Hi Creative Commoners! We are back with a new episode of CC’s Open Minds … from Creative Commons podcast. On this episode, CC’s Chief Operating Officer, Anna Tumadóttir, sits down for an interesting conversation with Sam Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Arweave, the company that created the Arweave protocol, a permanent archive of human knowledge and experiences on a blockchain. Creative Commons licenses are the first set of licensing standards to be deployed on Arweave. Sam has been immersed in open source since he was a kid, and started learning to code when he was nine. So it’s no surprise that now he’s passionate about building innovative software and solving complex problems in computer networking, and has built extensive experience in real-world mechanism design and implementation. When he’s not working on Arweave, Sam actively participates in the decentralized web space as technical advisor and mentor of blockchain projects.
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Sharing matters. Thanks to the digital revolution, we share things like never before, from scientific research to family photos, from day-to-day life to college courses — and all instantaneously. The variety and volume of sharing today was unimaginable even just a decade ago. Now social media and publishing platforms, smartphones, cheap data, and expanded internet access have enabled more sharing, both in forms that bring us joy and connection, and in the spread of lies, hate and misinformation. Our digital life reflects human nature in all its complexity, highlighting both the good and the bad.
All this sharing has created a flood of new copyrighted works — practically everyone is now a published author, many times over, when we think of all our social media postings — but is the current copyright paradigm working in our interest?
Copyright law is a strand of intellectual property law that affects us all, helping decide what we can read, listen to, watch and share online. It impacts creators, innovators and users of content. We all agree that creators should be fairly rewarded for their works. The economic argument that stronger protection for authors’ rights will inevitably lead to more gains for individual creators may appear convincing in the abstract. However, in practice, the economic argument does not turn out to be persuasive, because extending copyright terms from a few decades to life plus 70 years has not materially increased earnings for the majority of individual creators. Instead, it has generated greater monopolies, benefiting select corporations whose profit motives lift only a few star players. The vast majority of creators do not experience the benefits of the current copyright system first hand. When culture is paywalled, rented and held for profit, when knowledge is locked away, when our libraries are threatened and educators diminished, there’s a chill cast on how our society interoperates, and ultimately on the health of our democracy.
Onerous copyright rules, benefiting the few and not the many, obstruct our access to culture, the knowledge we share, and the society we care about. In order to empower individual creators and safeguard our democracy, Creative Commons (CC) has developed an alternative system to the onerous all rights reserved copyright rules, enabling a commons of knowledge and culture which is freely accessible to everyone, everywhere. We offer a set of open licenses and public domain tools free for anyone to use — a new system where creators get to make their own choices about which rights they want to keep and which rights they want to share. By making their own choices for sharing, creators can reach new and expanded audiences, and people across the planet can access works and ideas to build new creations. Our licenses are now the global standard for sharing content, for creators, researchers, educators, librarians, archivists and governments.
As CC celebrates 20 years of facilitating the sharing of content across the planet, it is important to reflect on what we have learned.
Firstly, our strategic shift away from sharing just for sharing’s sake to working for better sharing, helps us address the careful balance between sharing that is in the public interest, and sharing which is not. This is important at a time when all the benefits that the internet has brought to us seem to be so quickly forgotten, and the predominant narrative is around “harm” rather than public interest. At CC, we want to shift this narrative back to the importance of why sharing matters and how we can do it better. This is why we are an organizing partner in the nascent Better Internet movement, and are actively advocating around the world to ensure that human values and public interest are front and center in our online world.
Secondly, time and time again, we see digital public infrastructure and goods taken for granted. At a time when the public interest often stan
ds in direct contrast to the commercial interest of the creative industries and large tech firms, we need public investment in the structures that underpin the open commons. If we are not careful, the internet will be just a collection of those company towns, where you get paid in company scrip, can only buy from the company store, and only hear the company line and see the company viewpoint. With democracy already in a fragile state and open societies threatened, we need investment in the infrastructure that protects the public interest. Creative Commons is part of this public infrastructure. Without it, we will be poorer, less open and less democratic.
Thirdly, CC needs to be better at publicizing and promoting our work, to reach more people, so that our tools and services can be used to help expand the open commons of knowledge and culture even further. Our impact dwarfs our resources. Even though people use the open commons daily, the vast majority of the public have never heard of CC, or if they have, they are either surprised there is an organization behind the licenses at all, or they think that we are the size of Wikimedia — when in reality CC has a staff of 20, and Wikimedia over 550. We at CC recognize this challenge, and this is why we are already working with our existing network to build a new community of young and emerging leaders who can carry the torch of open knowledge and culture forward into the future.
