Creative Commons » new york

Clicking “Refresh”: A New Look at Fair Use in the Digital Age

Jane Park — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:03:24 +0000

For those of you in the NY area in October, the New York City Bar has a thought provoking panel discussion coming up on fair use in the era of blogging, Twitter, and Facebook. The panel members hail from the U.S. District Court, the Associated Press, and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, to name a few. And in the spirit of this topic, I’m going to quote from the site now,

“This panel discussion will address the ways in which copyright law’s fair use doctrine has evolved (or may be tested) in an era in which the rise of news aggregation, social networking, and a variety of other websites increasingly allow internet users to combine and transform content from endless sources of media. How transformative are on-line montages and mash-ups? Is the aggregation of headlines or content from news providers infringement or fair use? Does posting copyrighted content on a user’s Facebook or Myspace page undermine the market for that content? When does a blogger’s summary of an article appropriate enough content to constitute copyright infringement? Panelists will offer a broad range of perspectives on these an other issues from the bench, bar, media industry, and legal academy.”

The discussion will be held on Wednesday, October 7 at 6pm, so be sure to register (for free) and drop by.

Thursday @ EYEBEAM – Copyright & The Creator: Who Cares What’s Fair?

Fred Benenson — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:33:05 +0000

If you are in New York on Thursday this week, you are invited to a panel I’ve helped organize with our friends at Eyebeam on fair use and creators. I’ll also be moderating the panel and giving a brief primer on fair use:

This Thursday, July 9, 6–8PM at Eyebeam, there will be a panel discussion on fair-use and appropriation within activist and creative practice moderated by Creative Commons product manager and Eyebeam research associate Fred Benenson; artist/curator Mark Tribe, audio-visual remix artist Jonny Wilson (Eclectic Method), Postmasters gallery director Magdalena Sawon, and Eyebeam resident Jon Cohrs.

The panel is part of Eyebeam’s Summer School @ Night program. And in case you don’t know, Eyebeam, is one of the preeminent spaces for digital art and many of its residents and fellows create works that investigate many of the issues that we’re interested in at CC. But more on that later. :)

NY State Senate Goes CC

Fred Benenson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:00:10 +0000

If you’re reading the Creative Commons blog, chances are you’re aware of the fact that the United States federal government is not entitled to copyright protection for their works. If you didn’t know this, check out the Wikipedia article on the subject, or some of our past blog posts on the subject. This means that federal works are essentially in the public domain.

What you may not know is that works of American states, in contrast to works of the federal government, are actually entitled to copyright protection under U.S. law. This creates the very awkward consequence of states automatically holding copyright in the very state laws, rules and court decisions that bind their citizens, not to mention other types of content created by its employees who are paid from public coffers filled in part by their taxpayers. CC is not alone (check out legendary archivist Carl Malamud and his public.resource.org project for more info) in believing that all such works should belong to the public and reside in the public domain.

Needless to say, we think this is an enormous opportunity for proper application of our legal tools to free up state works.

This is why its exciting to see the New York State Senate adopt a Creative Commons License for the content on their website. The photos and text of NYSenate.gov are now available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license, and 3rd party content, such as comments and user submitted photos are available under our Attribution license. Furthermore, the Senate has used our CC+ protocol to allow all other uses (even commercial ones and non-attribution ones) of the content so long as it is not for political fund raising purposes. In other words, if you’re not doing political fund raising you’re allowed to do whatever you want with the content.

While this is a somewhat novel approach to using our licenses, and indeed grants citizens rights to works they don’t currently have, it is only the first step. In the future, CC would love to see more states pushing their work into the public domain (and their policies into synchronicity with those of the federal government), for example by using our public domain waiver, CC0.

If you know of a state using CC licenses, add it to our wiki page on government uses of CC, or just let us know.