New beginnings at WIPO 

On March 4, Daren Tang was nominated director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations agency dealing with intellectual property matters. Tang is currently the chief executive of the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) and his six-year term as top WIPO official will start on October 1, 2020. He will replace Francis Gurry, who has led the organization since 2008. 

This change in leadership opens the way for bold new perspectives and a sharpened focus on much needed global copyright policy reform that has been urged for decades. With Tang at the helm, WIPO and its member states will have a unique opportunity to recalibrate an outdated, unbalanced copyright system, embrace on equal terms the views and opinions of civil society organizations, and create a new order where rules are fit for the digital environment in which we all learn, create, and share.

In this post, we outline what needs to be done to drive copyright policy in the right direction, with a special focus on the three main substantive issues under discussion at WIPO: broadcasting rights, limitations and exceptions, and copyright and the digital environment.

Time for sweeping changes in the SCCR 

From 2018 to 2019, Tang served as chair of WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), the international forum where discussions on copyright and related rights take place. As a permanent observer to the SCCR, Creative Commons (CC) actively contributes to shaping global copyright policy with a view to upholding strong user rights and a robust and thriving public domain within a balanced ecosystem conducive to creativity, collaboration, and cultural interaction. Here are some of the initiatives pending before the SCCR where CC and other civil society organizations have taken a stance in support of the modernization of copyright.

• Broadcasting

Discussions over a potential new treaty for the protection of broadcasting organizations have been taking place for more than a decade within the SCCR. CC has time and again made the case that such a treaty is clearly not needed. Current legal frameworks provide more than enough enforcement mechanisms and remedies for so-called “signal piracy.” Promoting and delivering content via a broadcast signal should not convey rights to control access and use of the content itself. In addition, the creation of new rights atop copyright to “protect” a broadcast signal would severely compromise users’ right to make certain uses of the underlying creative work, either thanks to exceptions, limitations or via public licenses, such as CC Licenses or even to material in the public domain. At a minimum, broad exceptions and limitations should append to any new rights to allow wide use and reuse of works by the public so that underlying uses of works by the public that currently exist are not blocked by any new rights granted. There is significant risk that granting this new broadcasting right will limit access to information and culture. Instead of keeping this item on the agenda where, clearly, there is no outcome in sight, WIPO should halt the proceedings of the broadcast treaty.

• Exceptions and limitations 

Exceptions and limitations (E&L) are also a long-standing item on the SCCR agenda that need a complete reshuffle. While some interest groups proselytize licensing over E&L, licensing simply cannot uphold fundamental rights such as the right to information, the right to access to culture and freedom of expression, as noted in CC’s latest submission to the SCCR. CC licenses are an excellent way to share culture, information and knowledge—our licenses are the international standard for open licensing and the broadest, best understood and recognizable way to signal an intention to share. However, licensing (especially collective 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. 

That’s why we fully support a treaty on educational and research activities and for international copyright law to enshrine clear, mandatory, and flexible E&L for educational uses both offline and online, such as teaching and learning. We are also in favor of E&L for cultural heritage institutions, including for the preservation of cultural heritage by galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs).

• Copyright and the digital environment

New technologies and the internet have forced many countries to reform their copyright laws. Despite those efforts, we are still faced with a global copyright system that fails to keep up with digital advancements. Old rules that were designed for the analog world cannot be tweaked slightly to address the new realities of the digital world. What we need is a complete redesign of the legal and policy architecture supporting the creation, sharing and reuse of creative works. This new copyright architecture needs to be simple, efficient, targeted, effective, and realistic. WIPO was challenged more than ten years ago to serve as a leader in reforming copyright, and to date has done extremely little by our estimation. For copyright to be fit for the digital environment, where millions of copies of copyright works can circulate within seconds of their publication and be used by millions of users, policy action is urgently needed. Copyright needs to embrace and bolster the novel business models and interaction patterns emerging around creativity and online participation in culture. On that point, we champion the fundamental recognition that digital reproductions of works in the public domain should stay in the public domain. 

With the support of an extensive network of experts from all over the world, including copyright reform experts, CC is driving policy change to bring copyright in line with the realities of creation and online dissemination of creative works. This copyright upheaval is necessary to tear down the barriers that copyright erects around creative content and allow everyone to freely enjoy the benefits of access to culture, information, and knowledge. 

Fairness, transparency, and neutrality

We expect WIPO to facilitate a healthy and meaningful debate in the SCCR among all stakeholders, including those representing the public interest. This also holds true for all normative activities at WIPO, including those taking place in the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP), which plays a vital role in making sure the voices of developing countries are taken into account in discussions shaping global copyright law. Our expectations of fairness, transparency, and neutrality extend to WIPO’s capacity-building and technical assistance activities as well. 

