GS2013 Final Day in Hall (Ibtihel Zaatouri / CC BY SA).

And so we have it – we just came back from the Global Summit, CC’s bi-annual meeting of our global community, for another two years.

And the resounding opinion seems to be that this year’s Summit was a huge success. With over 300 attendees from over 50 countries and 5 days worth of events, it was our biggest meet up yet, and our first to have simultaneous language translation for most of the sessions. It had side events, keynotes, unconferencing, casual meet ups, and a rocking CC Salon.

Some highlights:

• the opening night CC Salon, featuring CC-licensing Argentinian musicians Shaman y Los Pilares de la Creación, Villa Diamante, and Sara Hebe and Ramiro Jota. Visuals were provided by vijay Valentino Tettamanti;
• the plenary panel on CC in the Real World, with inspirational projects such as Daniel Reetz’s DIY Scanner project and Valentín Basel’s educational robotics project, Fedora;
• fruitful discussions about CC’s stance on copyright reform, both at the pre-event miniconference and throughout the Summit. Watch the CC blog for more news on the resulting statement soon.
• the keynote by Lawrence Lessig at the University of Buenos Aires’ School of Law, during which he announced that he was teaming up with EFF to launch a landmark lawsuit against Liberation Music, who alleged copyright infringement when Lessig used part of one of its songs in a lecture he posted to Youtube. The suit could be an important precedent in defending fair use and setting limits on the overzealous copyright threats that to often occur on the internet.

If you missed out, you can find materials, including presentations and notes, on the Summit website. Watch for videos, which will be put up over the next few weeks.

The Summit couldn’t have happened without a lot of people. CC would like to thank the Summit Sponsors, the City of Buenos Aires, Banco Credicoop, Google, the Macarthur Foundation and Dotspin. We would also like to thank our venue, Cultural San Martin, and our side event organisers, FLACSO Argentina, Concepto Cero, and the Faculty of Law of Buenos Aires Unviversity. But most of all, we’d like to thank our coorganizers – our CC Argentina affiliates Foundacion Via Libre and Wikimedia Argentina. They did a fabulous job!

Creative Commons Global Summit 2013 (cckorea / CC BY)

You might remember a few months ago when CC announced the start of an affiliate project grant program to support and expand the work of CC’s global volunteer network.

Today, we are thrilled to announce the recipients of those grants. With a pool of over 70 applications from our community, 16 have been selected to receive grants that support and further open policies and practices in their region. From an open source platform for expression led by a Palestinian rap group, to an online copyright course for Latin american librarians, to a revived CC WordPress plug-in from Finland, we are more than excited to watch these projects unfold in the coming months.

We want to thank everyone for the thoughtful and varied submissions we received from our global affiliate community. In selecting the recipients, we based our decisions on a number of criteria, including the relevance to our mission, benefit to the CC community, significance of outcome, impact, feasibility, partners, and cost effectiveness.

Please join me in congratulating the recipients of the CC Affiliate Project Grants:

AFRICA
Kenya – School of Open Kenya Initiative
South Africa – Creative Commons for Kids
Tanzania – Tanzania CC Salon
Uganda – Promoting Creative Commons Initiatives in Uganda
Cross Regional – Activate Africa

ARAB WORLD
Algeria – Arabic Icons
Lebanon – CC Simply Explained in Arabic
Morocco – Creative BookSprint
Palestine, Lebanon – Hope Spoken/Broken: Change in the Eyes of Palestinian Refugees

ASIA – PACIFIC
Japan – Workshops and Symposium for Open Data in Japan
New Zealand – Media Text Hack
Taiwan – Practices and Depositories for The Public Domain

EUROPE
Finland – WpLicense Revived
Ireland – Awareness-raising Event in Dublin, November 2013
Romania – OER Awareness Activities for Librarians and Academics in Romania

LATIN AMERICA
Chile – Promotion of Open Knowledge in the Chilean Academia: Ways to Facilitate Adoption of Creative Commons in the Academic World
Colombia, El Salvador, Uruguay – An Online Course on Basic Copyright, including the open concept that will be totally developed in Spanish for Latinamerican librarians
Guatemala, Uruguay – Promoting Free Music in Central and South America

At today’s meeting of the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges, the Board voted unanimously to require open licensing on publicly funded materials resulting from all Chancellor’s Office contracts and grants.

The previous policy for these grants maintained ‘all rights reserved’ copyright over grant materials by the Chancellor’s Office; the exact language (PDF) reading, “The copyright for all materials first produced as a result of this Work for Hire agreement shall belong to the Chancellor’s Office.”

Upon reviewing the existing policy, and discussing the benefits of open licensing for publicly funded materials, the Board of Governors voted to adjust its policy so that any works created under contracts or grants funded by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office will be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) license.

