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Upcoming Open Culture Live Webinar: “Maximizing the Value(s) of Open Access in Cultural Heritage Institutions”

Four barrels full of cash printed in black, green and red are overflowing. The text in front reads “Maximizing the Value(s) of Open Access in Cultural Heritage Institutions: 28 February 2024 | 2:00 PM UTC”.
Barrels of Money” by Victor Dubreuil. 1890s. Brandywine Museum of Art, Public Domain.

On Wednesday, 28 February  2024, at 2:00 pm UTC, CC’s Open Culture Program will be hosting a new webinar in our Open Culture Live series titled “Maximizing the Value(s) of Open Access in Cultural Heritage Institutions.”

One common concern for GLAMs thinking about going open is the potential loss of revenue from image licensing — however, open collections are said to often draw in more viewers, onsite visitors, and (financial) supporters. There are also costs associated with the work of granting permissions on an image by image basis in employee time and legal fees. Ultimately, how do the costs and benefits stack up? How can we ensure the value of cultural heritage collections continues to support their financial sustainability?

We will be joined by a panel of experts including:

We will dive into some important questions like:

Register here.

CC is a non-profit that relies on contributions to sustain our work. Support CC in our efforts to promote better sharing at creativecommons.org/donate.

 

What is Open Culture Live?

In this series, we tackle some of the more complex challenges that face the open culture movement, bringing in speakers with personal and professional expertise on the topic. 

CC Supports a new Digital Knowledge Act for Europe

Creative Commons supports the development of a Digital Knowledge Act. In this blog post, we offer some background on the need for a law that supports researchers and knowledge institutions as a means of spurring knowledge-based innovation for a sustainable future.

A medieval manuscript representing three richly-clad women in front of a green, hilly landscape with castles in the background.
Anonymous, “Prudence, Wisdom and Knowledge”, National Library of the Netherlands, Public Domain Mark. 

In December last year, the Communia Association for the Public Domain — of which Creative Commons (CC) is a member —  asked the European Commission and European Parliament to consider the development of a Digital Knowledge Act. In this blog post, we offer some background on the proposal and explain why CC fully supports it. 

Rationale for a Digital Knowledge Act

European knowledge institutions (libraries, universities, schools, etc.) as well as researchers face numerous copyright challenges in the digital environment. Access to academic publications, their reproduction for research purposes, text-and-data mining, etc. are all activities that are necessary to conduct serious research but are hampered by misaligned copyright rules, especially where cross-border collaboration is key.  

As top EU institutions are gearing up for a new mandate for the next five years, a Digital Knowledge Act would enable knowledge institutions to fulfill their mission and offer the same services online as offline. Such a regulation could improve copyright law by introducing the following for the benefit of knowledge institutions: 

CC’s work on policy and open knowledge

CC recognizes that equitable policy which enables and promotes open access (OA) is pivotal to making knowledge open. For example, in 2022 CC, in partnership with SPARC and EIFL, launched the Open Climate Campaign, a four-year project working to make the open sharing of research the norm in climate science. At the center of this work is partnering with national governments, private funders, and environmental organizations to develop open access policies for their grantees. Another project aims to identify recommended best practices for better sharing of climate data and yet another strives to promote open licensing for life sciences preprints. Through these OA policies and best practices we believe we can change the culture of sharing and promote the adoption of open practices for knowledge to grow and help solve the greatest challenges of our times.  

Why we support this initiative

But discrete open access policies and best practices are not enough. Knowledge institutions need to be able to rely on a clear, harmonized, and supportive legal system that operates across borders. That is why CC’s policy work centers on promoting better sharing of knowledge and culture through global copyright reform. Knowledge institutions are pivotal actors in the fight against climate change and hold many of the keys to unlock knowledge. If we are going to solve the world’s biggest problems, the knowledge about them must be open, and institutions , which hold that knowledge in trust for the public, must be able to operate within a legal framework that is conducive to their core mission and purpose. A Digital Knowledge Act would provide such a structure at an EU-wide scale and would contribute to accelerating research, boosting scientific progress, and spurring knowledge-based innovation for a sustainable future. 

For additional guidance on open knowledge policy, contact us at info@creativecommons.org

An Invitation for Creators, Activists, and Stewards of the Open Movement

Dear Open Movement Creators, Activists, and Stewards, 

A key question facing Creative Commons as an organization, and the open movement in general, is how we will respond to the challenge of shaping artificial intelligence (AI) towards the public interest, growing and sustaining a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture.