We urge Tang and his senior management team to rise to the challenge of creating a copyright framework befitting 21st century technologies and sharing customs, including providing leadership in the global policy-making arena, with the goal of achieving a balanced and modern copyright system. To this end, we stand ready to break new ground and catapult copyright into the future, because the future is already here. 

 

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You’ve heard the stories: engineers 3D printing face shields in their basements; do-it-yourself hobbyists sewing face masks; and fashion designers crafting personal protection gowns. 

Globally, people are trying to help fill the medical supply gap caused by the COVID-19 pandemic through open-source medical hardware. It’s a heartwarming display of global ingenuity, innovation, and collaboration. In this post, we answer your questions about open-source medical hardware and provide some insight into what you can do to help.

Open-source hardware: the designs of physical objects that are openly licensed so they can be modified, created, and distributed without restrictions.

Why is open-source medical hardware important? 

It’s easy to forget, with such a flurry of increased activity, that open-source medical hardware is not new. In fact, it has been instrumental in providing medical devices and equipment to under-resourced healthcare workers and facilities for years—a need that predates the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, following the H1N1 pandemic, medical professors at Swansea University published open-source instructions for a low-cost emergency ventilator.

In a 2010 report titled, “Managing the Mismatch,” the World Health Organization (WHO) stated, “Research is making rapid progress within the development of sophisticated medical technologies…Yet despite this progress, the majority of the world’s population has little or no access to many of these innovations.” In particular, the WHO detailed a significant “mismatch” in the availability of relevant, effective medical devices for localized public health needs, highlighting that “70–90% of all medical devices donated to the developing world never function as intended.” Four important components of correcting this “mismatch” are availability, accessibility, appropriate(ness), and affordability—this is where open-source medical hardware comes in, as Dr. Gerrit Niezen et. al. explained in a 2016 research article:

“Making the hardware design available under an open source license allows anyone to improve and contribute to the device design, leading to very rapid innovation compared to traditional methods. It also enables the design to be modified for very specific uses, and makes the devices easy to repair…This has great potential for making medical devices more accessible in the developing world, where devices can also be designed as open-source and built for specific use cases, instead of having to depend on donated equipment.”

A clear example of a medical device “mismatch” is the cost of a stethoscope compared to its necessity. Although stethoscopes are one of the most important tools for healthcare workers, on the market, a reliable stethoscope costs between $90.00 – $200.00 USD and is almost impossible to come by in low-resource settings. After noticing this issue while working in Gaza, Dr. Tarek Loubani, an emergency room physician in Canada and recipient of the 2020 Bassel Khartabil Fellowship, created an open-source design for stethoscopes in 2018 that can be 3D printed for around $3.00 USD. Through his charity, The Glia Project, Dr. Loubani now creates and releases open-source designs for stethoscopes, tourniquets, and otoscopes so that they can be produced cheaply by anyone with a 3D printer. The charity not only creates these designs, they also train people in under-resourced and conflict-ridden areas to use 3D printers and deploy these medical devices in the field. “The Glia Project is first and foremost a project about independence,” explained Dr. Loubani in a 2019 interview.

Just recently, in response to the pandemic, the organization turned to creating face masks for Canadian health workers. “That’s been my promise to my colleagues,” Dr. Loubani recently told the CBC, “And soon that will be my promise to all health-care workers in Canada.”

Creating open-source medical hardware during the COVID-19 pandemic

Dr. Loubani is not alone in using open-source hardware to mitigate the medical supply and equipment shortage due to COVID-19. The Helpful Engineering Group on Slack is filled with thousands of engineers crowdsourcing ideas for medical devices and tools, and the Open Source COVID-19 Medical Supplies (OSCMS) group on Facebook has over 50,000 members doing the same. Alongside these somewhat ad hoc and loosely organized efforts are initiatives by research institutions and labs, such as the MIT Emergency Ventilator (E-Vent) project and the Just One Giant Lab OpenCovid19 Initiative. 

What’s the manufacturing process?

The process of identifying an open-source hardware design and manufacturing a final product differs depending on a variety of factors, such as design complexity, resource allocation, safety requirements, delivery needs, etc. In some cases, once an open-source design is created in-house, or identified elsewhere, the manufacturing process can be relatively quick. “The most important thing is to test the settings, optimize, adapt the design to your local resources, and test with professionals at hospitals. If it works, then you proceed,” said André Rocha, assistant professor at the Escola Superior de Educação de Lisboa, co-coordinator of FabLab Benfica, and an active member of CC Portugal. 

