I am delighted to introduce the latest additions to the Creative Commons Board of Directors: Marta Belcher, James Grimmelmann, and Luis Villa. They each bring unique skills and experiences, and they’re all passionate advocates for Creative Commons and the open movement.

We are at a pivotal moment in the development of Creative Commons. As we focus on CC’s strategic goal of accelerating better sharing and prepare for the first CC Global Summit since 2019 in Mexico City this October, the insights of Marta, James, and Luis will be invaluable.

Their appointment was made possible through an open nomination process steered by the Governance and Nominations Committee Chair, Carolina Botero, who harnessed the insights of the CC Global Network. I would like to thank the committee for their work, and a hearty welcome to Marta, James, and Luis. Let us all welcome them with open arms as they embark on their journey with us.

 

About the new board members:

Marta Belcher

Marta Belcher holds multiple esteemed positions in the tech and legal sectors, notably serving as President, Chair, General Counsel, and Head of Policy for the Filecoin Foundation and the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. Additionally, she is an integral part of Protocol Labs. She also lends her expertise to the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a Special Counsel. Marta is also a Board member of the Blockchain Association and the Zcash Foundation, and a member of Paradigm’s Crypto Policy Council. Marta is a pioneer in blockchain law and policy, and has testified in Congress and state legislatures, as well as speaking in European Parliament. Marta was previously an intellectual property litigator at Ropes & Gray, and has submitted briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. appellate courts for high-profile public interest organizations, including EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, Public Knowledge, the Cato Institute, the National Consumers’ League, the Blockchain Association, and Project Gutenberg. Marta has been recognized by the Financial Times Innovative Lawyer awards, by Law360’s list of Top Attorneys Under 40, by CryptoWeekly’s list of Most Influential Women in Crypto, and as Business Intelligence Group’s Woman of the Year.

James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann is the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. His work is primarily focused on how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. His role often involves helping lawyers and technologists understand each other, and he’s applied concepts from computer science to tackle legal problems. He’s also written a casebook titled “Internet Law: Cases and Problems” and over fifty articles on a range of topics within computer and internet law. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an A.B. in computer science from Harvard College. Before law school, he worked as a programmer for Microsoft; after graduation, he clerked for a federal appellate judge. He is an affiliated fellow of the Yale Information Society Project. He previously taught at New York Law School, Georgetown, and the University of Maryland. He has written for Slate, Salon, Wired, Ars Technica, and Publishers Weekly; he is a regular source of expert commentary for major news media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and All Things Considered. He and his students created the Public Index website to inform the public about the Google Books settlement.

Luis Villa

Luis Villa has made significant contributions to the open community since the late 90s, taking on a multitude of roles. He started as a developer, later transitioning into legal and board positions. His experience spans renowned organizations like Mozilla and the Wikimedia Foundation, where he held critical positions. In addition, he has provided legal counsel to a spectrum of companies, from small startups to giant Silicon Valley firms. His involvement in the open-source community extends beyond his professional roles. As a community member and informal advisor, he has worked with organizations such as Open Street Map, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the World Wide Web Consortium, and OpenETdata.org. Luis is also a co-founder and General Counsel at Tidelift, where the mission is making open source work better for everyone, including the maintainers behind the projects we all rely on, and the enterprises benefiting from their creations.

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As part of our #20CC anniversary, last year we joined forces with Fine Acts to spark a global dialogue on what better sharing looks like in action. Our #BetterSharing collection of illustrations was the result — we gathered insights from 12 prominent open advocates around the world and tasked 12 renowned artists who embrace openness with transforming these perspectives into captivating visual pieces available under a CC license.

Each month throughout 2023, we will be spotlighting a different CC-licensed illustration from the collection on our social media headers and the CC blog. For July, we’re excited to showcase “Better Sharing For Brighter Future” by Janice Chang. The piece, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, was inspired by a quote from Tyler Green, Author, Historian, Art Critic and Producer/Host, The Modern Art Notes Podcast:

“It means understanding that sharing and open content is a means, not an end. For me, it means understanding that sharing and open content is a means, not an end, that open content and open access policies aren’t an end in and of themselves. Although within the context of an individual project, it’s an excellent end. But what we get, we the community of scholars, we the broader community of people, what we get is an opportunity to understand how this material fits within the worlds around us, allowing new and different ideas to more fully inform us. My favorite example is always going to be the more art and visual material, whether it’s photographs or engravings in 19th century magazines. The more we understand how images have worked across histories, the more we will understand how impactful artists and visual makers, engravers, whomever have been. And so I think that open access is probably the primary and most important means through which we will understand how artists have impacted the world.”

Meet the artist:

Janice Chang is a Los Angeles born and raised illustrator based in Brooklyn, NY. Much of her work takes on an honest representation of the sometimes humorous and bendy limbs of her characters as a way to engage in conversations around social and interpersonal issues. She works primarily for editorial, commercial, advertising, and motion clients, but also loves to explore painting murals, animation, and making sculptures.

