Open Culture Live Recap & Recording: Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject
On 22 November, we organized a webinar with a group of experts to discuss their unique approaches to reparative metadata practices: considering the ways that harmful histories and terminologies have made their way into collections labeling and categorization practices and finding ways to identify those terms, contextualize them, and/or replace them altogether.
Jill Baron, a librarian at Dartmouth College (USA) shared some of her learnings from a project to change subject headings in the United States Library of Congress after working with a student who encountered the subject heading “illegal aliens” in Dartmouth’s library catalog. The journey is captured in the documentary Change the Subject that she co-produced. Marco Redina spoke about his work on the DE-BIAS project, identifying harmful terms and adding context and more appropriate terminologies to more than 4.5 million records currently published on the Europeana website. Amanda Figueroa spoke about her efforts on the Curationist team where reviewers work to recontextualize collection descriptions with more contemporary and respectful descriptions through review and research. Carma Citrawati, a lecturer at Udayana University (Indonesia) spoke about her efforts to preserve traditional Balinese manuscripts in consultation with communities in Bali.
In the conversation, you will hear more about some of the nuances around the choice to keep legacy terminology in the record in order to preserve the history of harm, or replace it in order to make for a less harmful experience during discovery today. You will also hear from the experts about how they have engaged their communities around the work they do and get some advice on how you might think about confronting some of the harmful histories that have made their way into descriptions and metadata at your institution.
Sign up for our newsletter, Open Culture Matters, to learn about our upcoming webinars and keep up to date on news and events related to Cultural Heritage and Open Access and join the Open Culture Platform to get involved in our work.
Open Climate Campaign at UNFCCC Conference of the Parties 28
The complexity of climate change is on display at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP). The conference is arranged into two major zones, blue and green, with the former accessible only by parties with UNFCCC accreditation. The green zone is a landscape dotted by venues with booths inside representing different climate change stakeholders. Each booth delves into a different dimension of climate change – energy transition, the role of mangrove forests in carbon capture and climate education just to name a few.
At COP 28, the Open Climate Campaign highlighted another critical dimension of climate change – open access to climate change research. A common theme in presentations and statements at COP is that we know a lot about both the mechanistic causes of climate changes and its effects. Yet, most of that knowledge is in research publications, half of which is not accessible to read without a subscription. At the Open Climate Campaign we are on a mission to make the open sharing of research the norm in climate science. We know that to develop solutions, mitigations or adaptations to climate change, the knowledge about it must be open. The Open Climate Campaign teamed up with EQTYLab and the Endowment for Climate Intelligence (ECI) for the launch of their Climate GPT and a discussion of the pivotal role open plays in not only understanding climate change, but leveraging that knowledge into new technologies. The Open Climate Campaign is also embarking on a pilot project with ECI to elevate the accessibility of climate change research beyond just physical access to the publication and the data associated with it. Our collaboration will show the potential of combining openly licensed publications with generative Al. Across the conference venue the Frontiers Research Foundation was also discussing the critical role open plays in addressing climate change. They hosted a series of panel discussions including open science for inclusive and transformative climate and sustainability innovation and embracing open science for the climate crisis.
The Open Climate Campaign is looking forward to participating in COP 29 in Azerbaijan where we will continue to raise the need for open access to knowledge about climate change. We are looking to partner with other organizations at the intersection of climate and open to organize panels, presentations and/or workshops to amplify our shared message. If you would like to collaborate please reach out to: contact@openclimatecampaign.org
Celebrating Two Years of CC’s Open Culture Voices
Today we conclude the Open Culture Voices series, which over two years has showcased more than 65 open culture experts and practitioners from around the world. Over these two years we have had the privilege of engaging with remarkable individuals, each bringing their unique insights and stories to our community.
