In the United States, there are two bills making their way through Congress that would require all government data to be made available in open and machine readable formats by default. The OPEN Government Data Act has been introduced in both the House of Representatives (H.R. 1770) and the Senate (S. 760). The bill would…

We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation. Today’s…

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash, CC0. Last month the United Nations released a report with recommendations on how to improve innovation and access to health technologies. The panel’s charge called for it to “recommend solutions for remedying the policy incoherence between the justifiable rights of inventors, international human rights law, trade rules and…

Copyright policy should benefit everyone, not just legacy rightsholders Today the European Commission released its legislative proposal for changes to EU copyright law. The proposal has been introduced as a Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market. The Directive fails to deliver on the promise for a modern copyright law in Europe. In an ideal…

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…

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…

FELLOWS’ UPDATES: Alessando Sarretta: Open Practices and Policies for Research Data in the Marine Community Jane Frances-Agbu: Pondering the Future of Open Education in Nigeria Roshan Kumar Karn: Building an Institutional Open Access Policy In Nepal Fiona MacAlister: Cultivating a Culture of Knowledge Sharing Juliana Monteiro: Creative Commons and Museu da Imigração: notes on a Brazilian experience Katja…

Fair Use Week 2016 is here, and we’re happy to celebrate it alongside many other organizations and individuals who believe in the importance of flexible exceptions to copyright law. There are now over 1 billion CC-licensed works available, and these will always be free for anyone to use and share. CC licenses work because of…

Rolling Rebellion Sparks in Seattle to Defend Internet & Stop the TPP by Backbone Campaign, CC BY 2.0 Creative Commons and an international coalition of organizations and individuals has published the Brussels Declaration on Trade and the Internet. It follows the recent ceremonial signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is an example of a trade…

The final text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was released earlier this month. The gigantic agreement contains sweeping provisions regarding environmental regulation, pharmaceutical procurement, intellectual property, labor standards, food safety, and many other things. If adopted, it would be the most significant expansion of international restrictions on copyright in over two decades. Over the last five years, the TPP…