creative commons | writing notes

The importance of not losing

Each time free copyright licenses such as the GPL or the suit of Creative Commons licenses go to court and win we confirm that the legal theory behind the licenses is correct. In a strange way the courts take the position that they agree with the practice of law and licensing being established in practice. Naturally they would not agree if the practices were totally outlandish so in actual fact what we have is the establishment of a school of thought – a consensus. Or what Ludwik Fleck called a thought collective. In the thought collective an idea is proposed and eventually gains momentum until it becomes an established norm.

This is what happens every time a free license is tested by the legal system.

This is because despite their theory and their use the free copyright license remains a different school of thought – a modification of the past thought collective of the established copyright regime. The problem is that often established regimes are seen as laws of nature. Permanent and everlasting. We know that copyright has not always been and does not always have to be – and yet many modifications are viewed with intense suspicion.

There is a snappy quote attributed to Henry Kissinger on the differences between conventional forces and guerrilla forces: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.

So free copyright licenses win in court but in reality they do not lose. We know when we have established them as a conventional norm not only when they keep winning in court but when they fact that they lose a day in court they are still seen as viable, valuable and an ordinary part of the copyright ecosystem.

Posted on January 1, 2011 by mklang

XKCD on Creative Commons

As both a fan of Creative Commons and XKCD the combination is almost impossible to resist. Right now XKCD t-shirts “doing science” t-shirts are available at the Creative Commons store. This is from the CC blog:

The icing on the cake is the most recent addition to our CC Store: this super-cool science-themed CC shirt, for which the world-famous XKCD was gracious enough to let us re-use a variation on a classic cartoon. Many of you may already read and enjoy the delightful webcomic of “romance, sarcasm, math, and language” which is under a CC BY-NC license. Now you can show your love for Creative Commons and science at the same time by buying one of these t-shirts, available for $20 over at the CC store.

Huge thanks to XKCD for being such a wonderful and creative member of the CC community, and for freely sharing that creativity with the world.

Science@creativecommons by Creative Commons / CC BY

Posted on November 30, 2010 by mklang

Enforcing a license is nasty

Doing a bit of reading on the Creative Commons criticism and came across this notice by Nina Paley

Nina released the film Sita Sings the Blues under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and quickly realized that people do not understand or follow the license terms

This is a real problem. Some artists have re-released Sita remixes under Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses. Many bloggers and journalists assume the non-commercial restrictions…

This means that she has two choice: to ignore what is going on or to react. While ignoring makes her wishes and control moot reacting is not always fun:

Initially I tried to explain what “ShareAlike” means to CC-NC remixers of “Sita”, and asked them to please switch to ShareAlike, per the terms of the ShareAlike license under which I released it. I felt like an ass; I don’t want to be a licensing cop. After a while, mis-identifications of the project’s license became so widespread I gave up trying to correct them. “Creative Commons” means “Non-Commercial” to most people. Fighting it is a sisyphean task.

This is an interesting problem. Many creators do not want to police their licenses (nor do they have the funds to do so) additionally any attempts to police the licenses reduces their gesture of sharing. The creators become less nice people since enforcers are less nice than people who give us what we want. Also it is a thankless task to attempt to educate a world who has no intention of listening.

Posted on November 24, 2010 by mklang

Open is nothing new

At times I feel that I am forever discussing openness. Mainly – but not exclusively – Creative Commons, Free Software & Open Source. Often I am arguing the basics of the idea with people unfamiliar with the concept and I need to overcome a great deal of skepticism. The skeptics argue that now way can it be a good idea to give away material and they are rarely convinced with the growth of modern examples. They lean back as if to say: just you wait, it will go terribly wrong.

This is why it is nice to present the skeptics with established, old examples. And recently I came across an excellent new old example.

Can you name an eighteenth century furniture designer? Most of us cannot, but all the same many of us are familiar with the name of Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779) and not because of the dancers. Thomas Chippendale was the first furniture designer to become famous – before Chippendale furniture was known by styles, monarchs or famous buyers, but not the designers.

So what did he do?