As we bid farewell to this enriching series, we want to take a moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to the interviewees who made this series possible. Your willingness to share your time, expertise, and experiences has left an indelible mark on our collective narrative. This journey has been more than a collection of interviews; it has been a tapestry of diverse stories that have inspired, educated, and connected us all. Your openness and authenticity have fostered a sense of community that goes beyond the digital realm: your perspectives are gathered in the CC report “What are the Barriers to Open Culture?” and several other resources which will continue to provide guidance and advice to the community.
Here are some of the experts’ insights:
“Standardized licenses support interoperability and compatibility with other collections. All of this means that users are able to find, access and use our content with fewer barriers and less friction, and this makes it easier for them to learn, share their learning, to create and innovate.” — Christy Henshaw
“When done right, the greatest advantage for open cultural heritage is digital equity. Removing paywalls means that more people can afford to access these materials. We live in a wildly inequitable world, and access to our culture should not contribute to this.” — Nicole Kang Ferraiolo
“Open culture is kind of a key building block for positive interaction and social inclusion” — Nkem Osigwue
“Weʼll often find that the benefits of being open with the collections outweigh the level of investment and cost, and the profit eventually made from generating income, selling, and controlling the use of collections.” — Dafydd Tudur
15, which ran from January 2022 to November 2023, the videos had more than 20,000 views on YouTube and more than 30,000 engagements here on the CC Blog.
Thank you everyone who has watched and learned from these videos already. We hope they continue to be a valuable resource for the blossoming open culture community.
All episodes can be watched from the Creative Commons Blog. The videos are licensed CC BY 4.0 to be easily adapted, reused and shared across the web.
CC Certificate Translations in Slovak, Bengali, and localized French
As we end 2023, we want to showcase the incredible work of CC community members to translate the CC Certificate content. Thanks to 21 volunteers this year and numerous volunteers in the past, the reading content of our CC Certificate training is now available in 10 languages. This makes our fundamental open licensing and open advocacy training more accessible to over one billion people in their native languages. We thank open community members for making that possible.
Side by Side, by Anina Takeff, licensed Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA)
As we end 2023, we want to showcase the incredible work of CC community members to translate the CC Certificate content. Thanks to 21 volunteers this year and numerous volunteers in the past, the reading content of our CC Certificate training is now available in 10 languages. This makes our fundamental open licensing and open advocacy training more accessible to over one billion people in their native languages.
The CC Certificate program offers in-depth courses about copyright, CC licenses, open practices and the ethos of our global, shared commons. CC Certificate courses target (1) Academic Librarians, (2) Educators and (3) Open Culture advocates, but are open to everyone. Learn more about the CC Certificate and other professional learning opportunities, then register for a Certificate course today. If you are a CC Certificate graduate and would like to translate course content in 2024, please contact certificate administrators on the alumni listserv.
Slovak
The Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information contacted CC in 2022, noting the need for CC Certificate content in Slovak. Thanks to Gabriela Fišová, Judita Takačová, Jakub Klech, and Barbora Bieliková, who translated content earlier this year, the Centre now has a complete translation.
Bangladesh Open University (BOU) faculty, Sadia Afroze Sultana and Mostafa Azad Kamal, translated the CC Certificate content to make open licensing training more accessible to the 184+ million Bengali-speakers worldwide. Sadia is a CC Certificate alumna and facilitator; Mostafa is the CC Bangladesh Chapter Representative and also a CC Certificate alumnus. CC thanks Mostafa and Sadia; CC also thanks BOU faculty Asma Akter Shelly and Ananya Laboni, and graduate students Aminul Islam Rana and Mir Khadija Tahera for reading the translated copies and providing feedback.
Building on last year’s French Translation, a community of volunteers from seven countries embarked on a two-week French translation 2.0 sprint, to increase the accessibility of the French translation for different francophone audiences. Nicolas Simon, a CC community member who provided the original French translation supported the sprint, and reviewed the final draft. Adou Jean-Constant Atta, Aman Ado, Emmanuelle Guebo Kakou, Fawaz Tairou, Karen Ferreira-Meyers, Kamel Belhamel, Nyirahabihirwe Clementine, Touré Kahou, Namon Moussa Traore, and Yao Hippolyte Bondouho added local contextual considerations such as recommended links.