“The most important thing is to test the settings, optimize, adapt the design to your local resources, and test with professionals at hospitals.”

For example, a face shield—an important component of personal protection equipment (PPE)—is very “fabricatable,” meaning it’s easy to design and manufacture with a 3D printer, taking around 20 minutes to an hour. Due to the global shortage of face shields, there are many people utilizing open-source designs to manufacture and deliver these to healthcare workers. This includes Darrell Currington, who runs the Rapid Prototyping Centre at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. “We’re currently working on the production of 3D printed visors which are used to make face shields for hospitals,” he explained over email, “With the university closed down, we weren’t able to run the facility as we normally would. So I decided the best thing we could do was to take what equipment we could, and distribute it among our staff, and faculty that would be most familiar with the technology.” 

OCAD University producing 3-D printed protective face shields for hospitals such as @MGHToronto https://t.co/uAysgNQqOx #COVID19 #covidontario pic.twitter.com/wdwAWyzPAb

— OCAD University (@OCAD) April 3, 2020

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Although 3D printing is a low-cost and quick way to create PPE components like face shields, there are instances in which it’s better to use other technologies like laser cutting to manufacture more reliable and effective devices—this is especially true for more complex devices like a positive pressure helmet (PPH). A PPH supplies filtered and precise airflow to the wearer. “Imagine an inflatable bubble on your head,” André explained. These have been used in hospitals where COVID-19 cases have overwhelmed the healthcare system, such as Italy. PPHs can relieve the pressure on ventilators and prevent sick people from contaminating the air in crowded hospitals. The process of designing and manufacturing a PPH is more complex than a face shield, requiring more collaboration with industrial companies and medical experts, more materials, and more tests to ensure the hardware is safe and reliable. Therefore, the pace of production and delivery is relatively slow. 

André is currently tracking a PPH project launched by the Fab Foundation. The open project’s documentation can be tracked here and the repository is located here. 

How are requests received and delivered? 

Again, this varies widely depending on the specific context. In some cases, requests are formally channeled through government officials and/or hospital administrators and delivered by established organizations. In other cases, the requests are made informally by healthcare workers and hand-delivered through small volunteer groups or individuals, like Coronavirus Makers in Madrid, Spain. André’s group in Lisbon, Portugal receives PPE supply requests directly from local healthcare workers. “All the help and requests are informal,” he explained, “We [the volunteers] meet remotely almost every day to prepare next day donations to hospitals, police squads, and next developments.” 

Aquí una foto que nos hacen llegar unos héroes de un centro de salud de Madrid. Como siempre decimos, ¡¡gracias a vosotros!!#DeEstaSalimosJuntos pic.twitter.com/pukPtWuFdD

— CoronavirusMakers.org (@CoronavirusMak3) April 10, 2020

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Unfortunately, volunteer groups and individual efforts suffer from limited capacity and resources—thus, they’re unable to scale their efforts. André and his group are hoping to overcome these challenges by “developing cutting stamps for printing houses that can deliver a few thousand [face shields] in a couple of hours.” However, localized challenges, like a scarcity of the necessary materials to manufacture the supplies, are more difficult to solve. “The effort here is to create versions for different materials, thicknesses, and production processes based on available resources,” he explained. 

Are these devices safe?

The landscape of open-source hardware feels a bit like the “wild wild west” due to the urgency and desperation of the current situation. However, ensuring that open-source hardware is safe and reliable is imperative. The devices developed by The Glia Project and their production site, for example, are approved by Health Canada. However, that approval process takes time and resources—neither of which are readily available during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In many countries, safety information and regulations around medical devices are publicly available and should be followed.

Therefore, it’s important that manufacturers (even those do-it-yourself hobbyists sewing face masks) do their due diligence in ensuring their products are safe. But how? “I think the most basic level is to test solutions with local health professionals,” emphasized André, “Another is to be extremely careful during fabrication. Everything should be validated by professionals before usage…In projects that represent higher complexity, I believe that [public health] authorities should be involved and contacted.” Darrell’s group, for example, checked with Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto for a tested and approved 3D printed face shield design before starting their efforts. “The hospital had worked with a designer named Shawn Lim, they tested his design, and found they could sanitize the visor and it would be safe for use in their hospital,” Darrell explained, “They then posted the design on their website and asked for anyone with a 3D printer to contribute…As of this evening [April 9] we should have just under 1000 units ready for drop off at the hospital on Tuesday.”