Finally, the world we live in today is different from the one when CC was first created. Looking forward, as I mark my 2nd anniversary at CC, I see our challenges and opportunities are to recognize and consolidate the impact we’ve made in supporting the growth of the commons, but also to continue that impact in this emerging era of AI, big data, and web3 to effect positive change in our world. We have reshaped the copyright regime in 20 years, becoming the global standard for open content sharing. Now we stand at the cusp of the next 20 years, encountering new places and spaces for dialogue, and championing a new generation of practitioners and advocates, but most importantly, continuing to build a commons of knowledge and culture that is accessible to everyone, everywhere. I look forward to working with you all to make this vision a reality.
The Creative Commons Open Education Platform community completed our latest round of Lightning Talks, or seven-minute presentations on specific updates or stories in open education. Learn more about the presentations in the recording links and summaries below.
And, we hope you will consider presenting in our next round, coming up in October. Sign up here.
Our Lightning Talks presentations include:
“Open Syllabus: UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science” by Jennifer Miller
Summary: An open syllabus, assignments–including interactive multiple choice self-check questions–and rubrics for a semester-long course teaching open science through the lens of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. The syllabus and materials were created as part of the Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) program. The course is suitable for PIs to teach as a special topics course to early career researchers in their lab or department, for a Maymester or summer session offering to prospective or incoming STEM graduate students, or in a lifelong learning context for practicing and retired STEM practitioners and educators. The syllabus has been presented and well received at OEGlobal, OE4BW Eduscope, OERcamp, and the First UNESCO Working Group Meeting on Capacity Building in Open Science. The openly-licensed materials are available on Wikiversity and Zenodo. A train-the-trainer session is offered July 26-28 at FSCI2022 and a workshop is offered August 6 at the Scholar.Social Summer School.
Presenter: Jennifer has 10+ years experience teaching and doing research in public policy and public management. She is a civic technologist and open knowledge advocate.
Summary: In jurisdictions with a strong works-made-for-hire doctrine in their copyright laws, there is often a policy decision to be made about educational materials produced by employees (instructors and other staff) of educational institutions. In the US, at least, the result tends to be that copyrights for such materials are owned by the employer, excepting only tenure-line faculty in higher ed who keep their individual copyrights. A policy which automatically applied to those institutionally owned materials an OER-compatible CC license would instantly free enormous quantities of existing material, and open up future materials, for much wider use and public benefit. Jonathan discussed some of the details of how versions of this policy might work, what obstacles there could be in their way, and how they are or are not consistent with other policies and efforts.
Presenter: Jonathan is a former mathematics faculty member and OER Coordinator at a public university in Colorado, USA; former member of the Colorado state OER Council; volunteer in many open ed orgs; and ongoing facilitator for the CC Certificate course. He currently lives in a Schroedinger’s Cat-like state somewhere between Colorado, USA, and Pietrasanta, Italy.
“Open Climate Campaign” by Dr. Cable Green and Dr. Monica Granados
Summary: Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. The complexity of the climate crisis requires global, national, and local actions informed by multidisciplinary research. The goal of this multi-year campaign is to promote open access to research to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. If we are going to solve these global challenges, the knowledge (research, data, educational resources, software) about them must be open.
Presenters: Dr. Cable Green works with open education, science and research communities to leverage open licensing, content, practices and policies to expand equitable access and contributions to open knowledge. His work is focused on identifying complex problems (e.g., UN SDGs) where open knowledge is a critical part of the solution, and then opening that knowledge to help solve the problem. Cable is also a leading advocate for open licensing and procurement policies that ensure publicly funded education, science and research resources are freely and openly available to the public.
Dr. Monica Granados is the Open Climate Campaign Manager for a multi-year campaign to open knowledge about the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. If we are going to solve these global challenges, the knowledge (research, data, educational resources, software) about them must be open. Link to presentation: The Open Climate Campaign: opening access to climate and biodiversity knowledge (CC Open Education Lightning Talk)
“Building OER into Capstone Courses” by Carolyn Stevenson
Summary: Integrating OER into undergraduate and graduate capstone courses offers the opportunity to serve learners across disciplines. The Professional Studies degrees are competency-based, allow learners to craft their own individualized learning plan, and use OER as a cost-effective means for providing learning resources.
