Kathlyn Clore

Cash-strapped editor seeks easy creative collaboration online:

Me: Law-abiding journalist who takes blurry photos. Looking for illustrative photograph to run alongside article or blog post. Editor at a not-for-profit by day, sometimes producing video for established media brands.

You: A talented photographer who reads Lawrence Lessig on the weekends. Have posted your telling, creative photograph on Flickr. Like to put your work under Creative Commons licensing. Mainly looking for Attribution-Noncommercial, but Attribution-Share Alike is OK.

Our collaboration will hopefully go viral.

My attribution gets your picture, free and clear.

What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons licences are an evolution in copyright.

Copyright law has so far developed mainly within nation-states; copyright law in the UK developed differently than copyright law in Italy or Germany.

The Internet enables more collaboration between people and businesses in these countries, though, necessitating a harmonized way to share.

Creative Commons licences allow creators of original works – be they photographs, articles or videos – to easily label their works with copyright permissions.

There are six versions of the licences, ranging from restrictive “Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives” permissions to an “Attribution” licence that allows the work to be used for commercial and not-for-profit work as long as its attributed.

Permission granted
Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, the not-for-profit that helps write and distribute the licences wrote:

“Imagine an amateur filmmaker creating content to upload to their website as they try to clear the rights of music that they’ve gathered from across the Internet.

Or imagine someone who wants to give a television broadcaster the right to use, with attribution, a photograph that they had posted on their blog.

In most cases, the legal fees would exceed the value of the transaction and the sharing would fail, either because the parties would ignore the law, or opt not to share because the legal cost of doing so was prohibitive.”

Creative Commons allow for a reversal of permission paradigms.

Editors or filmmakers previously had to find and ask authors or studios for legal permission to use a particular original work.

Creative Commons allows authors and studios to label their original work with legal permissions. Anyone who sees the work is then aware of how they may or may not legally use the work. They don’t have to ask permission.

What’s happening in Europe?
Creative Commons licences have been written for 25 of the 27 member states of the European Union. Legal experts in each country have written the licences to comply with the basis of local legal codes.

Proliferation of Creative Commons seems to be in line with current thinking in Brussels. Fostering a climate that enables Internet users to easily share their creative work is a priority within the EU.

In late January, 2010, the COMMUNIA Thematic Network On The Digital Public Domain, co-funded by the Commission to generate policy guidelines related to open access, released a dossier called The Public Domain Manifesto.

Its first principle states, “The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception.”

The Manifesto is available in 11 languages; a Facebook group dedicated to it has about 1,300 fans.
D2#07 Europe, The Borderless State? - Panel WCS 2009

Original signatories to the manifesto include Knowledgeland, a Dutch thinktank working toward a knowledge-based economy; iCommons, a UK charity promoting open-source software; and Digitale Allmend, a Swiss association dedicated to securing public access to digital assets. Other original signatories include like-minded Italian, Slovinian, Croatian, Brazillian and American groups.

The COMMUNIA is mainly concerned with open access and making analogue versions of cultural heritage available to the public in digital form. The Commission-funded digital museum project, Europeana, is a reflection of this effort.

The COMMUNIA defines open access as:

“a movement away from an ‘all rights reserved’ approach, by which rightsholders reserve every single use possible, towards a “some rights reserved” approach, by which rightsholders voluntarily renounce to some of the exclusive rights granted by copyright law.”

Future of EU copyright law
Addressing the future of copyright law online in Europe was from 2006-2010 the job of commissioner Viviane Reading, who for the second Barroso Commission has shifted to work on another portfolio.

Before Reading took this role in the second Barroso Commission, she
spoke in favour of reforming European copyright law to better enable protection of orphan works as well as the digitalisation of cultural heritage.

Dutchwoman Neelie Kroes now presides over the task of online copyrights. Like Reading, Kroes has said that allowing for the development of a single market for online content is the best way to fight Internet piracy. (Other commissioners may disagree with this approach.)

Kroes, who worked on international competition issues during the first Barroso Commission, is most famous for imposing fines on Microsoft related to an antitrust case with the American software maker.

Kroes’ stated priorities in her new job include creation of a single clearinghouse for music rights in the EU.

She could be supportive of initiatives like Creative Commons, according to Reuters reporting from 21 January, 2010:

“Kroes, however, has shown little appetite for extending crackdowns on piracy — France, for example, has legislated to disconnect consumers from the Internet for illegal downloading — before a properly functioning market is in place.

‘Copyright is important for economy and culture, people deserve its protection, but no proper action is possible while there is no single market,’ she told the European Parliament last week in a final “interview” for the Digital Agenda post.”

So what?
Whether you’re working on a non-profit media site like this one, a private media startup, a government or a blog, Creative Commons makes it possible for you to share or use writings, photography or videos.

Even established newspapers, like La Stampa in Italy, are utilising Creative Commons.

In January, 2009, Al Jazeera began hosting a repository of Creative Commons-licensed footage from Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza.