In many countries, safety information and regulations around medical devices are publicly available and should be followed. For example, the United States Federal Drug Administration (FDA) lists regulatory standards for a variety of devices on their website, and in response to COVID-19, they’ve curated specific information on ventilators and PPE.  

Where can I find open-source initiatives and designs?

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different open-source hardware initiatives that you can contribute to and designs that you can utilize. There are a few repositories that you can search through, including Appropedia, Wikifactory, and Public Invention’s “Evaluation of Open Source Ventilators,” as well as loosely organized social media groups to join, including the aforementioned Helpful Engineering Group on Slack and Open Source COVID-19 Medical Supplies (OSCMS) on Facebook. Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) has also launched several projects under their OpenCovid19 Initiative. There are also more country-specific initiatives and designs, such as Breath4Life (Belgium), Un Respiro (Argentina), Fast Jungle Face Shield (Panama), Make4Covid (USA), VentilAid (Poland), Open Source Ventilator (Ireland), OxyGen (Spain), Open Source Against COVID-19 (Belgium).

According to André, it’s important to distinguish ‘pirate’ initiatives that “reverse-engineer medical equipment” from other initiatives developing new designs through more official collaborations and/or partnerships by universities, companies, and research centers. “Information about the latter is unclear because it is hard to distinguish the nature of the initiative,” he emphasized, “We don’t always know if patents will be filed later on or if they are universally available open-source designs.” 

In order to avoid intellectual property (IP) issues, and make it clear the results of these collaborations are open source, Creative Commons is urging individuals, companies, and research institutions to clearly utilize an open-source license or sign the Open COVID Pledge—which grants the public free, temporary access to IP rights in support of solving the COVID-19 crisis, removing obstacles to knowledge and inventions that could save lives and limit suffering.

P.s. You don’t need to know how to operate a 3D printer, laser cutter, or sewing machine to help out. You can donate materials, money, or your time to each initiative. Just take a look at their websites!  

What’s next? 

The current situation is not ideal. The explosive growth of open-source hardware over recent weeks is the direct result of devastating medical supply shortages across the world—and unfortunately, current efforts are relatively ad hoc, difficult to scale, and loosely organized. Therefore, it’s impossible to predict what will happen to all of the open-source hardware developed in reaction to COVID-19. Will these designs become legitimate alternatives to those found on the market once the pandemic is over? Will they be used to correct the “mismatch” of medical devices globally? Or will they simply be relegated to the digital archives of history? These are important questions that will need to be examined in the coming months.

For now, let’s get to work.

If you have a question regarding CC Licenses and how they apply to hardware designs or the Open COVID Pledge, please feel free to contact us at info@creativecommons.org.

Stop the spread of COVID-19 by taking these steps outlined by the WHO, including washing your hands for at least 20 seconds and social distancing.

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Creative Commons is changing its legal code correction policy for official translations of the Version 4.0 licenses and the CC0 public domain dedication. In order to maintain the integrity of our firm commitment to honor official translations as legal equivalents of the original English 4.0 version and the original English CC0 1.0, CC will correct published official translations when any type of error is identified. 

Creative Commons is committed to maintaining canonical, stable, and unchanged versions of the legal code of its licenses and public domain tools. This policy applies to every legal tool stewarded by CC, including ported versions of the licenses, which are versions adapted both to the particular local language and law of a given jurisdiction, as well as deprecated tools, such as the Developing Nations and Sampling licenses. When errors to those legal tools have been identified, they have either resulted in new versions of the tools or been documented as minor errors on the Legal Code errata page.

Creative Commons has made the decision to adapt this policy with respect to official translations of the 4.0 licenses and CC0 1.0. By way of background, starting with the release of the Version 4.0 license suite in 2013*, CC ceased porting its legal tools because it was no longer necessary given the internationalization efforts surrounding 4.0. We instead committed to creating official linguistic translations of the original English version, without making any adjustments based on local law. While respecting the international reach of CC licenses, English was the language in which CC worked with its global community to negotiate and finalize terms of the 4.0 license suite (as well as our public domain tools), and so, as a community, we must recognize English as the original for purposes of official translation. That said, CC and our community are committed to the idea that all official translations are legal equivalents much like official instruments of the United Nations are negotiated, translated, and treated as equivalents. In other words, CC’s official translations are not separate licenses.This background is useful to understanding why Creative Commons has made the decision to adapt its policy for official translations. 

