We are excited to host the second installment of Open Culture Live with our next conversation:

 

Changing the Subject & Respectful Terminologies

For centuries, cultural heritage institutions have been undertaking the work to document and catalog objects in their collections — sometimes this work suffers from a legacy of colonialism and discrimination in the way their collections are labeled and categorized. Some institutions are working to update these labels with more respectful terminology. Hear more from some of the changemakers working to update labels and metadata with more respectful terminologies during this CC panel.

 

As CC’s Open Culture team works to promote better sharing, we think it is important to address some of the key challenges and concerns that come along with promoting open access to cultural heritage. These challenges are not always simple to address, but they are important to ensuring that open access policies and practices go hand in hand with harm reduction, and do not perpetuate or amplify historic injustices.

 

Learn from the experts involved in addressing harmful labels in cultural heritage institutions in this conversation. We will ask the experts if any institutions serve as a good model for rethinking their labels, acknowledging that many are in the process of ongoing work. We will discuss where to start, how to think about some of the challenging decisions, why and how to preserve historical metadata, and how digital archival practices can support this work. We hope that this will provide a guide of some of the ways you might consider adopting better metadata practices and using more respectful terminologies in your collections.

 

The panel will feature:

• Jill Baron, Dartmouth College
• Marco Rendina, European Fashion Heritage Association
• Oscar Ruben Cornejo Casares, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University
• Amanda Figueroa, Platform Director, MHz Foundation
• Ilham Nurwansah, Wikimedian in Residence

 

With introductory remarks from Brigitte Vézina and moderation by Jocelyn Miyara.

 

Register here to attend >

 

→ To stay informed about our open culture work:

• Join the open culture platform
• Join our global network
• Visit our website on open culture
• Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter

The post Open Culture Live Webinar: Changing the Subject & Respectful Terminologies appeared first on Creative Commons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H14Krmn9QOM

Dave talks about how many “institutions are on a mission to expose their collections to the world and make them available for everyone.” Dave sees this as a major evolution from a time not too long ago when it was only those with means who could access collections in any way.

Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Dave is the Executive Director at Authors Alliance which is a non-profit focused on sharing work broadly with the public together with authors in the US.

Dave responds to the following questions:

1. What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
2. What are the barriers?
3. Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
4. Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?

Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.

Want to hear more insights from Open Culture experts from around the world? Watch more episodes of Open Culture VOICES here >>

The post Dave Hansen — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 33 appeared first on Creative Commons.

From 6 to 8 November 2023, Creative Commons (CC) participated remotely in the 44th session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR). In this blog post, we look back on the session’s highlights on broadcasting, exceptions and limitations, and generative AI, from CC’s perspective.

As in previous sessions, our main objective was to drive copyright reform towards better sharing of copyright content in the public interest and in tune with the sharing possibilities of the digital environment. In this short session, we addressed the proposed broadcasting treaty and exceptions and limitations in our opening statement, as reported in the​​ “Statements” information document (SCCR/44/INF/STATEMENTS).

We also offered views on exceptions and limitations for cultural heritage institutions, i.e. libraries, archives and museums; you can watch our intervention on the WIPO webcast. These views are in line with our Open Culture Program’s recently launched initiative Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture (TAROC) which aims to develop policy to recognize the role of open culture to reach wider policy goals notably in relation to copyright and access and use of cultural heritage — see our TAROC Two-Pager in English, Shqip, français, Español, 日本語, Türkçe, italiano, عربي.

Overall, we are rather satisfied with the session’s outcomes. On broadcasting, we remain concerned that discussions on the draft broadcasting treaty are being maintained on the agenda despite evidence of a clear stalemate in the discussions; we are nonetheless heartened by the acknowledged need to work towards a balanced approach on exceptions and limitations in the draft treaty.

On exceptions and limitations, we are pleased that the SCCR Secretariat has undertaken to prepare a detailed implementation plan for the Work Program on Exceptions and Limitations; in CC’s views, this plan should provide for open and transparent engagement opportunities and wide participation from civil society of which CC is a leading voice. It should notably allow for real progress on substantive issues to support meaningful access and use of cultural heritage for preservation and other legitimate purposes.

We also welcome the organization of a virtual panel discussion on cross-border uses of copyright works in the educational and research sectors open to all member states as well as observers. As an accredited observer, CC places high value on broad and inclusive participation to ensure balanced and diverse perspectives can be brought to the table for a constructive debate. We recall that licensing falls short of addressing the problems that libraries, museums, archives, educational and research institutions, as well as persons with disabilities, face on a daily basis. Licensing is not a substitute for robust, flexible, mandatory exceptions and limitations to empower those who teach, learn and research, those who share in and build upon cultural heritage, and people with disabilities.

We note Group B’s Proposal Information Session on Generative AI and Copyright (SCCR/44/8) and look forward to the Secretariat organizing an open, inclusive, and balanced session at the next SCCR under the item of Copyright in the Digital Environment. As we have stated at the WIPO Conversation on Generative AI and Intellectual Property last September, generative AI raises important issues and is having an enormous impact on creativity, the commons, and better sharing, i.e., sharing that is inclusive, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable. Our consultations on the matter have revealed a wide variety of views among creators, AI developers, and other stakeholders in the commons. They have also shed light on the fact that copyright is but one lens through which to consider generative AI; what is more, it is a rather blunt tool that often leads to black-and-white solutions that fall short of harnessing all the diverse possibilities that generative AI offers for human creativity. Our interventions on copyright and generative AI in the United States and the European Union contexts attest to those nuanced views. We thus call on the Secretariat to ensure the session will offer a balanced and representative set of perspectives.

We look forward to participating in the Committee’s next session, to take place from April 15 to 19, 2024, and to bring our expertise on copyright, better sharing of cultural heritage, and generative AI in order to help create a fairer and more balanced international copyright system in the public interest.