So much of generative AI is built on the digital infrastructure of the commons and uses the vast quantity of images, text, video, and rich data resources of the internet. Organizations train their models with trillions of tokens from publicly available datasets like CommonCrawl, GitHub open source projects, Wikipedia, and ArXiV.

Access to the commons has enabled incredible innovations while creating the conditions for the concentration of power in entities that are able to amass the immense energy and data needed to train AI models. Community consultations at conferences like MozFest, RightsCon, Wikimania, and the CC Global Summit have also revealed concerns about transparency, bias, fairness, and attribution in AI.

Alignment Assembly

To start addressing some of these challenges, between 13 February and 15 March, Open Future will host an asynchronous, virtual alignment assembly for the open movement to explore principles and considerations for regulating generative AI. We hope to reach participants spread across different fields of open and coming from different regions of the world. We are organizing the assembly in partnership with Open Future and Fundación Karisma.

We want to bring to the conversation the perspectives of:

We will use the process of an alignment assembly, an experiment in collective deliberation and decision-making. This model is pioneered by the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP), led by Divya Siddarth and Saffron Huang. The model has been used by OpenAI, Anthropic, and the government of Taiwan.

You can sign up to take part in the process by registering your interest here (we will only use the contact information to invite you to the assembly and to provide updates and delete it once the assembly process is complete).

Background

Creative Commons has long been considering the intersection of copyright and AI. CC submitted comments to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s consultations on copyright and AI in 2020. When considering usage of CC-licensed work in AI, the organization explored in 2021 “Should CC-licensed work be used to train AI”. More recently, CC carried out consultations at MozFest, RightsCon, Wikimania, and the CC Global Summit, while publishing ongoing analysis of the AI landscape.

Ahead of the Creative Commons Global Summit last year, Creative Commons and Open Future hosted a workshop on generative AI and its impact on the commons. The group agreed and released a set of principles on “Making AI work for Creators and the Commons.” Now, we would like to test and expand this work. 

Outcome

The Alignment Assembly on AI and the Commons builds on and continues all of this work.

We treat the principles as a starting point. We are using the alignment assembly methodology and the pol.is tool to understand where there is consensus and which principles generate controversy. In particular, how much alignment there is between the perspectives of activists, creators, and stewards of the commons.

At the end of the process, we will produce a report with the outcomes of the assembly and a proposal for a refined set of principles. As the policy debate about the commons and AI develops, we hope the assembly will provide insights into better regulation of generative AI.

Sign up here to share your thoughts on regulating generative AI.

What does the CC Community Think about Regulating Generative AI?

In the past year, Creative Commons, alongside other members of the Movement for a Better Internet, hosted workshops and sessions at community conferences like MozFest, RightsCon, and Wikimania, to hear from attendees regarding their views on artificial intelligence (AI). In these sessions, community members raised concerns about how AI is utilizing CC-licensed content, and discussions touched on issues like transparency, bias, fairness, and proper attribution. Some creators worry that their work is being used to train AI systems without proper credit or consent, and some have asked for clearer guidelines around public benefit and reciprocity. 

In 2023, the theme of the CC Global Summit was AI and the Commons, focused on supporting better sharing in a world with artificial intelligence — sharing that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable. A team including CC General Counsel Kat Walsh, Director of Communications & Community Nate Angell, Director of Technology Timid Robot, and Tech Ethics Consultant Shannon Hong collaborated to use alignment assembly practices to engage the Summit community in thinking through a complex question: how should Creative Commons respond to the use of CC-licensed work in AI training? The team identified concerns CC should consider in relation to works used in AI training and mapped out possible practical interventions CC might pursue to ensure a thriving commons in a world with AI.

At the Summit, we engaged participants in an Alignment Assembly using Pol.is, an open-source, real-time survey platform, for input and voting. 25 people voted using the Pol.is, and in total 604 votes were cast on over 33 statements, with an average of 24 votes per voter. This included both pre-written seed statements and ideas suggested by participants.

The one thing everyone agreed on wholeheartedly: CC should NOT stay out of the AI debate. All attendees disagreed with the statement: “CC should not engage with AI or AI policy.” 

Pol.is aggregates the votes and divides participants into opinion groups. Opinion groups are made of participants who voted similarly to each other, and differently from other groups. There were three opinion groups that resulted from this conversation.

