Trey Ratcliff is an extremely successful photographer, who specializes in HDR photography. His blog Stuck in Customs is the top travel photography blog on the internet, with over a million views each week.
Creative Commons (CC) has been with us for nearly a decade, so you would have thought people might understand it by now. Apparently not, judging by the title of this blog post: "How Creative Commons Can Stifle Artistic Output."
There have been a number of stories on Techdirt recently about governments diminishing the public domain - not just by extending copyright for future works, but also by putting works currently in the public domain back under copyright, both in the US and EU. Reversing that trend – by pushing back copyright's term closer to the original 14 years, say – will be challenging, to put it mildly.
For many years, Brazil has been a shining beacon of how to do it right when it came to openness and sharing. For example, in the field of open source:
Em 2005, entretanto, o Governo Federal licenciou a solução de inventário de hardware e software CACIC (Configurador Automático e Coletor de Informações Computacionais), desenvolvida pela Dataprev, sob a segunda versão da licença GPL em português. Em pouco tempo, uma extensa comunidade de usuários, desenvolvedores e prestadores de serviço formou-se em torno da solução, o que assentou as bases para a definição do conceito de Software Público e para a sua materialização com o Portal do Software Público Brasileiro (SPB). Seis anos depois, a publicação da Instrução Normativa no 01, em 17/01/2011, dispõe sobre os procedimentos para o desenvolvimento, a disponibilização e o uso do SPB. Hoje, mais de 50 soluções já foram disponibilizadas no Portal, há mais de 100 mil usuários cadastrados nele, bem como uma grande quantidade de empresas cadastradas como prestadores de serviços para essas soluções – para algumas delas, são quase 200, espalhadas por todo o território nacional!
[Google Translate: In 2005, however, the Federal Government has licensed the solution for hardware inventory and software CACIC (Auto Configurator and Collector Information Computer), developed by Dataprev under the second version of the GPL in Portuguese. Soon, a large community of users, developers and service providers formed around the solution, which became the basis for the definition of Public Software and its realization with the Public Software Portal (SPB ). Six years later, the publication of the Instruction No 01, on 17/01/2011, sets forth the procedures for the development, provision and use of the SPB. Today, more than 50 solutions have been available in the portal, there are over 100,000 registered users in it, as well as a large number of companies registered as service providers for these solutions - some of them are about 200, scattered throughout the nationwide!]
Brazil was also very forward-thinking when it came to CC-licensed content:
Creative Commons has become a popular word and a media phenomenon in Brazil. The project was not only extremely well received, but enthusiastically embraced by a huge community of artists, starting with Minister Gilberto Gil. And artists are not the only users. Side by side with them, stands the civil society represented by all sorts of NGO´s. And even more surprisingly, the government itself has adopted several initiatives using the Creative Commons model. The website of the Ministry of Culture is entirely CC licensed. Two other important examples include the Ministry of Education creating a portal named “publicdomain.gov” inspired by and using the CC licenses. Also, the largest supporter of the arts in Brazil, the oil company Petrobras, included in its yearly call for proposals a clause recommending works supported by Petrobras to be licensed under a Creative Commons license.
All that happened under the presidency of "Lula". Alas, it's becoming clear that his successor has rather different ideas.
First we had this:The Brazilian Ministry of Culture has removed the logo of the Creative Commons license from its website. Since Gilberto Gil was ahead of the Ministry (2003-2008), all the content of the website has been licensed in Creative Commons.
The removal has been interpreted by the Brazilian civil society as a sign of the Minister's inflexibility. The removal came right after the publicization of an open letter, asking for the continuation of the policies that were adopted or were under discussion during the government of Lula. Minister Ana de Hollanda has criticized the proposal for copyright reform, which would, among of things, introduce important exceptions and limitations in Brazilian law.
