Anna Tumadóttir Appointed as CEO of Creative Commons
The Board of Directors of Creative Commons (CC) is pleased to announce the appointment of Anna Tumadóttir as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CC.
“The CC Board universally supported Anna’s appointment as CEO,” says CC’s Board Chair Delia Browne. “Anna has been a source of stability as well as a catalyst for CC’s future direction throughout her time at CC. The Board is looking forward to her leading the team with her experience, thoughtfulness, and commitment to removing barriers, improving workflows and effectiveness, and sharing openly as part of a robust knowledge commons,” continues Delia.
CC staff photos are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Gratitude to Sara Jordan Photography.
Anna’s longstanding leadership at CC has been a pillar of CC’s success since she joined in September 2019 as Director of Product. Anna was promoted to Chief Operating Officer (COO) in 2021 after her successful time leading product strategy. In 2023, she also held the role of Deputy CEO, ensuring ongoing effective operations and stewardship of organizational priorities.
During her tenure as Interim CEO, Anna articulated an innovative and sustainable future for CC. As CC continues to define its role within the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), Anna is positioned to guide this exploration with an unwavering commitment to knowledge sharing within the broader commons. Cementing CC’s role as the stewards of the legal infrastructure of the open web, in collaboration with the CC Global Network and community, is a key priority.
“I am honored to formally step into the role of CEO, and bring my experience with and understanding of CC’s global contributions, and ongoing need for sustainability and world-class operations, into this role,” says Anna. “I wish to thank the Board of Directors for their support during this transition period, as well as give my thanks to the CC team who are co-creating a shared vision of the future that I’m excited to implement alongside them,” continues Anna.
Anna’s appointment is effective immediately and will begin with a strategic refresh for the organization with more details and opportunities to engage with this process to come. Please join us in congratulating Anna and wishing her well in this new role.
Exploring a Books Data Commons for AI Training
Our work on copyright has long focused on supporting libraries and archives in the service of their missions to preserve and ensure access to culture. Our 2022 copyright reform agenda centers those sorts of institutions (and more generally GLAMs) and the critical role they play in society. Among other things, that agenda calls attention to the ways in which copyright might impede libraries and archives who wish to make their collections available for research uses, including use for AI training in order to fulfill their public interest missions.
That issue – AI training – has become ever more relevant. The concept of mass digitization of books, including to support text and data mining, of which AI training is a subset, is not new. But AI training is newly of the zeitgeist, and its transformative use makes questions about how we digitize, preserve, and make accessible knowledge and cultural heritage salient in a distinct way.
In 2023, multiple news publications reported on the availability and use of a dataset of books called “Books3” to train large language models (LLMs), a form of generative AI tool. The Books3 dataset contains text from over 170,000 books, which are a mix of in-copyright and out-of-copyright works. It is believed to have been originally sourced from a website that was not authorized to distribute all of the works therein. In lawsuits brought against OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Bloomberg related to their LLMs, the use of Books3 as training data was specifically cited.
The Books3 controversy highlights a critical question at the heart of generative AI: what role do books play in training AI models, and how might digitized books be made widely accessible for the purposes of training AI for the public good? What dataset of books could be constructed and under what circumstances?
Earlier this year, we collaborated with Open Future and Proteus Strategies on a series of workshops to explore these questions and more. We brought together practitioners on the front lines of building next-generation AI models, as well as legal and policy scholars with expertise in the copyright and licensing challenges surrounding digitized books. Our goal was also to bridge the perspective of stewards of content repositories, like libraries, with that of AI developers. A “books data commons” needs to be both responsibly managed, and useful for developers of AI models. Today, we’re releasing a paper based on those workshops and additional research.
While this paper does not prescribe a particular path forward, we do think it’s important to move beyond the status quo. Today, large swaths of knowledge contained in books are effectively locked up and inaccessible to most everyone. Large companies have huge advantages when it comes to access to books for AI training (and access to data in general). At the same time, as the paper highlights, there are already relevant examples of nonprofit and library-led efforts to provide responsible, fair access to books for many more people, not just the privileged few. We hope this paper can support further research, collaboration and investment in this space.
The proliferation of digital services has exponentially changed the way in which we engage with information, bringing both opportunities and challenges. In an increasingly digital world, the dual threats of mis- and disinformation are a huge challenge for democratic societies, especially at a time when almost half of the world will hold elections in 2024. And as we look at how media consumption evolves over time, many more citizens are now consuming their information online. In this context, the primary objectives of the EMFA are to ensure media plurality, as well as editorial and functional independence of public media, and to protect journalists across the EU.
Misinformation is the sharing of inaccurate information. Disinformation is the sharing of inaccurate information, with the intention to mislead.