With these translations, the CC Certificate reading content is accessible in 10 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Slovak, Turkish, and Yoruba. The latest translations make our open licensing training more accessible than ever before and we thank open community members for making that possible.
On Openness & Copyright, EU AI Act Final Version Appears to Include Promising Changes
Throughout the last year, Creative Commons has actively engaged in the EU’s development of an AI Act. We welcomed its overall approach, focused on ensuring high-risk systems that use AI are trustworthy and safe. At the same time, we had concerns about the way it might impede better sharing and collaboration on the development of AI systems, and we joined with a coalition of AI developers and advocates offering suggestions for how to improve it. Rather than advocating for blanket exemptions, we supported a graduated, tailored approach – differentiating merely creating, sharing, and doing limited testing of new tools, versus offering a commercial service or otherwise putting powerful AI models into service, particularly at broad scale and impact.
We also raised concerns about late additions to the text related to copyright. While we generally support more transparency around the training data for regulated AI systems, the Parliament’s text included an unclear and impractical obligation to provide information specifically about use of copyrighted works.
This week, the EU’s political institutions announced that they have reached a tentative final agreement. We’re still awaiting a final text, and there are many other issues at stake related to the specific regulations on high-risk systems; a number of civil society organizations have raised concerns with, for example, changes to rules around predictive policing and biometric recognition, among other things.
At the same time, from the initial reported details (including this draft compromise text published by POLITICO), the final agreement appears promising relative to the recent Parliament text and from the perspective of supporting open source, open science, as well as on copyright. The devil is in the details, and we will update our views based on further review of the final text.
Open Source & Open Science
Consistent with our advocacy, the final version appears to clarify that merely providing and collaborating on AI systems under an open license is not covered by the Act, unless they are an AI system regulated by the Act (e.g., a defined “high-risk” system) that is commercially available or put into service.
As the AI Act progressed, focus shifted from particular high-risk systems to general purpose AI models (GPAI), sometimes referred to in terms of “foundation models.” This is a tricky issue, because it could have unintended consequences for a wide variety of beneficial uses of AI. In light of the Parliament’s proposed inclusion of these models, we had advocated for a tiered approach, requiring transparency and documentation of all models while reserving stricter requirements for commercial deployments and those put into service at some level of broad scale and impact.
On the one hand, the final Act also takes a tiered approach, reserving the strict requirements for models of “high impact” and “systemic risk.” On the other hand, the initial tiering is based on an arbitrary technical threshold, which at best only has a limited relationship to measuring actual real-world impact. Fortunately, it appears this tiering can be updated by regulators in the to-be-created AI Office in the future based on other quantitative and qualitative measures, and we hope that the final rules also appropriately distinguish between development of the pre-trained model, and follow-on, third party developers “fine-tuning” a model.
Interestingly, the draft text will exempt models that do not have “systemic risk” and are “made accessible to the public under a free and open-source license whose parameters, including the weights, the information on the model architecture, and the information on model usage,” with the exception of certain transparency requirements around training data and respect for copyright (see below). This provides further breathing room for open source developers, although it is worth noting that the definition of what constitutes an “open source license” in this context is still a matter of some debate. We hope those continuing discussions will help ensure these protections in the law are applied to those models that, by virtue of their openness, do provide critical transparency that facilitates robust accountability and trustworthy systems.
The exact rules will continue to evolve as the AI Act is implemented in the coming years, and other countries are also considering the role of openness. For instance, the U.S. Department of Commerce is soliciting input on “dual-use foundation models with widely available weights,” pursuant to the White House’s recent Executive Order.