→ To stay informed about our policy and open culture work:

• Visit our blog for regular updates on our work on AI
• Sign up for our open culture mailing list
• Join the open culture platform
• Join the copyright platform
• Visit our website on open culture

Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter >

The post CC’s Key Insights from WIPO’s Meeting on Copyright appeared first on Creative Commons.

In August, the United States Copyright Office issued a Notice of Inquiry seeking public responses to 34 questions (and several sub-questions) about the intersection of copyright law and artificial intelligence. The comment period closed on 30 October with over 10,000 individuals and organizations responding, representing a broad spectrum of interests on how copyright should apply in relation to generative AI. CC joined in the conversation to provide our own thoughts on copyright and AI to the copyright office.

Since our founding, we have sought out ways that new technologies can serve the public good, and we believe that generative AI can be a powerful tool to enhance human creativity and to benefit the commons. At the same time, we also recognize that it carries with it the risk of bringing about significant harm. We used this opportunity to explain to the Copyright Office why we believe that the proper application of copyright law can guide the development and use of generative AI in ways that serve the public and to highlight what we have learned from our community through the consultations we have held throughout 2023 and at our recent Global Summit about both the risks and opportunities that generative AI holds.

In this post we summarize the key point of our submission, namely:

• AI training generally constitutes fair use
• Copyright should protect AI outputs with significant human creative input
• The substantial standard similarity should apply to Infringement by AI outputs
• Creators should be able to express their preferences
• Copyright cannot solve everything related to generative AI

AI training generally constitutes fair use

We believe that, in general, training generative AI constitutes fair use under current U.S. law. Using creative works to train generative AI fits with the long line of cases that has found that non-consumptive, technological uses of creative works in ways that are unrelated to the expressive content of those works are transformative fair uses, such as Authors Guild v. Google and Kelly v. Arriba Soft. Moreover, the most recent Supreme Court ruling on fair use, Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, supports this conclusion. As we commented upon the decision’s release, the Warhol case focus on the specific way a follow-on use compares with the original use of a work indicates that training generative AI on creative works is transformative and should be fair use. This is because the use of copyrighted works for AI training has a fundamentally different purpose from the original aesthetic purposes of those works.

Copyright protection for AI outputs subject to significant human creative input

We believe that creative works produced with the assistance of generative AI tools should only be eligible for protection where they contain a significant enough degree of human creative input to justify protection, just like when creators use any other mechanical tools in the production of their works. The Supreme Court considered the relationship between artists and their tools vis-a-vis copyright over 100 years ago in Burrow-Giles v. Sarony, holding that copyright protects the creativity that human artists’ incorporate into their works, not the work of machines. While determining which parts of a work are authored by a human when using generative AI will not always be clear, this issue is not fundamentally different from any other situation where we have to determine the authorship of individual parts of works that are created without AI assistance.

Additionally, we believe that developers of generative AI tools should not receive copyright protection over the outputs of those tools. Copyright law already provides enough incentives to encourage development of these tools by protecting code, and extending protection to their outputs is unnecessary to encourage innovation and investment in this space.

Infringement should be determined using the substantial similarity test

We believe that the substantial similarity standard that already exists in copyright law is sufficient to address where AI outputs infringe on other works. The debate about how copyright should apply to generative AI has often been cast in all-or-nothing terms — does something infringe on pre-existing copyrights or not? The answer to this question is certainly that generative AI can infringe on other works, but just as easily it may not. As with any other question about the substantial similarity between two works, these issues will be highly fact specific, and we cannot automatically say whether works produced by generative AI tools infringe or not.

Creators should be able to express their preferences

In general, we believe there is value in methods that enable individuals to to signal their preferences for how their works are shared in the context of generative AI. In our community consultations, we heard general support for preference signals, but there was no consensus in how best to do this. Opt-ins and opt-outs may be one way, but we do not believe they need to be required by US copyright law; instead, we would like to see voluntary schemes, similar to approaches to web scraping, which allow for standardized expression of these preferences without creating strict barriers to usage in cases where it may be appropriate.

Transparency is necessary to build trust — Copyright is only one lens through which to consider AI regulation

We urge caution and flexibility in any approach to regulating generative AI through copyright. We believe that copyright policy can guide the development of generative AI in ways that benefit all, but that overregulation or inappropriate regulation can hurt both the technology and the public. For example, measures that improve transparency into AI models can build trust in AI models by allowing outside observers to “look under the hood” to investigate how they work. But these measures should not be rooted in copyright law. Copyright is just one lens through which we can view generative AI, and it is ill equipped to deal with many of the social harms that concern us and many others. Attempting to use copyright to solve all of these issues may have unintended consequences and ultimately do more harm than good.

We are happy to see the Copyright Office seeking out guidance on these many difficult questions. We will have to wait to see what comes from this, but we will hope for the best, and continue to engage our community so we can more fully understand what role generative AI should play in building the commons and serving the public good.

Read CC’s full submission to the Copyright Office >

The post CC Responds to the United States Copyright Office Notice of Inquiry on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Creative Commons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oamKexFbTYc

Kyle believes that “the artistic and creative expressions of humanity is the best way to experience our human efforts” and open GLAM makes this a reality for much more than what you can see on a given day in a museum. Open GLAM also helps drive more digitization of collections around the world in an effort to make institutions more known.

Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Kyle is a copyright advisor at Harvard library and helps people understand how material can be used in the library and online for users.

Kyle responds to the following questions:

1. What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
2. What are the barriers?
3. Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
4. Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?

Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.

Want to hear more insights from Open Culture experts from around the world? Watch more episodes of Open Culture VOICES here >>

The post Kyle K. Courtney — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 32 appeared first on Creative Commons.