And now this:Cadeia para quem compartilhar sua rede de banda larga de internet wi-fi com os vizinhos, compartilhar músicas pelo bluetooth do aparelho celular ou usar softwares para desbloquear mídias de DVDs e assisti-las no computador. É isso o que pode acontecer caso seja aprovado na Câmara o Projeto de Lei 84/99 (conhecido como PL Azeredo) que tramita em caráter de urgência e pode ser votado a partir da terça-feira.
...
O PL é bastante polêmico ao limitar a disseminação de informações na rede. A proposta trata de crimes cibernéticos e criminaliza práticas comuns de internautas como digitalizar e guardar suas músicas num MP3 player ou computador – mesmo que o consumidor tenha passado para computador as músicas de um CD que comprou.
“Além disso, seria considerado criminoso o consumidor que compartilhasse com seus vizinhos seu acesso à internet através de redes Wi-Fi ou que utilizasse plenamente serviços de voz sobre IP na rede, como o Skype”, diz Varella.
[Google Translate: Jail for those who share your network's broadband wi-fi with neighbors, share music by bluetooth from mobile phone or use software to unlock media from DVDs and watch them on your computer. That's what can happen if the House approved the bill 84/99 (known as Azeredo PL) which is being processed on an urgent basis and may be voted from Tuesday.
...
The bill is controversial enough to limit the dissemination of information on the network. The proposal deals with cyber crime and criminalizes ordinary Internet users to scan and store your music on an MP3 player or computer - even if the consumer has gone to computer music from a CD you bought.
"In addition, the consumer would be considered criminal to share with your neighbors access the Internet via Wi-Fi or make full use of voice over IP network, such as Skype," says Varella.]
Although this kind of stuff is becoming standard for copyright maximalists to demand from governments around the world, it's particularly sad to see Brazil regress in this way. It emphasises that freedom can never be taken for granted, and must be fought for continuously.
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As has been noted many times before, the Internet is essentially a global, digital copier. Anything that is placed online is, by definition, copied as it is accessed. This means that every site must think about how it would like its content to be shared. That wish may or may not be respected, but if it's not articulated, it certainly won't be.
For "ordinary" creations like text of images, the licensing situation is pretty well-defined. Basically, you can either put things into the public domain, claim maximal, "ordinary", copyright, or something in-between, using Creative Commons licences. But for less common kinds of material, things may not be so obvious.
That seems to be the case with an interesting new site called CircuitBee. Here's the background:We love making electronics projects, we've not worked on many but we've enjoyed it as a hobby for some time. The one thing we have a problem with however is how to get help with our schematics, how to talk about them and how to show them off to other people.
During our last big electronics project we got really stuck with our design, it mostly worked but we weren't sure how stable it was or how reliable our circuit would be. We went online to look for help and see if anybody would look over our schematics and give us any tips. We found people willing to help easily enough but providing them with our circuit became a real headache.
First we posted a copy of the project files, that didn't help since the some of people helping us used a different version of the software and some of them only used a different schematics package.
Next we decided to post a screenshot of the schematic but our schematic software would only let us capture the current screenshot of the schematic, which wasn't zoomed in enough to be able to make it readable!
Finally we used a PDF print out of the schematic and had to upload it to some hosting online and give the people in the forum a link to the PDF.
After all this messing around just to show someone our schematic we thought that there had to be a better way. We looked around, but didn't find anything that solved this problem, so we set out to create CircuitBee.
CircuitBee takes your schematic project files, converts them into its own internal format and then provides you with an embeddable version of the circuit, similar to Google Maps but for electronics schematics.
You can pan, zoom, go fullscreen, mouse over components to see what they are and we have plans for lots more features yet.
Currently we only support KiCad schematics since we couldn't find good documentation on the file formats used by other software. We intend to expand to other popular schematic capture software like Eagle and Fritzing in the near future.
That sounds like a really good idea. The problem with the site at the moment is that these schematics come with no information about what you can do with them. Are they freely available, available for non-commercial use, subject to the maximal copyright restrictions, etc?