As AI development and regulation continue to evolve next year, we will continue to work with a broad coalition to ensure better support for open source and open science. This fall, we were proud to join with a wide range of organizations and individuals in an additional joint statement emphasizing the importance of openness and transparency in AI – not only because it helps make the technology more accessible, but also because it can support trust, safety and security. We look forward to continuing to work with all stakeholders to make this a reality.
Copyright & Transparency
The final Act appears to take a more flexible approach to transparency around use of training data. Rather than expecting GPAI providers to list every specific work used for training and determine whether it is under copyright, it instead indicates that a summary of the collections and sources of data is enough (for example, it might be sufficient to state that one uses data from the web contained in Common Crawl’s dataset). The AI Office will create a template for meeting these transparency requirements. We welcome the new wording, which clarifies that the transparency requirement applies to any training data — not only to copyright-protected works. We will continue to engage on this topic to ensure it takes a flexible, proportionate approach, free of overreaching copyright restrictions.
The Act also requires that foundation model providers have policies in place to adhere to the copyright framework. It’s unclear exactly what this means besides restating that they must comply with existing law, including the opt-out stipulated in Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive. If that’s the intent, then it is an appropriate approach. As we said previously:
“We also believe that the existing copyright flexibilities for the use of copyrighted materials as training data must be upheld. The 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market and specifically its provisions on text-and-data mining exceptions for scientific research purposes and for general purposes provide a suitable framework for AI training. They offer legal certainty and strike the right balance between the rights of rightsholders and the freedoms necessary to stimulate scientific research and further creativity and innovation.”
The draft does create some uncertainty here, however. It states that models must comply with these provisions if put into service in the EU market, even if the training takes place elsewhere. On the one hand, the EU wants to avoid situations of “regulatory arbitrage,” where models are trained in a more permissive jurisdiction and then brought into the EU, without complying with EU rules. On the other hand, this threatens to create a situation where most restrictive rules set a global standard; to the extent that simply putting a model into service on a globally accessible website could put a provider in legal jeopardy, it could create uncertainty for developers.
Highlights from GLAM Wiki by the CC Open Culture Team
From 16 to 18 November, members of the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture and Learning and Training teams attended GLAM Wiki in Montevideo Uruguay. In this blog post we look back at the event’s highlights from CC’s perspective.
GLAM Wiki is an extraordinary international gathering that brings together cultural heritage professionals (from Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, etc.) with the vibrant Wikimedia communities. More than 150 participants from all over the word came together with the goals to:
Identify strategic priorities for the GLAM Wiki communities that promote knowledge equity, diversity and inclusion.
Exchange and build capacity around GLAM Wiki tools, outreach and collaborations.
Reflect, discuss and think of new roadmaps for our existing tools and platforms.
Reconnect after the pandemic, network and discuss the future of GLAM Wiki.
The program was rich and diverse and included four sessions organized by CC, summarized as follows.
Creative Commons sessions’ highlights
1. Remixing Open Culture: Get Creative with Creative Commons
In this session, we provided a short presentation about remixing open culture. ALL culture is a remix, and everything we create draws inspiration from the art we have seen and been inspired by. We asked participants to think about why open culture is important to them as an individual. Using public domain images, attendees created “propaganda” for open culture, openly licensing their new creations, as in the example below. The CC licensed works have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under the category: Open Culture Remix Posters. Create your own poster to promote open culture and upload it to Wiki Commons with the category “Open Culture Remix Posters”.
“Cultura es Remezcla” created using Tiger in the Jungle by Paul Elie Ranson, CC0. Licensed CC0.
2. Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture – What, When, How?
In this session, we presented an overview of our work around the TAROC initiative and invited participants from the audience — coming from Chile, Morocco, India, Finland, Mexico, Serbia and Portugal — to share their open culture experiences in order to inform this international, community-focused initiative. Some of the topics raised include: the notion of culture is much broader than fine art or even “the arts”; open culture raises specific questions in the context of heritage preservation during armed conflict, where the risk of looting is heightened; better sharing might imply “conditional” sharing in certain contexts; the control over access and use of cultural heritage might be shared by a multitude of stakeholders; open culture raises financial challenges that must be addressed; and more.