Group A: Moat Protectors

Group A comprises 16% of participants and is characterized by a desire to focus on Creative Commons’ current expertise, specifically some relevant advocacy and the development of preference signaling. They uniquely support noncommercial public interest AI training, unlike B and C. This group is uniquely against additional changes like model licenses and strongly against political lobbying in the US.

Group B: AI Oversight Maximalists

Group B, the largest group with 36% of participants, strongly supports Creative Commons taking all actions possible to create oversight in AI, including new political lobbying actions or collaborations, AI teaching resources, model licenses, attribution laws, and preference signaling. This group uniquely supports political lobbying and new regulatory bodies.

Group C: Equitable Benefit Seekers

Group C, containing 32% of participants, is focused on protecting traditional knowledge, preserving the ability to choose where works can be used, and prioritizing equitable benefit from AI. This group strongly supports requiring authorization for using traditional knowledge in AI training and sharing the benefits of profits derived from the commons. Like group A, this group is against political lobbying in the US.

There are two key limitations of this assembly: participant sample size and participant representativeness. There are over 22,000 members in the Creative Commons slack community, which is only a subset of the many more members of the CC community more broadly. 30 people were present and active voting members of the assembly. While many participants were open movement leaders in their countries and represented the perspectives of more individuals, this sample is too small to have a complete picture of the CC community’s desires. We did not perform a demographic survey of the room, but data from the overall conference suggests that American and European perspectives may be overrepresented in our assembly. 

Want to learn more about the specific takeaways? Read the full report.

We invite CC members to participate in the next alignment assembly, hosted by Open Future.  Sign up and learn more here. 

Dispatches from Wikimania: Values for Shaping AI Towards a Better Internet

Isolated Araneiform Topography
Isolated Araneiform Topography, from UAHiRISE Collection on Flickr. Public Domain Mark.

AI is deeply connected to networked digital technologies — from the bazillions of works harvested from the internet to train AI to all the ways AI is shaping our online experience, from generative content to recommendation algorithms and simultaneous translation. Creative Commons engaged participants at Wikimania on August 15, 2023  to shape how AI fits into the people-powered policy agenda of the Movement for a Better Internet.

The session at Wikimania was one of a series of community consultations hosted by Creative Commons in 2023. 

The goal of this session was to brainstorm and prioritize challenges that AI brings to the public interest commons and imagine ways we can meet those challenges. In order to better understand participant perspectives, we used Pol.is, a “real-time survey system, that helps identify the different ways a large group of people think about a divisive or complicated issue.” This system is a powerful way to aggregate and understand people’s opinions through written expression and voting. 

Nate Angell and I both joined the conference virtually, two talking heads on a screen, while the majority of approximately 30 participants joined in-person in Singapore. After introducing the Movement for a Better Internet and asking folks to briefly introduce themselves, we immediately started our first Pol.is with the question: “What are your concerns about AI?” If you’re curious, you can pause here, and try out Pol.is for yourself. 

In Pol.is, participants voted on a set of ten seed statements — statements that we wrote, based on previous community conversations,— they added their own concern statements, and then they voted on concern statements written by their peers in the room. Participants can choose “Agree,” “Disagree,” or “Unsure.” Overall, 31 total people voted and 532 votes were cast (with an average of 17.16 votes per person). 

96% of participants agreed that “Verification of accuracy, truthfulness and provenance of AI-produced content is difficult.” This statement drove the most consensus among all participants in the group. Consensus indicates that people from different opinion groups have a common position, or in other words, people who do not usually agree with each other agree on this topic. The other two most consensus-driving concerns were: “Large-scale use of AI may have a negative impact on the environment” and “I suspect a push for greater copyright control would eventually be appropriated and exploited by big companies. E.g. Apple and privacy.”  

The most divisive statement was: “AI is developing too fast and its impact is unclear.” Divisive implies the areas with the most differing opinions (rather than with the most disagreement, as widespread disagreement is a consensus too).  The other three most divisive statements were also the most unclear statements, with more than 30% voting “Unsure”: “AI can negatively impact the education of students,” “AI can use an artist’s work without explicit permission or knowledge,” and “AI and the companies behind them steal human labor without credit and without pay.” 

Back in our workshop room, we  viewed the data report live, which was somewhat difficult due to limitations in text size. Participants in the room elaborated on their concerns, highlighting why they agreed or disagreed on particular points. 