Presenter: Carolyn has 20+ plus years experience in online learning and is currently University Faculty for Purdue University Global, USA.
Summary: Lumen Learning’s Improve It Challenge grant program invites anyone and everyone to engage in the continuous improvement of open educational resources. First, Jamison shared how Lumen uses data to identify learning outcomes in Lumen courses where students across the U.S. are struggling. He then explained the Lumen grant program, beginning with how people can apply. Small grants are awarded to individuals with compelling proposals to revise / remix / create new learning activities aligned with these difficult outcomes. If A/B testing demonstrates that the updated learning activities significantly improve student learning, grantees receive a 10x bonus award!
Presenter: Jamison is the Director, Research Communication at Lumen Learning.
What are the barriers to open culture? What challenges do cultural heritage institutions — such as galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) — face in making their collections openly accessible online? How could Creative Commons support institutions in addressing these challenges and taking part in better sharing of cultural heritage?
In search of answers, we looked at past research, notably Andrea Wallace’s Barriers to Open Access · Open GLAM, and asked more than 30 experts in the open culture movement. You can watch what they told us in our CC Open Culture VOICES vlog series. Here’s a small sample of what we heard:
“A number of imbalances related to power, priority, interests, and resources can facilitate or impede participation in digitization and open access initiatives…” — Andrea Wallace
“…we need to consider what openness online really means and who the audiences are. Are they mostly privileged audiences? Are they mostly people who have access to very expensive laptops and mobile phones? Or is this truly an open culture that can be accessed anywhere, anytime by all people around the world?” — Temi Odumosu
“Another perceived barrier is that [GLAMs] are missing out on opportunities to generate income from the collections.” — Dafydd Tudur
“Open GLAM requires resources, expertise, and investment in rights management and copyright, which are complex.” — Douglas McCarthy
We identified three main clusters of barriers:
Money: lack of resources and fear of losing revenue from licensing;
People: lack of appropriate knowledge and skills, together with a host of apprehensions and risk aversion;
Policy: a complex and outdated copyright system, and the absence of a positive policy framework encouraging openness.
Do you face these or other barriers? Do you have ideas about how CC could help GLAMs overcome these barriers to opening up culture? Reach out and let us know: Fill out this short form or write to us at info@creativecommons.org and share your ideas and opportunities to overcome these barriers.
As part of Creative Commons’ key strategic goal of Better Sharing, we have taken a firm stance against mandatory content filtering on the internet. In new proposed legislation, the U.S. Congress is now raising mandatory content filtering again as a tool to eliminate infringement of copyrighted works. For those who are new to the discussion, mandatory filtering would require that all information providers enable software that prevents the distribution of materials claimed by rightsholders. If you’ve ever uploaded videos to YouTube, you’ve seen content filters at work: videos are scanned for copyrighted audio like popular music before they are published, and sometimes videos are blocked even when they are legal to share. Policy that forces every digital publisher, platform, and service provider to adopt similar filters would make this broken model universal. CC has long stated that the effects of mandatory filtering are devastating to free speech, as well as the sharing of culture and knowledge. CC has also spoken out against filtering mandates and opposed their introduction in the European Union.
Specifically, we stated in our Comment that we did not believe the law mandated STMs, and that the law must continue not to require them. While service providers should be free to choose to use filtering as a tool to aid in compliance for a first-level review, filters should never be the final say in what materials are shared with the public.
In June, Creative Commons was invited to present its position on mandatory filtering at a workshop organized by the Internet Archive entitled “Libraries and the Digital Information Ecosystem: Towards an Affirmative Policy Agenda for a Better Internet.” (The workshop is a continuation of the Better Internet initiative.)
Our lightning talk presentation centered on the damaging effects of mandatory copyright filtering for library communities; mainly, that such policy was at odds with providing the public with access to information. We reiterated that mandatory filtering, by design, does not respect limitations and exceptions to authors’ exclusive rights, but respects only the interests of the largest rightsholders. These simplistic technical tools unfortunately do not account for the context of uses such as education, research, preservation, or critical commentary; they see only matches for content, and many cannot even do that well. Even the most sophisticated systems available today give too many false positives to legally authorized material uploaded by users. (Examples include public domain recordings of classical music mistakenly flagged as major label recordings of those pieces, and an hour long loop of a cat purring being misidentified as a song.)
Do you face these or other barriers? Do you have ideas about how CC could help GLAMs overcome these barriers to opening up culture? Reach out and let us know: Fill out