This served as a continuation of our ongoing community consultation, after a session on Values at the CC Summit in October, where we polled the audience to learn more about some of the core principles that underpin the movement’s aspirations. These consultations will continue in-person and online with the Open Culture Platform.
3. Open Culture on Wikipedia
In this collaborative session, participants worked together to draft and publish the first Wikipedia articles dedicated to open culture. In one hour we managed to publish pages in English, French, and Spanish, which are now open for anyone to edit and contribute to. We started articles in Finnish and Swedish as well.
4. The CC Certificate for GLAM: learn about it by becoming part of a human sculpture collection
This workshop highlighted considerations from the CC Certificate for Open Culture, a professional development training that builds expertise in open licensing and open practices for cultural heritage professionals. With participants, we put the teaching into practice by creating an exhibit of human sculptures, “digitizing” the works, then evaluating the ethical, cultural, logistical, and copyright considerations around the digitized collection.
GLAM Wiki and the broader open culture context
In running our Open Culture Program, we strive to hold space for conversations about the complexities of openness and the practical implementation of better sharing, our strategic north star — sharing that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable.
As we engage with diverse stakeholders around the globe and as the landscape of the internet continues to evolve, we face new and important questions around how culture should be shared in a variety of contexts. For example, how can we envision exploration, and not exploitation, of the commons in the age of AI? What does equity look like in a global context where not all GLAMs have the resources for digitization? How can we think of “open” as a means to support wider cultural policy ambitions, not just an end in and of itself?
Our participation in GLAM Wiki was a way to tackle these questions and continue some of the exciting conversations we have had in the past months, including at the CC Summit, on TAROC, traditional knowledge and Indigenous cultural heritage, open culture and generative artificial intelligence (AI), and the future of the open movement.
We will continue to explore these complex topics to gain fresh perspectives in our Open Culture Live webinars, publications, Open Culture Platform calls and activities, and at in-person events where we can connect with the open culture community.
For more information on how to get involved, including in translations of our Open Culture resources:
We want to share a message regarding some learnings obtained after the 2023 Creative Commons Global Summit and meeting with our Mexican organizing committee and members of the local community.
Financial decisions related to the CC Summit were made by the CC team and not by the local Mexican Chapter. Specifically the cost of entry to the event, which proved to be high in relation to the contextual conditions of Mexico. Due to difficult fundraising conditions for many nonprofits in 2023, the CC team decided to keep the entrance fee higher, offer discounted rates, and scholarships for attendees. We wish to learn from this experience for future events, as it is clear that if we want to continue our value of global inclusion, it is necessary to create a new formula to eliminate access barriers for those who wish to attend our events.
Initially, the estimated cost for simultaneous translation provided to us was above our budget. For this reason, we hired SyncWords to provide live subtitles, human and automatic translations for each of the sessions and panels in the main auditorium. The translations could be accessed through the QR code that we had published in various places (this code provided access to a SyncWords page that displayed the subtitles and the translation). We also offered translation (English/Spanish) according to the needs of our attendees, with bilingual people available in each room and in the auditorium. However, as we began the event we recommended that it was imperative to have simultaneous audio translation to encourage dialogue and follow our value of global inclusion. We especially thank the Tlatolli Ollin Professional Interpretation and Translation Services cooperative, which won the challenge by providing excellent service in a short time.
No one in our Mexican Chapter should be held responsible for any decision, nor should their reputation be tarnished by decisions made during the Summit. After such big events, there are always lessons to be learned and one of them is how CC, as a small global non-profit, which has to raise funds every year to survive, can better support our local chapters that provide so much wisdom and experience.