To be clear, CC’s legal code correction policy will remain the same for Version 3.0 and prior versions of the licenses, including ports. The policy will also remain unchanged for the Version 4.0 English legal code and the CC0 English legal code. For those, CC will continue to maintain static versions of the legal code, even when errors are identified. All such corrections will be cited in a footer on the relevant legal code and publicly documented in full on the Legal Code errata page.

To date, after six years of overseeing the publication of official translations of 4.0 and CC0, CC has identified only one official translation with known material errors. Upon discovery, this translation was immediately hidden from public view with the consent of the translation team in order to avoid confusion by reusers. CC will be publishing corrected versions of that translation pursuant to this modified policy and process shortly. In response to these errors, CC has also revisited its legal code translation policy and processes to increase quality control and documentation.

We remain committed to ensuring the integrity of our legal code for licensors and licensees, and we believe this modified policy best accomplishes these goals. Please direct any questions to legal@creativecommons.org.

* This policy change was made, in part, as a result of the structure of the Version 4.0 licenses, which are designed to take effect according to applicable copyright law wherever the licensed work is used. Given this international design and operation, it is no longer necessary to adapt the legal code to the laws of particular jurisdictions. CC0 has never been ported, only officially translated.

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Creative Commons has joined forces with other legal experts and leading scientists to offer a simple way for universities, companies, and other holders of intellectual property rights to support the development of medicines, test kits, vaccines, and other scientific discoveries related to COVID-19 for the duration of the pandemic. The Open COVID Pledge grants the public free, temporary access to IP rights in support of solving the COVID-19 crisis, removing unnecessary obstacles to dissemination of the knowledge and inventions that could save lives and limit suffering.

The Pledge, developed by a coalition of scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, gives broad permission to anyone to use technology and content otherwise inaccessible in its absence, in most cases, replacing the need for a costly license or royalty agreement.

Intel has joined the effort as a founding pledgor, along with Unified Patents and Fabricatorz Foundation.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working with these experts with the goal of creating a tool that allows the development of diagnostic tools, treatment, and preventative solutions—possibly even a cure or vaccine—to halt the spread of this disease. Although developed quickly due to exigent circumstances, Creative Commons looks forward to working closely with the many talented international legal and policy experts in our Global Network on next steps to make this Pledge an impactful reality.

“Intellectual property rights are intended to encourage creativity and invention for the ultimate benefit of humanity. It’s fitting and inspiring that many intellectual property owners recognize that at this moment humanity needs all of the intellectual resources we can muster right now—from educational resources for online learning, to designs for protective equipment, to patented pharmaceuticals” – Molly Shaffer Van Houweling; Chair, CC Board of Directors

The Pledge has received public expressions of support from organizations around the world including Creative Commons; Mozilla; Unified Patents; the Idea Laboratory for Intellectual Property in Bogota, Colombia; Universities Allied for Essential Medicines; The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital); and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University Washington College of Law, among others.

CC is proud to support the Open COVID Pledge, and the many other efforts directed at accelerating the pace of discovery during the pandemic and thereafter, including pushing for Open Access policies, especially for publicly-funded research.

 Please support the effort by encouraging your company, university, or research team to support the pledge. Visit opencovidpledge.org to learn how you can contribute and read our full press release for more info.

 

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We are thrilled to announce today that Dr. Tarek Loubani has been awarded the 2020 Bassel Khartabil Fellowship. Loubani is the medical director of Glia, a project focused on using Open Access manufacturing and distribution in order to provide lower costs and vastly increase the accessibility of urgently needed medical supplies and gear.

The Fellowship award will allow Loubani to Combat COVID-19 through the release of Open Access plans for medical hardware, so that vital equipment may be produced cheaply by anyone with commonly available 3D printers. Loubani’s approach enables high quality devices to be made available during periods of global supply chain disruption, and in areas with limited access. Glia has released face shields already being used in the battle against COVID-19, as well as other hardware including stethoscopes, tourniquets, and otoscopes. Additional devices including pulse oximeters, electrocardiograms, and dialysis products are currently in development. See the full press release for more information about Loubani’s work and how the fellowship will support his efforts.

The Bassel Khartabil Fellowship is a project of Fabricatorz Foundation, with partnership and support provided by Creative Commons and Mozilla Foundation. The fellowship honors the work and legacy of our friend Bassel Khartabil, a Palestinian-Syrian technology innovator, artist, open source advocate, and Creative Commons community leader who was “disappeared” in 2012 then executed by the Syrian regime in 2015. The fellowship provides funding, mentorship, and general support to individuals and teams whose work embodies the ideals of free culture and Open Access—ideals that Bassel dedicated his life to.

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