In the second half of the workshop, we asked participants to imagine ways we can meet one particular challenge. We focused our discussion on the only statement with 100% agreement: “AI makes it easier to create disinformation at scale.” 

Participants were asked to write down their ideas in a shared document, and stand up to share their thoughts in front of the audience. The three major buckets for innovation in this space were education, technical advancement, and cultural advocacy. In education, participants brought up the need for critical thinking education to reinforce the ability to identify reliable sources and AI tools education to allow more people to understand how misinformation is created. Technical projects included developing AI to tackle disinformation, building a framework for evaluating AI tools during development, and creating better monitoring systems for misinformation. Participants also highlighted the need for cultural advocacy, from building the culture of citations and human-generated reference work to policy advocacy to maintain the openness of the commons. 

Creative Commons will continue community consultations with Open Future Foundation in the next month. Sign up and learn more here. 

 

Recap & Recording: “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution”

The background is a woven textile with black, red, blue, and brown and tan shapes emmulating birds and fish. The text reads
Andean Textile Fragment” by Peruvian. 1500. Walters Art Museum., here slightly cropped, is released into the public domain under CC0.

In January we hosted a webinar titled “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution” discussing the intersection of indigenous knowledge and open sharing. Our conversation spanned a variety of topics regarding indigenous sovereignty over culture, respectful terminology, and the legacy of colonialism and how it still exists today.  While we strive for more open sharing, it is important to recognize the cases where culture should not be open to all.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples had a significant impact on the ability for indigenous people to advocate for their rights, and for institutions to have clearer guidance on the treatment of indigenous cultural expressions. But there is much more to be done. Institutions stewarding indigenous cultural expressions must be patient and  take the time needed to build relationships with the communities whose culture is in their collections in order to establish ways of sharing with consideration and consent.

In this webinar, we were  joined by:

Watch the recording. 

 

Learn More 

We shared a reading list in our announcement post, here are some more links as shared by the panelists and by some audience members during the conversation:

What is Open Culture Live?

In this series, we tackle some of the more complex challenges that face the open culture movement, bringing in speakers with personal and professional expertise on various topics. Watch past webinars:

Save the date for our next webinar “Maximizing the Value(s) of Open Access in Cultural Heritage Institutions” on 28 Feb at 2 PM UTC. 

CC is a non-profit that relies on contributions to sustain our work. Support CC in our efforts to promote better sharing at creativecommons.org/donate

CC Open Education Platform Activities: 2023 in Review

The CC Open Education community had a busy 2023!  Community members reflect on their accomplishments, lessons learned and what is next. 

 

Orange figures writing on and sharing papers, then making paper airplanes

The CC Open Education community had a busy 2023!  Five project teams, spanning nine countries, worked on open education projects ranging from developing STEAM, interactive, and climate change-related OER, to international curriculum alignment and translation work. Community members also worked on multimedia resources supporting the UNESCO Recommendation on OER, and presented in CC’s biannual Open Education Lightning Talks. Community members reflect on their accomplishments, lessons learned and what is next below. CC staff lightly edited text for clarity.

Building a K-12 Interactive Open Textbook

Update from Werner Westermann: This project developed a K-12 Open Textbook in the subject of Civics and Citizenship subject for 11th and 12th Grade, aligned to the official K-12 curriculum of Chile. With the CC funding, we made 60% progress on one Open Textbook for 11th grade, surpassing our initial goal. We worked with teachers, creators of the interactive resources and a graphic designer on all four learning units of the 11th grade Open Textbook, as defined by Chile’s official curriculum for Civics and Citizenship. To help others’ open education projects, we share some lessons we encountered:

What’s next? The next step is to complete the 11th grade Open Textbook development and publish it, pending funding.  We also await an AI tool for Spanish support to speed up production.

Popularization of OER in Ukraine: Small steps to a big goal

Update from Tetiana Kolesnykova: Polytechnic University of Milan and the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies (USUST) partnered to translate and localize a MOOC on OER: “Using Open Educational Resources in Teaching.” This OER provides equitable and inclusive access to education amidst full-scale war in Ukraine. Despite the war, the project achieved its aim: there is now a version of the MOOC for Ukrainian learners. Our lessons from this work included: listening to each other, negotiating where needed, and compromise. We were not looking for perfection but for a good result to be achieved within all limitations. With teamwork and strong motivation, we solved the challenges of the project together; and the end result exceeded our expectations. As a result: All MOOC subtitles for each video, the course description and all tests were made available in Ukrainian, ensuring participants gain a better understanding and support with the final assessment. We also created eight additional instructions and illustrations in Ukrainian. We developed a mock-up of the Certificate of Completion of the course “Using Open Educational Resources in Teaching” adapted into Ukrainian. Several faculty and librarians tested the MOOC in Ukrainian.

