Last year, six projects were carried out thanks to funding made available to the Creative Commons Copyright Platform members to drive policy issues affecting the open movement. In this blog post, we’re glad to share the engaging, inspiring articles the project lead wrote on CC’s Medium publication We Like to Share.

Preparing Bulgarian GLAMs for the EU Copyright Reform — by Ana Lazarova

The initiative ‘GLAMs to Fix Copyright: Preparing GLAMs for the Copyright Reform in Bulgaria’ was organized by Creative Commons Bulgaria in collaboration with Digital Republic Association, and supported by Creative Commons Global Network Copyright Platform Activity Fund.

On December 07 and 14, 2020, we organised a two-days extensive copyright training for public libraries in Bulgaria. Our main purpose was to inform library representatives about the upcoming implementation into national law of the recently adopted Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (the CDSM Directive). However, we also included what turned out to be much-needed information on copyright basics, CC licenses, Rights statements, the legal status of e-books and digitisation. Read more…

The impact of the Paying Public Domain on Creative Commons public domain tools – by Maximilliano Marzetti

Works in the public domain are free to be reused, remixed and mashed-up. Well, unless a “domaine public payant” or paying public domain (PPD) system is in force, in that case, a fee (or tax) has to be paid to a state agency beforehand. This is the case in several countries, including Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. In these three countries, after copyright expires, the PPD begins and lasts indefinitely. Unlike what happens under copyright law, in a PPD system it is the State and not the author who gets paid. The PPD applies to national and foreign authors’ works, anonymous works, and even works that were never copyrighted. Read more here and here…

A new copyright that belongs to everybody: the CCMX grant project — by Salvador Alcántar

In Mexico, as in many other countries, the copyright discourse is made up of different parts, but it always has a notorious bias towards the point of view of the so-called entertainment industry. Sometimes you feel copyright is not like a set of rules that motivates creation, innovation and new content, but as a bunch of don’ts that freeze cultural activity and require payment for every form of use of content. Thanks to a Creative Commons grant, the local CC chapter in Mexico decided to lead a publication integrating other visions about copyright, a document that could become a milestone for new understandings in the responsibility of public policy about culture, freedom, inclusion, sharing and other non-traditional visions about authorship. Read more…

Mapping user rights in the evolving EU copyright framework — by Paul Keller

In a little less than a month from now, on the 7th of June 2021 the new Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, that was adopted in April 2019 after much controversy will come into effect across the 27 EU Member States. While the directive is primarily known for its problematic provisions, such as the new rules requiring online content sharing platforms to install upload filters for copyrighted works (Article 17 of the Directive) and a new press publishers right (Article 15), it also includes a number of provisions that strengthen user rights in the EU Member States. Read more…

Open Knowledge Platform — by Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič and Azra Jušić

Intellectual Property Institute (IPI) (https://www.ipi.si/en/) is working on the project Open Knowledge Platform (the Project), aiming to bring together an open science community in Slovenia. In addition to covering copyright and open licensing, its focus is to engage educators and cultural heritage institutions. For this Project, IPI has teamed up with project partners, who are bringing together different institutions involved in open science. The two main project deliverables are 1) building strategy for setting up the platform/community focused on copyright and open licenses and 2) launch of initial activities and program of the Project. Read more…

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