CC’s support for journalists
Access to verified information is a basic human right and an issue we care deeply about at CC, especially as part of our work on Open Journalism. In 2023, we published A Journalist’s Guide to Creative Commons, which offers practical advice on how to make the most out of CC licenses in journalism and encourages journalists to openly license their outputs.
We find that CC-licensed news articles can dramatically increase their spread. The Conversation, a nonprofit network of eight international news sites publishing hundreds of useful articles of news and analysis each week under CC licenses, reports that around 60% of their readership comes from republished articles. Furthermore, small news outlets, lacking budgets for image subscriptions, turn to CC-licensed images on platforms like Flickr for free access to media.
Policy engagement with the EU
Starting with our Statement on the Introduction of the EU Media Freedom Act, we have provided context and input into the EU policy making process regarding the costs and risks of disinformation, through parliamentary hearings and engagement on the EMFA text itself. We have outlined how our licenses and our community-based work can support free and fair access to pluralist media content as well as defend independence of information for citizens, whether they access their information through more traditional channels (TV, radio, newsprint) or more modern, digital channels.
Our efforts centered on Article 17, which introduced the so-called “media exception,” thus creating special privileges for some incumbent, traditional media such as commercial newspapers and broadcasters. We argued that such a provision would disfavor smaller and independent creators, interfere with policies aimed at protecting users from harmful information, and have implications for how all people are able to share their creativity and knowledge online.
EMFA: A positive step forward but not the end of the road
While we welcome adoption of the EMFA, we believe the EU must remain active and vigilant in the fight against disinformation, resolute in its defense of independent journalism, and tireless in its defense of media plurality. We remain concerned about several aspects of the EMFA, particularly around the “media exception,” including:
Public media should not get a lighter treatment than private media: We believe that public media do not inherently have lower risks of disinformation. So while we welcome the provisions on ownership transparency, we feel the text still falls short in providing lighter touch provisions for state-owned, state-funded media outlets which may hide behind domestic standards bodies and regulators.
Traditional vs new media – same standards should apply to both: We remain unconvinced by the inferred assumption that public channels, which often tend to be “traditional” media outlets such as radio and TV, are more “reliable” than private media outlets, in particular digital ones. Citizens have a right to expect that all media, irrespective of ownership structure or interfaces used, should respect the same norms and standards.
Content moderation provisions risk exacerbating dis- and misinformation: We support the premise that decisions on content moderation by all operators, including very large online platforms, do not per se negatively affect media freedom. However, we fear the 24-hour “must-carry” obligation could have the perverse effect of allowing dis- and misinformation to spread further and faster. The “going viral” nature of social media and platforms is a challenge to balancing content moderation vs. robust controls to limit arbitrary removal of information. Despite the EMFA’s creation of an appeals process, the final text still lacks appropriate checks and balances to ensure content moderation can be practically enforced in a robust, proportionate way across all platforms. We also fear this could risk undermining the Digital Services Act implementation and encourage other stakeholders to request similar privileges in content moderation policies, creating a patchwork of potentially inconsistent rules.
In short, we strongly believe journalism provides a crucial public service. Access to verifiable information and stories that question the underlying terrain of power is critical to all democratic societies. Open-access information provides the strongest collective bulwark against the societally corrosive effects of mis/disinformation in the public arena.
While the EMFA may not be applicable by the time EU citizens cast their votes in June this year, we applaud the EU’s efforts to strengthen its regime in this important area. CC will continue to engage with policymakers to enhance the sharing of knowledge and defend the basic rights and freedoms enshrined in the EU acquis.
For more information on our work on policy and on open journalism, contact us at info@creativecommons.org.
CC Joins Civil Society Letter Urging U.S. to Support Openness and Transparency in AI
Over the last year, Creative Commons (CC) worked with other stakeholders to support open science and open source in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) and, specifically, the EU AI Act. This policy debate has now ratcheted up in the U.S. as well, after President Biden directed the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the Department of Commerce to start a public consultation process regarding “Dual Use Foundation Artificial Intelligence Models with Widely Available Model Weights.”
This week, wejoined a broad coalition of civil society and leading academics urging a tailored, evidence-driven approach. The letter highlights the critical benefits that open models can provide, and encourages the government to consider carefully the best ways to address the marginal risks that openness can create. As the letter states, “We do not claim that openness is always beneficial, and there are some situations where openness may exacerbate risks from AI.” However, risk should be evaluated relative to alternatives (e.g., the use of closed models or other digital tools to accomplish the same ends) and may be addressed through less restrictive means than direct limits on openness.
The event brought together advocates for the public domain and open access to cultural heritage including members of the Open Culture Platform, Doug McCarthy, who presented on the “Monetization of the Public Domain,” Emine Yildirim, who presented on how to “Decolonize the Public Domain,” and Maarten Zeinstra who previewed for the audience an update to the Europeana Public Domain Charter. On behalf of Creative Commons I was happy to present the new guidelines which were published in February: Nudging Users to Reference Institutions When Using Public Domain Cultural Heritage Materials.