We started promoting the Ukrainian localisation of the MOOC “Using Open Educational Resources in Teaching” in October. Politecnico di Milano (METID) and the Scientific Library of the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies (USUST) presented our collaborative project at international conferences, national webinars, publications, and on the website of the USUST Scientific Library.

While it is too early to measure the success of the Ukrainian MOOC “Using Open Educational Resources in Teaching,” we know it is already raising awareness of OER opportunities among the wider Ukrainian academic community. 

What’s next?  We will continue our teamwork, and ignite new OER adaptations in a sustainable way.

STEAM Ahead with OER in South Africa project

Update from Dan McGuire: This collaborative project between Ghana, South Africa and the US created, curated, and sourced OER content aligned to Ghanaian and South African education standards.  

Our colleague, Peter Amoabil observed that using the MoodleBox and OER materials provided learning opportunities for students without the need to rely on the internet, which is very useful in Ghana where over 95% of schools don’t have internet access. Students were able to use the digital content for all subjects and especially for reading in their mother tongue, Dagbani. Reading materials in Dagbani have previously been very hard to acquire.

In South Africa, we were able to translate both reading materials and math assessments from English into isiXhosa for students in grades Pre-K through 1st grade. Students were excited to learn using WIFI devices.

What’s next? Translating educational materials into the students’ mother tongue is especially valuable and innovative. We plan to expand the professional development for use of digital OER materials aligned to national standards to more teachers in both Ghana and South Africa. This project helped us establish a process to create and deliver learning materials to Pre-K — 6th grade students. We will also be making the OER professional development courses and instructional content available via open repositories.

Climate Change: OER integrating SDG components in Education in two Southeast Asian Countries

Update from Dr. Suma Parahakaran: This project worked with the Malaysian Ministry of Education as well as Malaysian and Laotian schools, creating OER and experiential learning activities. Primary and Secondary school students engaged in cross disciplinary, technical, and integrated learning activities, such as setting up solar panels on rooftops. They got to attend workshops and brainstorms with international experts and teachers. Students also created videos, brochures and other resources focused on ethics, climate change and sustainable development education. Finally, students then entered a competition related to Climate Change and Sustainable Development OER. For more information and results of the competition, view the project website

What’s next? While there are private Youtube links to the videos, they will be made public soon. Project lead: Dr. Suma Parahakaran

Alquimetricos

Update from Fernando Daguanno: Alquimétricos is an OER project that uses connectors and sticks to build geometric structures for STEAM education. Through experiential learning, the project develops students’ spatial, mathematical and kinetic understanding. The Alquimétricos Kit Zero is already published online and available to purchase: see our repositories for ready-to-print and fully editable CC BY files, including content, packaging and labeling. 

During 2023 we developed a new product line of elementary-school-oriented kits, drawing from eight years of experiences and research. The kits include a deck of cards with guidelines, a bunch of hubs and sticks that help educators make Alquimétricos’ activities dynamic in the classroom. The new kit was developed and introduced as part of the (FADU-UBA) DiJu post degree “Toys and Games Design” course 2023. It was launched in Argentina at the Open Education Meeting in Bariloche – Argentinian Patagonia, presented at the OpenEd Conference 2023 and displayed at the CC Global Summit in Mexico City.

What’s next? Next steps include translation to Portuguese and English and sharing the project in global OER repositories. We will seek support proofreading and sharking Kit Zero in a community call in early 2024. 

Global Commons: Unlocking Open Education with Creative Commons

Update from Lisa Di Valentino and John Okewole: This project developed a short animated video describing Creative Commons and how CC licenses support the implementation of the United Nations Recommendation on OER. We currently have a first version of the video created by Brainboxx Studios for which we will re-record the English narration. We have also solicited translations of the transcript from other subgroup members in the nine other UNESCO languages, and have offers for translation in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Italian (of which we now have a draft), and Spanish. 

What’s next? We will finalize the English video and determine how to translate the video text.  We will also design handouts in the various languages explaining the benefits of using Creative Commons licensing for open educational resources.

