Timothy Vollmer

Timothy Vollmer is Senior Manager for Public Policy. He coordinates public policy positions in collaboration with CC staff, international affiliate network, and a broad community of copyright experts. Timothy helps educate policymakers at all levels and across various disciplines such as education, data, science, culture, and government about copyright licensing, the public domain, and the adoption of open policies. Prior to CC, Timothy worked on information policy issues for the American Library Association in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Information, and helped establish the Open.Michigan initiative.

Posts by Timothy Vollmer

Don’t let California lock down public access to government works

by Timothy Vollmer Open Access

Unencumbered access to public sector information is central to a well-functioning democratic system.

EU pushing ahead in support of open science

by Timothy Vollmer Open Science

Laboratory Science—biomedical, by Bill Dickinson, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 April saw lots of activity on the open science front in the European Union. On April 19, the European Commission officially announced its plans to create an “Open Science Cloud”. Accompanying this initiative, the Commission stated it will require that scientific data produced by projects under Horizon 2020…

Join CC in supporting the International Day Against DRM

by Timothy Vollmer Open Access

Image credit Brendan Mruk/Matt Lee, CC BY-SA Today is the International Day Against DRM, a global campaign to raise awareness about the harms of restricting access to legally-acquired content using digital restrictions management (DRM). DRM consists of access control technologies or restrictive licensing agreements that attempt to restrict the use, modification, and distribution of copyright-protected…

U.S. should require “open by default” for federal government software code

by Timothy Vollmer Open Data, Technology

Photo by Tirza van Dijk, CC0. A few weeks ago we submitted comments to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) draft federal source code policy. The purpose of the policy is to improve access to custom software code developed for the federal government, and would require that: (1) New custom code whose development is…

The long arm of copyright: Millions blocked from reading original versions of The Diary of Anne Frank

by Timothy Vollmer Copyright, Open Culture

The original writings of The Diary of Anne Frank should have entered the public domain on January 1, 2016. They should have become freely accessible to everyone who wants to read and experience this important cultural work. Instead, the texts remain clogged in the pipes of EU copyright law. In some countries like Poland, the…