The Chancellor’s Office will maintain its copyright over grant and contract funded materials, while enabling wide dissemination, reuse, and adaptation of those materials under the CC BY license. With 72 districts and 112 colleges, the California Community Colleges is the largest system of higher education in world to now require a CC BY license on its publicly funded grant materials.

According to the press release (PDF),

Using a CC BY license also saves taxpayers money by not funding duplicate work that may only be accessible on the local level. For instance, under the old grant requirements a community college staff may have produced a report under contract from the Chancellor’s Office but was not required to openly license or share that report with other colleges. This made it difficult for other colleges to access and reuse the report, but with the new CC BY requirement, other colleges can both view the report and reuse, share, and improve upon it with updated information and data.

“The Chancellor’s Office already held copyrights to all materials that had been contracted,” California Community Colleges Chancellor Brice W. Harris said. “But the great thing about the action taken by the board of governors this afternoon is that those materials will now be available to a world-wide audience. Also, the tax-paying public shouldn’t be required to pay twice or more to access and use educational materials, first via the funding of the research and development of educational resources and then again when they purchase materials like textbooks they helped fund. So, ultimately this decision to change the board’s regulations will save taxpayers money over time. That’s always a good thing.”

Dean Florez, President and CEO of the 20 Million Minds Foundation added:

“These are exciting times as the California Community Colleges takes the lead in advancing higher education. Creative Commons licensing saves families and taxpayers money and the advancement of Open Educational Resources further expands access to materials for faculty members and their students.”

The video of the open policy discussion from the September 9th meeting is now available. Learn more at the press release (PDF) and the presentation and analysis of the agenda item (PDF) from the meeting. Creative Commons is thrilled with this recent development and hopes this new policy by the California Community Colleges inspires other college systems to also implement open policies for their grants and contracts.

Thank you, California Community Colleges for ensuring publicly funded educational resources are openly licensed.

Related: California’s Community Colleges Shift to Creative Commons Licenses by The Chronicle of Higher Education

Are you planning to go to South by Southwest next year? CC has two pending sessions at SXSW Interactive and one at SXSWedu.

If you’d like to see these sessions happen next year, then please cast your vote. Voting ends this week, so please show your support now!

Open Education: The Business & Policy Case for OER

The Internet, increasingly affordable computing, open licensing, open access journals and open educational resources provide the foundation for a world in which a quality education can be a basic human right. Yet before we break the “iron triangle” of access, cost and quality with new models, we need to develop sustainable open business models with open policies: public access to publicly funded resources.

How Open Licensing Is Transforming Design

When designers share their work under an open license, they invite others to build upon and transform their designs without asking for permission, sometimes even using them commercially. A few years ago, the idea of letting non-clients steal your work was crazy; today, it’s a big part of how designers network, collaborate, and create professional opportunities for themselves and each other.

How Creative Commons Is Changing Artists’ Careers

When creators share their art under a Creative Commons license, they invite others to build upon and transform their work without asking for permission. Everyone has heard the stories of big names like Amanda Palmer and Cory Doctorow licensing their work under CC, but what about artists who don’t already have a massive following? Does open licensing open doors for developing creators, or does it close off potential revenue streams?

When we published Draft 3 of Version 4.0 of the CC license suite in February, we reminded our community that the ensuing consultation period would be its final chance to comment on the licenses before publication. The publication of that draft and reminder caused some stakeholders and others in our affiliate network to take a final hard look at the legal code. This was also the trigger for us here at CC to conduct one last review as planned. After all, one of our foremost goals has been to develop a long-lasting suite of licenses that will carry us as far into the future as possible. If there are some improvements we can make now and that will avoid problems later, then we ought take the time to account for those when possible.

That our publication caused the legal code to undergo this final level of scrutiny is the good news. We were also able to have a concluding discussion with our affiliates face-to-face during the 2013 Global Summit in Buenos Aires last week. There, we received valuable input from those in attendance about the final draft of the licenses.

The unfortunate news is the ensuing delay. For those eager to move from 3.0 to 4.0 — and there are many of you who have been waiting patiently — we recognize that the delay is a source of frustration. We are excited to say that the wait will pay dividends for everyone; however, the community identified a few important issues and we’re working together to address those issues in the upcoming draft. We’ll be expanding more on those when we publish the draft, slated for next week.

For those of you interested in commenting on the final draft, take note that the consultation period will be abbreviated, no longer than two weeks. The bulk of the changes are not substantive and do not involve a shift in policy. Instead, they involve further refinements and simplification in language when possible, consolidation of the sui generis database rights provisions into a single section for ease of reference, and similar improvements. The remainder will be concisely framed and explained, and we don’t expect them to be controversial.

Watch this space and our 4.0 wiki for the final drafts of the licenses next week. Thanks again for your patience and support. We’re close!