The obvious solution would be allow people who upload their schematics to choose from the full range of Creative Commons licences at that time. These could then be displayed alongside circuit online so that visitors know what the legal situation is.
However, there is one other aspect that could be usefully clarified. As the quoted text explains, "CircuitBee takes your schematic project files, converts them into its own internal format and then provides you with an embeddable version of the circuit, similar to Google Maps but for electronics schematics." The status of that format is not clear. Ideally, it would be released as an open format for all to use - after all, doing so is likely to increase its uptake, for example in other software. Making it a fully open format will also allow others to help improve it.
And that, really, is the art of sharing stuff online: the more freely it is done, the greater the benefits for everyone.
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Talking of commons, I was reading David Bollier's Viral Spiral recently, probably the best book about the rise of the commons as a new force (and I want to emphasise that I am not at all bitter about the fact that he didn't mention Rebel Code once in his description of the early days of free software - nope, not bitter in the slightest.)
I bought a dead tree version, but it's freely available online under a CC licence (sadly not an option when Rebel Code came out...for the simple reason Creative Commons was being formulated at the same time I was writing it.) That's appropriate, since the book is largely about the evolution of the CC licences - and a fascinating tale it is, too.
One particularity of those licences is the way that they try to give users different flavours (in fact there were originally more than there are now - some were later dropped). In many ways the ability to specify exactly which freedoms you are passing on is the most revolutionary - and contentious - part of the CC project.
Against that background, I was therefore delighted to come across Move Commons (MC), "a simple tool for initiatives, collectives and NGOs to declare the core principles they are committed to." It works in almost the same way as the CC licences, allowing you to specify exactly what your "core principles" are:
MC helps these initiatives to declare the core principles they are committed to, allowing others to understand the initiative’s insight with the first glance. The idea is to choose the MC that fits your initiative, and place the generated logo (a combination of four icons) in your webpage.
Once done that, when the next websurfer reaches the initiative’s webpage, it’ll be very easy to understand your initiative’s approach and immediatly answer several questions (Is this a Non-Profit? Are they transparent? Can I use part of their content for my blog? How are they organized internally? Do they expand the Commons with their actions?), before even clicking here and there.
But not only that. By choosing your MC you are connecting with other collectives using MC. Thus, anyone can come to movecommons.org and search for “non-profits that are sharing their contents, and are interested in environmentalism and education“, and if your initative fits that description, it’d appear there. You can thus link with other similar initiatives, regardless of their geographical location. Besides, volunteers could easily find you when they are searching with initiatives like yours… independently of how much you have invested in marketing
The page of options gives an idea of how this works, complete with dinky little logos representing things like profit/non-profit and hierarchical/non-hierarchical.
It's a clever idea, although I'm not sure they've got the key categories worked out yet - for example, it's not clear what the "Reproducible" option really means in terms of content licensing. Still, it's great to see people building on the CC ideas, just as Creative Commons built on the GNU GPL's original breakthrough.
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Here's a variety of "sharing" I'd not come across before: private label rights. This is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:Private label rights is a concept similar to reselling, but the merchant is permitted to modify the product to fit his or her needs. Typical PLR products are articles, reports, eBooks, and autoresponders. This kind of content is used for the purpose of allowing multiple buyers to invest in the content with free rein to alter and use it by claiming authorship of it. It is typically used in online affiliate marketing systems.
As far as I can make out, this is a kind of a cross between spamblog content and pyramid selling.
One question that comes to mind is how much CC-licensed stuff ends up being passed around in this way? Of course, if the licence allows it, that's fine, but I wondered whether anyone had any experience of their content being "repackaged" in this way?
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As readers of this blog will doubtless know, Richard Stallman's great stroke of genius at the founding of the GNU project was to use copyright when crafting the GNU GPL licence, but in such a way that it undermined the restrictive monopoly copyright usually imposes on users, and required people to share instead.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Well, of course you can – free software is the primary demonstration of that. But that doesn't mean it's trivial to turn free into fee. Here's an interesting move that demonstrates that quite nicely.