I want to personally thank everyone involved in the CC Summit and we will continue to work to create a world where knowledge and creativity are accessible to everyone.
Sincerely,
Catherine
Español
Queremos compartir un mensaje referente a algunos aprendizajes obtenidos después de la Cumbre Global Creative Commons 2023 y de reunirnos con nuestro comité organizador mexicano y miembros de la comunidad local.
Las decisiones financieras relacionadas con la Cumbre CC fueron tomadas por el equipo de CC y no por el Capítulo Mexicano local. Específicamente el costo de la entrada al evento, el cual se consideró alto en relación a las condiciones contextuales de México. Debido a las difíciles condiciones de recaudación de fondos para muchas organizaciones sin fines de lucro en 2023, el equipo de CC decidió mantener la tarifa de entrada más alta, ofrecer tarifas con descuento, y becas para los asistentes. Deseamos aprender de esta experiencia para eventos futuros, ya que está claro que si queremos seguir nuestro valor de inclusión global, es necesario crear una nueva fórmula para eliminar barreras de acceso para aquellos que deseen asistir a nuestros eventos.
Inicialmente, el costo estimado para traducción simultánea se nos proporcionó por encima de nuestro presupuesto. Por tal motivo contratamos a SyncWords para realizar subtítulos, traducciones humanas y automáticas en vivo para cada una de las sesiones y paneles en el auditorio principal. Se podía acceder a las traducciones a través del código QR que habíamos publicado en varios lugares (dicho código proveía acceso a una página de SyncWords que mostraba los subtítulos y la traducción). También ofrecimos traducción (inglés/español) según las necesidades de nuestros asistentes, con personas bilingües disponibles en cada sala y en el auditorio. Sin embargo, al comenzar el evento decidimos que era imperativo contar con traducción de audio simultánea para fomentar el diálogo y seguir nuestro valor de inclusión global. Agradecemos especialmente a la cooperativa Tlatolli Ollin Servicios Profesionales de Interpretación y Traducción que aceptó el desafío brindando un excelente servicio en poco tiempo.
Nadie en nuestro Capítulo Mexicano debe ser responsabilizado por ninguna decisión, ni su reputación debe verse empañada por las decisiones tomadas durante la Cumbre. Después de eventos tan grandes, siempre hay lecciones que aprender y una de ellas es cómo CC, como una pequeña organización global sin fines de lucro, que tiene que recaudar fondos cada año para sobrevivir, puede apoyar mejor a nuestros capítulos locales que brindan tanta riqueza, sabiduría y experiencia.
Quiero agradecer personalmente a todos los involucrados en la Cumbre CC y continuaremos trabajando para crear un mundo donde el conocimiento y la creatividad sean accesibles para todos.
Atentamente,
Catherine
Open Culture Live Webinar: Changing the Subject & Respectful Terminologies
We are excited to host the second installment of Open Culture Live with our next conversation: Changing the Subject & Respectful Terminologies
29 November 2023 at 4:00 UTC
For centuries, cultural heritage institutions have been undertaking the work to document and catalog objects in their collections — sometimes this work suffers from a legacy of colonialism and discrimination in the way their collections are labeled and categorized. Some institutions are working to update these labels with more respectful terminology. Hear more from some of the changemakers working to update labels and metadata with more respectful terminologies during this CC panel.
As CC’s Open Culture team works to promote better sharing, we think it is important to address some of the key challenges and concerns that come along with promoting open access to cultural heritage. These challenges are not always simple to address, but they are important to ensuring that open access policies and practices go hand in hand with harm reduction, and do not perpetuate or amplify historic injustices.
Learn from the experts involved in addressing harmful labels in cultural heritage institutions in this conversation. We will ask the experts if any institutions serve as a good model for rethinking their labels, acknowledging that many are in the process of ongoing work. We will discuss where to start, how to think about some of the challenging decisions, why and how to preserve historical metadata, and how digital archival practices can support this work. We hope that this will provide a guide of some of the ways you might consider adopting better metadata practices and using more respectful terminologies in your collections.
