American University Washington College of Law (AUWCL) has received a three-year grant of $3.8 million from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, for its Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP). The project will study changes needed in international copyright policy to ensure equity in the production of and access…
We at Creative Commons (CC) have long disagreed with the use of digital rights management (DRM) and technological protection measures (TPMs) in the open environment. We believe that DRM and TPMs should not be used to control, limit, prevent or otherwise affect activities and uses allowed under CC licenses’ terms. Plainly, DRM and TPMs are…
Dear Mr. President-elect, First, I’d like to offer my sincere congratulations to you and to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. This has been such a difficult year for so many around the world, and in this time of extreme polarization it is encouraging to hear you both talk about bringing people together to meet our common…
Brunch_final by Alexander King (CC BY-SA) derivative of Jan Rombauer's Cheers 2
Generally speaking, 2020 hasn’t been a great year. That’s obvious. But we’re not here to focus on the awful things that have happened (and are still happening) this year. Instead, we’re here to tell you a good news story about 2020: a story about collaboration, innovation, and creativity. A story about the present and the…
Fashion Plate (1886) published by Abel Goubad et Fils, French via the Smithsonian Design Museum (CC0)
On November 2 and 3, 2020, Creative Commons (CC), the European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) and the Onassis Foundation held the online symposium: Is Sharing Always Caring? Bringing together 250 participants from 38 countries on four continents— from museum professionals to fashion design students all the way to big fashion brands—the event was an opportunity…
Four years ago today, the Marrakesh Treaty entered into force. The Treaty is truly special in the international copyright law universe: it has a clear humanitarian and social development dimension and it’s the first international treaty that focuses on the beneficiaries of limitations and exceptions, rather than on the rights of creators or holders of…
One of our roles at Creative Commons involves influencing policy making at the international level. This is a role we can fulfill notably thanks to our permanent observer status with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the UN agency that shapes international intellectual property (IP) law. However, a few days ago, the Wikimedia Foundation’s application…
Credit: 2010 PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellows by PopTech (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Last month, cOAlition S released its Rights Retention Strategy to safeguard researchers’ intellectual ownership rights and suppress unreasonable embargo periods—Creative Commons (CC) keenly supports this initiative. Modernizing an outdated academic publishing system Under a traditional publishing model, researchers who want to publish their articles in a journal typically need to assign or exclusively license their…
In the second part of our series on artificial intelligence (AI) and creativity, we get immersed in the fascinating universe of AI in an attempt to determine whether it is capable of creating works eligible for copyright protection. Below, we present two examples of an AI system generating arguably novel content through two different methods:…
Image: "Love is Art Science 95" by Kollage Kid, licensed CC BY-NC 2.0.
Should novel output (such as music, artworks, poems, etc.) generated by artificial intelligence1 (AI) be protected by copyright? While this question seems straightforward, the answer certainly isn’t. It brings together technical, legal, and philosophical questions regarding “creativity,” and whether machines can be considered “authors” that produce “original” works. In search of an answer, we ran…