With seven reporters based in Gaza, Al Jazeera had access to exclusive footage while the Israeli Defence Forces would not allow more journalists into Gaza. Al Jazeera could have charged other broadcastors by the second for its exclusive content.

Moeed Ahmad, the head of new media for Al Jazeera, said his company benefitted from incoming links from sites like Wikipedia, which used still images from Al Jazeera videos.

In the summer of 2009, Al Jazeera opened its blog section for re-use with a Creative Commons license.

What for photographers?
Many photojournalists worry that the proliferation of free photography will lead to the devolution of photojournalism as a profession.

Others have used Creative Commons to search for new ways to profit from photography.

In autumn, 2009, professional photographer Jonathan Worth circulated Creative Commons licensed photographs of science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. The images were licensed for commercial and non-commercial use.

Alongside these, Worth began selling series of limited-edition prints of his work alongside Doctorow’s book, For the Win. He wanted to see if the free photos generated publicity for the paid-for versions of his work.

They did, and Worth made 760 GBP, or 867 euro. He also earned many of what he calls perceivable non-material benefits.

A Foto8 blogger wrote about the experiment,

“What’s at stake here is the possibility of identifying practices that enable community-building and audience-building on the fly, around an idea, something we’re seeing more and more of.”

The French legislature passed the Hadopi bill yesterday.

According to EU Observer:

“French culture minister Frederic Mitterrand cheered the bill’s passage: ‘Artists will remember that we at last had the courage to break with the laissez-faire approach and protect their rights from people who want to turn the net into their libertarian utopia.’”

Yes, I hate the idea of the Internet as a libertarian utopia too.

Lame!

Here is a Google translation of the French Pirate Party’s response.

Wired has a great infographic and article explaining how AP’s content “protection” system works - or rather, doesn’t.

Helpful in general, but a few grafs in the middle have confused me, especially this bit:

“Indeed, it is designed to detect unauthorized use under conditions a content thief would be unlikely to use: Simply cutting and pasting AP content will remove all underlying code (as an overly ambitious aggregator might). So will re-typing it (as a commenting blogger might).”

But then, one graf later:

“Nothing in copyright law requires a blogger or commenter to include the meta-tags if they use an excerpt in a blog post. (Got it!) In fact for a blogger to comply, they’ll have to do more than just cut and paste – they will have to view the source code on a newspaper’s site, search through the HTML and javascript to find the text of the story and its micro-formats. Once the thief has gone to this trouble the purloined story will call home to report where it is being re-printed, via a Web Bug url embedded in the story. Only then would The News Registry even be aware of this use.”

Question: Does cut and pasting alert The News Registry, or not?

Big brother got a kid sister today, and she’ll be watching you closely.

The media blogosphere was a-crackin’ today after The Associated Press announced its intent to:

“create a news registry that will tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use. The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a built-in beacon to notify AP about how the content is used.”

Hm. Is this OK?

After reading some of the reaction to this announcement, in particular a post written by author and professor Jeff Jarvis’ - that the AP attempting, but will likely fail, to kill the link economy - I decided I don’t think AP’s fancy new “wrapper” system is a problem.

Yes, the AP will be monitoring the use of its content more closely. So what?

Today’s announcement is really just about a somewhat cool bit of technology. In fact, I think big companies like Google should be more supportive of this kind of technology. I’m not an expert, but can refer to an explanation of ACAP and why search engines don’t like it.)

What Jarvis is really worried about is what the AP will or will not do when it finds its content cited, linked to or quoted.

He references one of my favorite Martin Luther King, Jr., quotes when he writes “If the AP goes after ANYONE for linking that affects EVERYONE” in the comments section of this CJR post on the subject.

Not sure I think this is all that serious.

I read just now the AP’s Terms and Conditions. It does not allow anyone to “copy, reproduce, publish, transmit, transfer, sell, rent, modify, create derivative works from, distribute, repost, perform, display, or in any way commercially exploit the Materials carried on this site, nor may you infringe upon any of the copyrights or other intellectual property rights contained in the Materials.”

Granted, The AP does have a reputation for being intermittently tough on bloggers who quote lines of AP content. It puzzlingly went after the Drudge Report about a year ago, asking Matt Drudge to remove lines quoting from the AP from seven stories.

At that time, there was a lot of reaction and attention paid to an AP fee sheet for use of its content.

The hippie illegal downloader of music and movies in me thinks the AP is absurd to try and apply such stringent standards to the link-based Internet. Its board of directors clearly don’t understand how this medium works.

But the girl who desperately wants to try and support her travel habits on a reporter/editor salary thinks content creators have the right to protect the economic value of their work. And that’s what the new tag and tracking system should give AP the opportunity to do - after it gives AP a better understanding of how its content is being referenced/used online.

After all, it makes sense to try and really understand how content is being used on the Internet before deciding the best Fair Use policy for this “new” medium.

This is proof that railing against “the man” (even if he does have the face of a 12-year-old) can make a difference, at least online.

And that Internet users who use social networking are not free slave labor.

Indeed, massive web platforms should not be allowed to so lightly steal content.

Smart move, Facebook.