After working as a journeyman cabinet maker in London he became the first cabinet-maker to publish a book of his designs. The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director is still available in print today. The amazing thing about the publication was that it created open source furniture and allowed other furniture makers to make copies of his designs. Of course he may have lost a few commissions but going open source ensured that his fame lasted long after his death. Which is more than can be said of his contemporaries.

Sharing is caring – sharing is good business.

Posted on September 8, 2010 by mklang

The Public Domain Mark

Important news from Creative Commons about the development of a new Public Domain Mark. This whole post is taken from the Creative Commons blog:

Almost 1½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. At the time we published CC0, we made note of a second public domain tool under development — a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.

We are publishing today for comment our new Public Domain Mark, a tool that allows works already in the public domain to be marked and tagged in a way that clearly communicates the work’s PD status, and allows it to be easily discoverable. The PDM is not a legal instrument like CC0 or our licenses — it can only be used to label a work with information about its public domain copyright status, not change a work’s current status under copyright. However, just like CC0 and our licenses, PDM has a metadata-supported deed and is machine readable, allowing works tagged with PDM to be findable on the Internet. (Please note that the example used on the sample deed is purely hypothetical at the moment.)

We are also releasing for public comment general purpose norms — voluntary guidelines or “pleases” that providers and curators of PD materials may request be followed when a PD work they have marked is thereafter used by others. Our PDM deed as well as an upcoming enhanced CC0 deed will support norms in addition to citation metadata, which will allow a user to easily cite the author or provider of the work through copy-paste HTML.

The public comment period will close on Wednesday, August 18^th. Why so short? For starters, PDM is not a legal tool in the same sense our licenses and CC0 are legally operative — no legal rights are being surrendered or affected, and there is no accompanying legal code to finesse. Just as importantly, however, we believe that having the mark used soon rather than later will allow early adopters to provide us with invaluable feedback on actual implementations, which will allow us to improve the marking tool in the future.

The primary venue for submitting comments and discussing the tool is the cc-licenses mailing list. We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted on August 7, 2010 by mklang

Australia goes Creative Commons

Jessica Coates, Project Manager for Creative Commons Australia emailed some important news from CC Australia. The Australian government has now decided to use the Creative Commons BY license as a default for public sector information.

In an official response released yesterday, the Federal Government has agreed to 12 of the 13 recommendations to come out of the Government 2.0 Taskforce report released last December – including Recommendation 6.3, which states that Creative Commons Attribution should be the default licensing position for PSI.

In addition, the government has also agreed that the new Information Commissioner currently being established will issue guidelines to ensure that:

by default PSI is free, open, and reusable;

PSI is released as quickly as possible;

PSI may only be withheld where there is a legal obligation preventing its release.

when Commonwealth records become available for public access under the Archives Act 1983, works covered by Crown copyright will be automatically licensed under an appropriate open attribution licence.

The response also includes an undertaking that the Attorney-General’s Department will examine the current state of copyright law with regard to orphan works (including section 200AB of the Copyright Act 1968), with the aim of recommending amendments that would remove the practical restrictions that currently impede the use of such works.

This is the single biggest commitment to CC licensing and open access principles by Australian government, and should mean that the majority of Australian government material will soon be available under a CC licence. The fact that both the response and the announcement have been released under CC BY is a good start.

The assignment of responsibility for implementation of the commitment to the new Information Commissioner is also an encouraging move, and will hopefully see a more coordinated approach to IP policy across the Australian government as a whole.

The response is available here and a blog post from Finance Minister Tanner is available here.

Jessica just emailed an update:

Having read the report more thoroughly, the Australian Federal Government has committed to open access, but its statement re CC licensing is more properly described as an “agreement in principle”, with an undertaking that the IP Guidelines to be developed as part of the response will not “impede the default open licensing position proposed in recommendation 6.3.”