On Open Enterprise blog.
The Australian government is emerging as one of the leaders in the sphere of open government. It has now published a draft report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce, entitled "Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0" (hmm, not quite sure about that phraseology). Here's the central recommendation:A Declaration of Open Government by the Australian Government
Accompanying the Government’s announcement of its policy response to this report, the Australian Government should make a Declaration on Open Government, stating that:
* Public sector information is a national resource and that releasing as much of it on as permissive terms as possible will maximise its economic, social value to Australians and reinforce its contribution to a healthy democracy;
* Using technology to increase collaboration in making policy and providing service will help achieve a more consultative, participatory and transparent government;
* Online engagement by public servants involving robust professional discussion, as part of their duties and/or as private citizens, benefits their agencies, their professional development, those with whom they are engaged and the Australian public. This engagement should be enabled and encouraged;
* The fulfilment of the above at all levels of government is integral to the Government’s objectives including public sector reform, innovation and utilising the national investment in broadband to achieve an informed, connected and democratic community.
What's interesting is that in addition to this strong central declaration in favour of openness, the draft report is peppered throughout with references to "open source"; indeed, the whole thing is permeated by its spirit - which is probably why it is such an inspiring document. Let's hope that other governments are indeed inspired by it, and come out with something similar themselves.
Update: As people in the comments have rightly reminded me, this plan to open up some data is rather negated by the Australian government's moves to censor massively the Internet. Interestingly this schizophrenia mirrors almost exactly that of the UK government.
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One of the vexed issues in the world of Creative Commons licensing is what, exactly, is meant by "non-commercial" use. In an attempt to clarify things, the Creative Commons people have commissioned a study, which has now appeared. Here are some of the highlights according to the press release:Creative Commons noncommercial licenses preclude use of a work “in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.” The majority of respondents (87% of creators, 85% of users) replied that the definition was “essentially the same as” (43% of creators, 42% of users) or “different from but still compatible with” (44% of creators, 43% of users) theirs. Only 7% of creators and 11% of users replied that the term was “different from and incompatible with” their definition.
Other highlights from the study include the rating by content creators and users of different uses of online content as either “commercial” or “noncommercial” on a scale of 1-100, where 1 is “definitely noncommercial” and 100 is “definitely commercial.” On this scale, creators and users (84.6 and 82.6, respectively) both rate uses in connection with online advertising generally as “commercial.” However, more specific use cases revealed that many interpretations are fact-specific. For example, creators and users gave the specific use case “not-for-profit organization uses work on its site, organization makes enough money from ads to cover hosting costs” ratings of 59.2 and 71.7, respectively.
On the same scale, creators and users (89.4 and 91.7, respectively) both rate uses in which money is made as being commercial, yet again those ratings are lower in use cases specifying cost recovery or use by not-for-profits. Finally, both groups rate “personal or private” use as noncommercial, though creators did so less strongly than users (24.3 and 16.0, respectively, on the same scale).
In open access polls, CC’s global network of “friends and family” rate some uses differently from the U.S. online population—although direct empirical comparisons may not be drawn from these data. For example, creators and users in these polls rate uses by not-for-profit organizations with advertisements as a means of cost recovery at 35.7 and 40.3, respectively—somewhat more noncommercial. They also rate “personal or private” use as strongly noncommercial—8.2 and 7.8, respectively—again on a scale of 1-100 where 1 is “definitely noncommercial” and 100 is “definitely commercial.”
I hope you got all that, for I certainly didn't. All that comes across to me from these figures is that "non-commercial" is so fluid a concept as to be useless.
The Creative Commons people rather created a rod for their own backs when they allowed this particular licence, which was bound to problematic. Indeed, it's striking that the GNU GPL, which doesn't allow this restriction, avoids all these issues entirely. Probably too late now to do anything about it...other than commissioning surveys, of course.