The panel will feature:
Jill Baron, Dartmouth College
Marco Rendina, European Fashion Heritage Association
Oscar Ruben Cornejo Casares, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University
Amanda Figueroa, Platform Director, MHz Foundation
Carma Citrawati, Lecturer, Udayana University
With introductory remarks from Brigitte Vézina and moderation by Jocelyn Miyara.
Dave Hansen — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 33
Dave talks about how many “institutions are on a mission to expose their collections to the world and make them available for everyone.” Dave sees this as a major evolution from a time not too long ago when it was only those with means who could access collections in any way.
Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Dave is the Executive Director at Authors Alliance which is a non-profit focused on sharing work broadly with the public together with authors in the US.
Dave responds to the following questions:
What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
What are the barriers?
Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?
Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.
CC’s Key Insights from WIPO’s Meeting on Copyright
From 6 to 8 November 2023, Creative Commons (CC) participated remotely in the 44th session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR). In this blog post, we look back on the session’s highlights on broadcasting, exceptions and limitations, and generative AI, from CC’s perspective.
As in previous sessions, our main objective was to drive copyright reform towards better sharing of copyright content in the public interest and in tune with the sharing possibilities of the digital environment. In this short session, we addressed the proposed broadcasting treaty and exceptions and limitations in our opening statement, as reported in the “Statements” information document (SCCR/44/INF/STATEMENTS).
Overall, we are rather satisfied with the session’s outcomes. On broadcasting, we remain concerned that discussions on the draft broadcasting treaty are being maintained on the agenda despite evidence of a clear stalemate in the discussions; we are nonetheless heartened by the acknowledged need to work towards a balanced approach on exceptions and limitations in the draft treaty.
On exceptions and limitations, we are pleased that the SCCR Secretariat has undertaken to prepare a detailed implementation plan for the Work Program on Exceptions and Limitations; in CC’s views, this plan should provide for open and transparent engagement opportunities and wide participation from civil society of which CC is a leading voice. It should notably allow for real progress on substantive issues to support meaningful access and use of cultural heritage for preservation and other legitimate purposes.
We also welcome the organization of a virtual panel discussion on cross-border uses of copyright works in the educational and research sectors open to all member states as well as observers. As an accredited observer, CC places high value on broad and inclusive participation to ensure balanced and diverse perspectives can be brought to the table for a constructive debate. We recall that licensing falls short of addressing the problems that libraries, museums, archives, educational and research institutions, as well as persons with disabilities, face on a daily basis. Licensing is not a substitute for robust, flexible, mandatory exceptions and limitations to empower those who teach, learn and research, those who share in and build upon cultural heritage, and people with disabilities.
We note Group B’s Proposal Information Session on Generative AI and Copyright (SCCR/44/8) and look forward to the Secretariat organizing an open, inclusive, and balanced session at the next SCCR under the item of Copyright in the Digital Environment. As we have stated at the WIPO Conversation on Generative AI and Intellectual Property last September, generative AI raises important issues and is having an enormous impact on creativity, the commons, and better sharing, i.e., sharing that is inclusive, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable. Our consultations on the matter have revealed a wide variety of views among creators, AI developers, and other stakeholders in the commons. They have also shed light on the fact that copyright is but one lens through which to consider generative AI; what is more, it is a rather blunt tool that often leads to black-and-white solutions that fall short of harnessing all the diverse possibilities that generative AI offers for human creativity. Our interventions on copyright and generative AI in the United States and the European Union contexts attest to those nuanced views. We thus call on the Secretariat to ensure the session will offer a balanced and representative set of perspectives.
We look forward to participating in the Committee’s next session, to take place from April 15 to 19, 2024, and to bring our expertise on copyright, better sharing of cultural heritage, and generative AI in order to help create a fairer and more balanced international copyright system in the public interest.
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