Bethlehem College Preso / Locus Research / CC BY-SA Last month, I had the honour of providing a keynote address and two workshops at a teacher conference at Northcote College1, on the North Shore of Auckland, New Zealand. Like many schools, Northcote is in the process of developing an overarching digital citizenship policy for staff,…

EFF / CC BY Today, Creative Commons and over 35 other organizations published an open letter urging negotiators of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to rescind a proposal to extend copyright terms by another 20 years beyond its current, mandatory term. This week, 12 Pacific rim countries are meeting in Ottawa, Canada, to continue secret negotiations…

Read about this course in Spanish on the CC Uruguay blog. ABC of Copyright for Librarians in Latin America, or ABC del derecho de autor para bibliotecarios de América Latina, is a free, online course that launches today as part of the School of Open. This Spanish language course seeks to help librarians and library…

Yesterday marked the launch of the Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization that supports authors who want “to harness the potential of digital networks to share their creations more broadly in order to serve the public good.” In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Authors Alliance founder Pamela Samuelson explained that the Authors Alliance will have a…

Is copyright a little fuzzy? / Elias Bizannes / CC BY-SA Following on the heels of “Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond,” three more School of Open courses are now open for sign-up. They are: 1. Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) This course will equip Australian educators with the copyright knowledge to confidently use copyright…

The following is a guest post by Jessica Smith, National Copyright Officer for the National Copyright Unit of Australia. She ran the Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) course with Delia Browne as part of the School of Open’s second round of facilitated courses in 2013. The School of Open is a community of volunteers focused on…

Today Creative Commons released a policy statement expressing its support for copyright reform efforts around the world. Creative Commons (CC) has enabled a new approach to copyright licensing over the last ten years. CC licenses facilitate novel social, educational, technological, and business practices, and support productive relationships around networked knowledge and culture. We are dedicated…

Adventures in copyright / opensourceway / CC BY-SA It has come to our attention that the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and top internet service providers are drafting curriculum to teach kids in California elementary schools that copying is wrong, or as Wired.com puts it, “Downloading is Mean!” This…

Update 12/16 The hearings are still going on; please keep calling, emailing, and otherwise spreading the word! Tomorrow the House Judiciary Committee will debate and potentially vote on SOPA, the Internet Blacklist bill that would break the Internet. Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have compiled a list of 12 actions you can take…

November 16 the U.S. Congress will hold hearings on a bill that would unfairly, recklessly and capriciously enable and encourage broad censorship of the Internet in the name of suppressing distribution of works not authorized by copyright holders. As Public Knowledge aptly summarizes, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” would seriously “threaten the functioning, freedom, and…