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...surprises, that is:So my blog turns seven today. On August 20, 2002, while hiding north of San Francisco working on the Eldred appeal, I penned my first (wildly and embarrassingly defensive) missive to Dave. Some 1753 entries later, I'm letting the blog rest. This will be the last post in this frame. Who knows what the future will bring, but in the near term, it won't bring more in lessig.org/blog.
The main reason is that he's too damn busy with other projects, although I suspect the imminent arrival of his third child also was a big factor.
Lessig surprised me before by moving from CC work to his transparency gig. I thought he was bonkers then...and I was wrong, he was just - as usual - prescient. Maybe his move away from blogging is the same: but I hope not.... (Via John Naughton.)
I'm a big fan of the Creative Commons movement. But it has a big problem: few people have heard of it according to a survey conducted on behalf of the UK's Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI).
In the survey, people were shown one of the standard CC logos (like the one at the foot of this page). Here's what they found:
75% of respondents did not recognise this image.
Lack of recognition was highest amongst the “general public” – 87%. And lowest amongst respondents from the OPSI website – 55% did not recognise the image.
The majority did not understand the meaning of the image. Understanding was highest amongst the OPSI website respondents – 35%.
This is not surprising as this group was also the group in which the most had heard of Creative Commons licences before – 47% (vs 10% of the “general public” and 29% of the OPSI database). Only those likely to be more familiar with copyright (inferred from their route to the survey) are likely to have a previous understanding of Creative Commons terminology and imagery. One might argue that if these are used moving forward, more people will become more familiar with these, however, the benefits at this stage of shared/added meaning would only really apply to a minority – a minority who are likely to have a strong understanding of Crown copyright already.
It looks like much more work needs to be done to get the message out about Creative Commons and its licences.
As RMS emphasises again and again, at the heart of free software lies an ethical vision of sharing and mutual respect. Although open source blurs that vision somewhat thanks to the glasses of pragmatism that it wears, the basic idea is still there. And yet we talk relatively little about that ethical aspect, which is a pity, because it is both important and interesting.
Just how interesting can be seen in this splendid essay "Ethical Visions of Copyright Law" from James Grimmelmann, who is Associate Professor of Law, New York Law School. As its title makes clear, the focus is on copyright, but Stallman's approach to subverting copyright to make it more ethical occupies an important place in the argument. Here's part of the introduction:copyright law imagines that we are ethical beings, capable of being creative and of being touched by the creativity of others, inclined to be sociable and to return good for good. It has in mind a deontic vision of reciprocity in the author-audience relationship. Or, more succinctly, authors and audiences ought to respect each other.
That may sound like a platitude, but it isn’t. Everyone agrees that authors and audiences ought to respect each other, but they come to blows over how that respect ought to be expressed. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) thinks that audiences don’t respect authors enough; the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) counters that it’s the authors who aren’t showing enough respect for audiences. Meanwhile, free software advocates and fans of the commons sketch pictures of respectful exchange that look very different from the marketplace exchanges that both the RIAA and EFF treat as normal.
We can learn some very interesting things about the state of the copyright debate by looking closely at those disagreements. When the EFF tells the content industries not to “sue their customers,” it’s making an ethical argument that’s the mirror image of the content industries’ call for people to “respect copyrights.” The arguments are the same, just directed at opposite sides of the author-audience relationship. Compare those arguments with the genuine radicalism in the way that some free software advocates don’t care whether programming remains a viable profession. They see legal restrictions on user freedoms as inherently unethical; no amount of software produced or programmers employed could justify them.
As scholars, we should pay attention to these ethical visions, because they are descriptively important to how people behave, because they affect the persuasiveness of our policy arguments in the public arena, and because they make provocative claims about what intellectual property law ought to look like. This essay will find evidence of these visions in the language and structure of intellectual property law, and in the rhetoric that activists use as they make arguments about intellectual property. These ethical visions link copyright law’s rules to a model of how those regulated by copyright law could and should behave.