However, the report, the announcement and the entire AGIMO blog are all under a CC BY licence, which seems like a good sign. The response also makes much of the National Government Information Licensing Framework (GILF) as an important tool in assisting government agencies in making information licensing decisions. GILF, a collaborative project between the Queensland Government and the Queensland University of Technology which is recognised internationally as a leader in the area, recommended and endorsed the use of CC licences as the core of its framework for the sharing of PSI.

You can find a fuller description of the Government’s Gov 2.0 response on the CCau blog at http://creativecommons.org.au/node/295.

Posted on May 4, 2010 by mklang

Congratulations & Welcome

Missed this in the rush of things… Two new jurisdictions join the Creative Commons family!

Costa Rica

The CC project in Costa Rica is officially underway. Leading the public initiative are Rolando Coto-Solano, from the Office of the Vice Dean of Research at the University of Costa Rica, and Carlos E. Saborío Romero, a representative of over ten creative communities and artists. The license porting will be conducted by our long-time friend and colleague of Costa Rican descent, Andres Guadamuz, of the University of Edinburgh. Andres continues to lead CC efforts in Scotland, and we’re thrilled his expertise will be turned to the Costa Rican project as well. Legal support will also be provided by Denis Campos, a representative from the Legal Department of the Office of the Vice Dean of Research. The project is hosted by the University of Costa Rica.

To see some of the promising local initiatives, visit http://www.cientec.or.cr/accceso/, the website of the recent seminar on Free Culture and creativity, held in San Jose. Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cientec/sets/72157622756119822/

Iceland

Today kicks off the Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference <http://www.fsfi.is/atburdir/radstefna2009/>, which features an MOU signing with Creative Commons, the Icelandic Society for Digital Freedoms (Icelandic abbreviation: FSFÍ), and Reykjavík University. CC Iceland was initiated by Project Lead Tryggvi Björgvinsson and is supported by Legal Lead Harald Gunnar Halldórsson. The project has already won the heart of the Ministry of Education, whose lawyer Jón Vilberg Guðjónsson will liaison with the Icelandic team throughout the porting process. This afternoon the group will meet with the Prime Minister of Iceland joined by CC Board Member Eric Saltzman, a keynote speaker at the Digital Freedoms conference.

For your viewing pleasure, check out the event’s CC video collage. “Horses like free software!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rLm1NDGep8&feature=youtube_gdata

Posted on January 8, 2010 by mklang

Collecting Societies & Creative Commons

Moa Bergsten has written her final thesis for the completion of Masters in Law on the topic of collecting societies and Creative Commons licensing. But the essay is more than a theoretical standpoint it is an analysis of the situation in Sweden where the main copyright collecting society has begun to allow member to use Creative Commons licenses. Thus the title of Moa’s work is Stim & Creative Commons Licensing.

Thus, the purpose of this paper is to analyze judicial problems that may arise when a copyright collecting society draws up conditions for the use of CC licenses within the scope of their right management mandate. (p6)

And from her conclusions we may read that the collecting societies are forced to accept both digital realities and to proide a continued service to their members.

The initiative of STIM to allow CC licensing is an outflow of flexibility and adaption to the digital reality. As a result a new member category is created and STIM is obligated to carry out the management with respect to the member group with due diligence and fulfill its responsibility as a trustee.

No doubt the new opportunity will cause complex interpretational determinations. However, this fact does not deprive STIM from its obligation to carry out the management in best manner possible. (p76)

Congratulations Moa on a well written, insightful and important work! Thanks for writing it in English. And thank you for allowing me to post it online. I only wish you had licensed it under a Creative Commons license.

Posted on December 22, 2009 by mklang

The good, the bad & the ugly: Copyright & Open content licenses

Despite being close to the planning and organisation I had not paid attention to ensure that Creative Commons presented at this years FSCONS. Then today we had the unfortunate news that one of our presenters on Sunday was too ill to attend. So the opportunity presented itself and I will be presenting The good, the bad & the ugly: Copyright & Open content licenses

Taking its starting point in the principles, growth and development of open Creative Commons licenses this talk takes a closer look at what licenses can and cannot do in a world were copyright is attempting to lock-in culture into a eternal artificial monopoly.

Posted on November 12, 2009 by mklang