CC Open Education Lightning Talks

Lightning Talks are seven-minute presentations on a given area of expertise or work. Based on community demand, CC hosted Open Education Lighting Talks online in February and in-person, at the CC Summit in October. Community members’  presentations ranged from explorations of OER for social justice to practical applications, such as using machine translation algorithms for OER translation and recommendations for digital publishing. CC also presented a forthcoming microcredential course on which we are partnering with the University of Nebraska Omaha, in effort to bring more open licensing expertise to new audiences. 

What’s next? We look forward to learning more from the open education community in future CC Open Education Lightning Talks!

Creative Commons extends our gratitude to the inspiring CC community members making a difference in their educational contexts. We look forward to continued open education collaborations in 2024! If you would like to join our Open Education community, visit the CC Open Education Platform site for more information.

Recommended Best Practices for Better Sharing of Climate Data

Creative Commons is happy to share our “Recommendations for Better Sharing of Climate Data,” informed by major government and intergovernmental climate agencies including ECMWF, NASA, NOAA, and the World Resources Institute. These recommendations help public climate data-producing institutions to choose the most suitable legal terms and licenses, and use metadata that center the user experience around attribution, licensing, and provenance. Click to access the full report here, and click to access the the PDF summary here.

At Creative Commons, we believe that addressing global challenges like the climate crisis requires opening the knowledge about those challenges. We are thrilled to announce the release of our “Recommendations for Better Sharing of Climate Data”— the culmination of a nine-month research initiative from our Open Climate Data project. These guidelines are a result of collaboration between Creative Commons, government agencies and intergovernmental organizations. They mark a significant milestone in our ongoing effort to enhance the accessibility, sharing, and reuse of open climate data to address the climate crisis. Our goal is to share strategies that align with existing data sharing principles and pave the way for a more interconnected and accessible future for climate data.

Our recommendations offer practical steps and best practices, crafted in collaboration with key stakeholders and organizations dedicated to advancing open practices in climate data. We provide recommendations for 1) legal and licensing terms, 2) using metadata values for attribution and provenance, and 3) management and governance for better sharing.

Click to access the full report here, and click to access the the PDF summary here.

Opening climate data requires an examination of the public’s legal rights to access and use the climate data, often dictated by copyright and licensing. This legal detail is sometimes missing from climate data sharing and legal interoperability conversations. Our recommendations suggest two options: Option A: CC0 + Attribution Request, in order to maximize reuse by dedicating climate data to the public domain, plus a request for attribution; and Option B: CC BY 4.0, for retaining data ownership and legal enforcement of attribution. We address how to navigate license stacking and attribution stacking for climate data hosts and for users working with multiple climate data sources.

We also propose standardized human- and machine-readable metadata values that enhance transparency, reduce guesswork, and ensure broader accessibility to climate data. We built upon existing model metadata schemas and standards, including those that address license and attribution information. These recommendations address a gap and provide metadata schema that standardize the inclusion of upfront, clear values related to attribution, licensing and provenance.

Lastly, we highlight four key aspects of effective climate data management: designating a dedicated technical managing steward, designating a legal and/or policy steward, encouraging collaborative data sharing, and regularly revisiting and updating data sharing policies in accordance with parallel open data policies and standards.

As we release these recommendations, we extend an invitation to join us in an ongoing journey of collaboration. Together, we can continue to develop policies and practices that open up data, fostering advancements in climate research and innovation. Send us your comments at openclimatedata@creativecommons.org.

What did Creative Commons do for Open Culture in 2023?

Laterna magica picture painted in color on glass plate. Pictures from the solar system.
Laterna magica bild målad i färg på glasskiva. Bilder ur solsystemet. from Tekniska Museet Svenska, Public Domain Mark.

2023 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin. As the team grew from one full time employee to a team of three, we have had increased capacity to carry out our programmatic work. At the same time, pandemic-related travel restrictions eased, allowing the Open Culture Team to lead and participate in events and convenings in diverse locations, including Morocco, Uruguay, USA, Switzerland, UK, Mexico, and Portugal, to name a few. This allowed us to connect with community members in person, further cementing pre-existing strategic partnerships and engaging with new audiences. In this blog post we look back on some of the year’s key achievements.