Follow Janice on Instagram: @janiceechang

The full #BetterSharing collection is available on TheGreats.co to be enjoyed, used and adapted, and then shared again, by anyone, forever. View the full collection >>

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As a part of CC’s continuing engagement in policy to shape generative artificial intelligence (AI), Brigitte Vézina, our Director of Policy and Open Culture, participated in a June session hosted by the European Internet Forum: Generative AI, Art & copyright: from creative machines to human-powered tools. The panel was held in the framework of EU negotiations on the development of the Artificial Intelligence Act, one of the world’s first regulations dedicated to AI.

The panel was chaired by MEP Dragos Tudorache, Rapporteur on the AI Act, and brought together speakers representing rightholders in the creative industries, an AI developer, and CC as the only representative of civil society present to defend the public interest. The debate touched on several copyright-related issues related to AI training, transparency and safeguards, AI-generated outputs, and more.

In our panel remarks, we emphasized how, for many years, we have been examining the interplay between copyright and AI — exploring ways in which these technologies and practices could help people build on and contribute to the commons, stimulate new creativity, and foster better sharing, i.e. sharing that is inclusive, equitable, reciprocal and sustainable.

Going forward, it is clear that a diverse, global community must be involved in guiding the regulation of generative AI, with expertise spanning the fields of copyright, certainly, but also ethics, privacy and data protection, and fundamental human rights, so that AI’s promises are fulfilled and its perils, averted.

CC will continue our work to represent the public interest in negotiations around AI policy, as well as continue to engage and grow our broad, global community to refine and share understanding of AI’s impact on the commons. Join us at our Global Summit in Mexico City during 3–6 October 2023 where our theme is AI & the Commons.

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We are thrilled to announce that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have now adopted version 4.0 of the Creative Commons BY-SA license! The project first began using version 3.0 of the CC licenses in 2009 following a community process, having previously used the GNU Free Documentation License.

This decision, made as part of a Terms of Use revision that was widely discussed by the Wikimedia community, will enable more compatibility and reuse with CC-licensed resources as well as take advantage of the improvements in the 4.0 licenses.

Wikipedia is run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, and is one of the most widely-used websites in the world. Its resources are all freely licensed for reuse by the public. This change will now enable Wikipedia to incorporate content from a variety of useful sources that also use CC 4.0 licenses, including publications from the United Nations and many national governments.

This change was made through a revision to the project’s Terms of Use, where all new edits to Wikipedia will be under version 4.0 of the CC BY-SA license. Older edits will remain under BY-SA 3.0, which allows adaptations to be made with 4.0-licensed material. This presents a small amount of complexity for reusers, but over time, as more and more of the project is revised, this will become less of a practical concern.

Version 4.0 of the CC licenses, first published in 2013, introduced several important updates and improvements. Some of the key benefits of this upgrade include greater internationalization, more practical attribution requirements, a grace period for correcting reuse errors, improved clarity and simplicity, and better handling of rights outside copyright, such as database rights. These changes make it an ideal fit for Wikimedia’s mission of simple, globally accessible reuse in a wide variety of contexts.

A big part of CC’s ongoing stewardship of the commons is helping organizations like Wikimedia keep their platforms and communities aligned with current open licensing tools and practices. With Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikidata, and all the other Wikimedia projects together being some of the biggest contributors to the open commons, we know how important it is for these essential works made by people from all over the world to be as interoperable as possible with other open content. CC salutes Wikimedia and its community for doing the necessary work to align thinking and technology to make the move to 4.0 a reality!

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Back in 2004, ccMixter.org was born when Creative Commons and Wired magazine collaborated to support communities engaged in remixing openly-licensed and public domain music. As it has evolved over the years, ccMixter has become an independent project that supports musicians and creators working in remix culture, connecting them with each other and their fans. To reflect ccMixter’s contemporary identity, they have developed a new logo and a new tagline, “collaborative community”, represented by the “cc” in their name and logo.

Starting in 2009, ccMixter’s marks, terms of use, and format were managed by both Creative Commons and ArtisTech Media, an organization that supports global open music communities. Going forward, ccMixter will be operated independently by ArtisTech Media alone, with Creative Commons’ enthusiastic support.

“Today we’re celebrating an exciting new chapter for ccMixter,” said Emily Richards, CEO of ArtisTech Media. “Our history with Creative Commons and its licenses built a solid foundation for our community’s culture of sharing. We’re ready to take our creative collaboration to yet another level.”

Along with their new identity and independence, ccMixter has updated their platform to use the latest CC licenses, version 4.0, which enable shared music to be remixed more flexibly and with greater legal certainty across international jurisdictions.

“We are delighted that ccMixter can now be independently stewarded by the expert hands of Emily and her colleagues at ArtisTech Media,” said Catherine Stihler, CEO of Creative Commons. “Better sharing and the ability for us to work together with like-minded organizations further increases the value of the commons for generations to come. We wish Emily and her colleagues well and know that the commons is stronger for our working together to enable this project to live and grow in their hands.”

CC salutes ccMixter and its collaborative community and the ongoing beat of remix culture!

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