As you might expect, the Creative Commons movement also figures largely, and the essay picks out an interesting fact about it:
To summarize, there’s a significant ambiguity in Creative Commons’ response to the copyright system. It could be saying (or could be seen to say) that the system is out of balance because authors have exclusive rights they don’t need and don’t want to use. It could also be saying (or could be seen to say) that the system is out of balance because authors have exclusive rights they shouldn’t have and shouldn’t be allowed to use. In either frame, its licensing strategy is a natural response designed to encourage a healthier balance. But the latter frame, let us be clear, is a challenge to the default ethical vision of copyright itself, not merely a critique of authorial behavior made from within that vision.
Great stuff - highly recommended.
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Welcome the Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository
On this site you will find select broadcast quality footage that Al Jazeera has released under various Creative Commons licenses. Through Creative Commons licensing, you are able to legally share and reuse our footage.
What Al Jazeera understands is that you *want* people to copy and share your stuff: that's how you build influence. Locking content away is a sure method to *diminish* your role in the conversation. That's why most Western media companies are doomed to become irrelevant if they don't follow Al Jazeera's lead.
Of course, no danger of any of this dangerous "21st century" openness cropping up here in the UK:President-elect Obama has championed the creation of a more open, transparent, and participatory government. To that end, Change.gov adopted a new copyright policy this weekend. In an effort to create a vibrant and open public conversation about the Obama-Biden Transition Project, all website content now falls under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
(With thanks to Alan Lord for reminding me this deserves to be highlighted.)
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of the term “intellectual property”, and that I prefer the more technically correct term “intellectual monopolies”. Despite that, I strongly recommend a new book from someone who not only approves of the term “intellectual property”, but of its fundamental ideas. I do so, however, because this avowed fan also has serious reservations....
On Open Enterprise blog.
I wrote below about the distinction between digital and analogue objects, but that was just a crude statement of the situation, which is in a state of flux. The distinction between digital and analogue is blurring thanks to rapid prototyping machines that can take digital representations of objects and turn them into physical things.
Once that happens, it becomes possible to apply all the usual open source methodology to analogue stuff - sharing designs, improving on them etc. One thing you need to do this is a repository of open designs; enter the wonderfully-named Thingiverse:Thingiverse is a place for you to share your digital designs with the world. We believe that just as computing shifted away from the mainframe into the personal computer that you use today, digital fabrication will share the same path. Infact, it is already happening: laser cutters, cnc machines, 3D printers, and even automated paper cutters are all getting cheaper by the day. These machines are useful for a huge variety of things, but you need to supply them with a digital design in order to get anything useful out of them. We're hoping that together we can create a community of people who create and share designs freely, so that all can benefit from them.
Creative Commons has some useful further info:
Thingiverse is an “object sharing” site that enables anyone to upload the schematics, designs, and images for their projects. Users can then download and reuse the work in their projects using their own laser cutters, 3D printers, and analog tools. Think of it as a Flickr for the Maker set.
Besides implementing our licenses, Bre and Zach [Thingiverse's creators] have also gone the distance and allowed users to license works under the GNU GPL, LGPL, and BSD licenses, as well as allowing them to release works into the public domain.
Here's a fine open access initiative, but unusually, it's for books:Bloomsbury Academic is a radically new scholarly imprint launched in September 2008.
Bloomsbury Academic will begin publishing monographs in the areas of Humanities and Social Sciences. While respecting the traditional disciplines we will seek to build innovative lists on a thematic basis, on issues of particular relevance to the world today.
Publications will be available on the Web free of charge and will carry Creative Commons licences. Simultaneously physical books will be produced and sold around the world.
For the first time a major publishing company is opening up an entirely new imprint to be accessed easily and freely on the Internet. Supporting scholarly communications in this way our authors will be better served in the digital age.
Let's hope it, er, blooms.
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