Here are the top 5 things we are particularly proud of (in no particular order):

  1. We started the TAROC initiative (Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture) with the Lisbon Open Culture Roundtable. Our TAROC information brief is available in English, Shqip, français, Español, 日本語, Türkçe, italiano, عربي.
  2. We launched Open Culture Matters, our bi-monthly newsletter, which now has 500+ subscribers and counting.
  3. We debuted Open Culture Live: A Webinar Series with “Back to Basics: Open Culture for Beginners”. Other topics discussed in the series include “Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject”, and “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution.”
  4. We completed Open Culture Voices — a series of insightful video interviews with open culture experts from around the world. It came to a close in November, gathering ca. 70K views across all platforms.
  5. We created the Open Culture resources webpage. It includes numerous documents available in multiple languages thanks to our community of volunteers, including 2023 publications:

In addition, we published blog posts, organized training activities, signed on to advocacy letters, took part in several events to promote open culture (notably our CC Global Summit, WIPO SCCR meetings, MozFest, Wikimania, WikiIndaba, GLAM Wiki, Wikimedia’s conference for the open culture movement, and much more!), and offered the CC certificate on open culture.

We also supported our community through the OC platform, community-led activities and our Medium Publication.

In 2024, we look forward to building on those achievements and continuing to help people (re)connect with their culture(s).

UK Court Clears Path for Open Culture to Flourish

In a segment of a black and white etching, a bearded man in a tophat and coat holds hands with two children as they all leap in the air, birds above them, wearing matching white boots seemingly enabling them to fly.
The Electric Boots” British Library. Public Domain.

In November 2023, the Court of Appeal in THJ v Sheridan¹ offered an important clarification of the originality requirement under UK copyright law, which clears a path for open culture to flourish in the UK.

A game-changing ruling

In setting the copyright originality threshold, the court stated: “What is required is that the author was able to express their creative abilities in the production of the work by making free and creative choices so as to stamp the work created with their personal touch.” Crucially, the court affirmed that “this criterion is not satisfied where the content of the work is dictated by technical considerations, rules or other constraints which leave no room for creative freedom.” For a thorough analysis of the case, see Professor Eleonora Rosatti’s take for the IPKat.

The case is potentially a game-changer in the UK open culture landscape, as noted by open culture advocates Bendor Grosvenor (paywall) and Douglas McCarthy. How so? Because by setting the standard for copyright to arise based on “free and creative choices” it effectively bars copyright claims from being made over faithful reproductions of public domain materials (i.e., materials that are no longer or never were protected by copyright).

No copyright for faithful reproductions of public domain materials

This is a position that Creative Commons (CC) has been championing for years as part of our Open Culture Program: digital reproductions of public domain material must remain in the public domain. In other words, no new copyright (or related right) should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.” Europeana and the Communia Association, among many other open culture organizations, share this position. It is also aligns with Article 14 of the 2019 EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which states that: “when the term of protection of a work of visual art has expired, any material resulting from an act of reproduction of that work is not subject to copyright […]”.

In practice, this means that CC licenses should not be used by cultural heritage institutions (museums, libraries, archives, etc.) to release digital reproductions of public domain works, since licenses can only be used in connection with in-copyright content. To share digital twins of public domain content, we recommend the public domain dedication tool (CC0) or the public domain mark (PDM).

A widespread but problematic practice

Alas, a great many institutions still claim full copyright or use CC licenses to share faithful reproductions of public domain material, often against payment of a (steep) fee — this is particularly prevalent in the UK, as reported by Dr. Andrea Wallace in her study for the Towards a National Collection program.

In an effort to curb this undesirable practice, in 2022, a CC Open Culture Platform working group led by Deborah De Angelis (CC Italy) and Tomoaki Watanabe (CC Japan) investigated this issue and developed proposals for technical, legal, and social interventions to address the problem of “PD BY” (i.e. the use of CC BY licenses to share reproductions of public domain works). On that basis, we are currently developing a set of guidelines to provide alternative design ideas and platform examples to cultural heritage institutions that wish to better share the digitized public domain cultural heritage material in their collections. Stay tuned for their release soon!

A new dawn for open culture in the UK and around the world?

This court case unlocks vast untapped potential for open culture to blossom in the UK cultural heritage sector. We are heartened that by offering enhanced legal certainty, this decision will give a boost to cultural heritage institutions to engage more deeply in the open culture movement and make these vast collections openly accessible to everyone.

Get Involved

For additional guidance and tailored support in developing or implementing open access policies or to get involved in promoting open culture around the world:

¹ THJ Systems Limited & Anor v Daniel Sheridan & Anor [2023] EWCA Civ 1354, https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/civ/2023/1354