public domain, and a quirky musician who’s built his career on giving music away. We hope these stories inspire you, and we hope you feel inspired to share them with your friends and colleagues.

We’re also launching our annual fundraising campaign today. We have some cool giveaways this year, including a Team Open t-shirt and set of trading cards. To make it fun, we’re setting a little goal for ourselves. We’d like to see 600 donors by January. We’ll be keeping you up-to-date on our progress via Twitter and Facebook. If Creative Commons is important to you but you’ve never made a donation, this could be the day!

CC is more than a license to share; it’s a license for all of us to create a better world.

Creative Commons has responded to the European Commission’s consultation on recommended standard licenses, datasets and charging for the re-use of public sector information (PSI). See our response here. The Commission asked for comments on these issues in light of the adoption of the new Directive on re-use of public sector information. The Directive 1) brings libraries, museums, and archives under the scope of the Directive, 2) provides a positive re-use right to public documents, 3) limits acceptable charging to only marginal costs of reproduction, provision, and dissemination, and 4) reiterates the position that documents can be made available for re-use under open standards and using machine readable formats. CC recognizes the high value of PSI not only for innovation and transparency, but also for scientific, educational and cultural benefit for the entire society.

The Commission has not yet clarified what should be considered a “standard license” for re-use (Article 8). The dangers of license proliferation–which potentially leads to incompatible PSI–is still present. But it’s positive that the Commission is using this consultation to ask specific questions regarding legal aspects of re-use.

Part 3 of the questionnaire deals with licensing issues. One question asks what should be the default option for communicating re-use rights. We believe that there should be no conditions attached to the re-use of public sector information. The best case scenario would be for public sector information to be in the public domain, exempt from copyright protection altogether by amending national copyright laws. If it’s not possible to pass laws granting positive re-use rights to PSI without copyright attached, public sector bodies should use the CC0 Public Domain Dedication (CC0) to place public data into the worldwide public domain to ensure unrestricted re-use.

Another question first states that the Commission prefers the least restrictive re-use regime possible, and asks respondents to choose which condition(s) would be aligned with this goal. Again, we think that every condition would be deemed restrictive, since ideally PSI would be removed from the purview of copyright protection through law or complete dedication of the PSI to the public domain using CC0. If the Commission were to permit public sector bodies to incorporate limited conditions through licensing, then they should be expected to use standard public licenses aligned with the Open Definition (with a preference for “attribution only” licenses). A simple obligation to acknowledge the source of the data could be accomplished by adopting a liberal open license, like CC BY. Such a license would also cover other issues, such as acknowledging that an adaptation has been made or incorporating a waiver of liability. Some of the conditions listed would be detrimental to interoperability of PSI. An obligation not to distort the original meaning or message of public sector data should be deemed unacceptable. Such an obligation destroys compatibility with standard public licenses that uniformly do not contain such a condition. The UK’s Open Government License has already removed this problematic provision when it upgraded from OGL 1.0 to OGL 2.0.

In addition to mentioning CC licensing as a common solution, the questionnaire notes, “several Member States have developed national licenses for re-use of public sector data. In parallel, public sector bodies at all levels sometimes resort to homegrown licensing conditions.” In order to achieve the goals of the Directive and “to promote interoperable conditions for crossborder re-use,” the Commission should consider options that minimize incompatibilities between pools of PSI, which in turn maximize re-use. As far as we are concerned that means that governments should be actively discouraged from developing their own licenses. Instead, they should be encouraged to adopt standard public licenses aligned with the Open Definition. But even better would be to consider removing copyright protection for PSI by amending copyright law or waiving copyright and related rights using CC0.

Europe graphic designed by Monika Ciapala; Public Domain.