In the morning the sessions focused on Belgian cultural heritage and other initiatives related to the public domain. Notably, Wikimedia Belgium announced and presented prizes to the winners of the 2023 Wiki Loves Monuments Photo contest.
The event was well attended by members of the community including from local cultural heritage institutions, academics, and policy advisors at the European level. We are looking forward to collaborating and contributing to similar events with our partners in the future.
Yesterday, the European Parliament (EP) adopted the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA), the world’s first piece of legislation comprehensively regulating artificial intelligence (AI).
Creative Commons (CC) has been actively engaged with EU policymakers on the AIA for the past years, especially as copyright issues arose front and center in the negotiations last June. In this blog post, we share a few high-level assessments of where the text landed across various key aspects impacting the commons as well as some thoughts on what lies ahead.
Open source software
We welcome the fact that the final text excludes open-source AI from some obligations, even if these exclusions are subject to conditions and come alongside ambiguity of the meaning of “open” in the context of AI overall and in the specific context of this law. Other noteworthy positives include an exemption for AI systems “specifically developed and put into service for the sole purpose of scientific research and development” and another exemption from the detailed transparency requirements for open-source general purpose AI (GPAI) models, even if they still have the obligation to put in place a policy to respect copyright law and produce a summary about the content used for model training.
AI and creativity
The AIA is largely agnostic when it comes to how the creative industries (and indeed individual creators) use AI. From our community consultation outcomes, we see some creators embracing AI, using it as a creative tool to further develop new and innovative works. Others, however, remain concerned about the impact of AI on employment in certain sectors as well as the competition aspect of more cost-effective digital/virtual solutions vis-a-vis human created works.
In response to Chat GPT’s explosive adoption, the EP introduced significant provisions, including on copyright. CC provided direct input to policymakers inpublic and in private on this aspect of the legislation, which touches directly on CC’s core mission.
As ever with compromises there are aspects of the deal on copyright which are positive and others which will require further reflection and iteration. The AIA makes several cross-references to EU copyright legislation, in particular Articles 3 and 4 of the CDSM Directive on text and data mining. There are already some stakeholders who are pushing for revision of related EU legislation, including said Directive, in light of the AIA and recent technological developments. At CC we look forward to facilitating practical application of Articles 3 and 4. However, we caution against any fundamental revisions of the exceptions provided for in these articles. These are critical for ensuring a balanced copyright system.
What happens next? A gradual application process
The Council is expected to give its final approval in the coming weeks and the Act will likely be published in the EU’s Official Journal later this spring. The Act will enter into force 20 days later, while the individual provisions will start applying in a staggered manner, with articles on prohibited AI applications applicable after 6 months (circa end of 2024), provisions on general purpose AI applicable after 12 months (circa mid-2025) and the remaining provisions applicable after 24 months (circa mid-2026). Looking further into the future, EU policymakers will no doubt have to assess how the AIA works in practice and ensure appropriate enforcement.
We welcome the creation of the EU’s AI Office, which will soon have to start crafting technical rules, as mandated by the AIA. We look forward to engaging with the Office as it further develops important technical standards, in particular in developing an opt-out standard in alignment with existing copyright law. The Office will also have an important role in interpreting and further clarifying vaguely worded concepts, such as the requirement to publish “sufficiently detailed” summaries of inputs for large language models (LLMs) and foundation models. These rules will be crucial to provide clarity for firms and individuals regarding regime compliance.
CC will continue to engage constructively with EU policymakers to ensure that the EU’s copyright regime remains fit for purpose in an ever-evolving digital age and that AI can be harnessed for good in support of a thriving commons.
Getty Museum releases 88K+ images of artworks with CC0
“Irises, 1889” by Vincent van Gogh, The J. Paul Getty Museum is dedicated to the public domain by CC0.
The J. Paul Getty Museum just released more than 88 thousand works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the digital images of items from its impressive collection squarely and unequivocally into the public domain.
According to the museum’s press release, “users can download, edit, and repurpose high resolution images of their favorite Getty artworks without any legal restrictions.” The museum’s Open Content database is a wellspring of art that is bound to inspire myriad new creative reuses. It includes Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises and many more treasures waiting to be explored. Since opening up, Getty has seen “an uptick in image downloads on our site, averaging about 30,000 per month.”
This announcement is a huge cause for celebration for CC’s Open Culture efforts, which strive to promote open access and better sharing of cultural heritage held in cultural heritage institutions, such as museums, libraries and archives. It is also a testament to the stewardship of our open, public-interest infrastructure of Creative Commons licenses and tools. These are free, easy-to-use, and standardized open legal tools that enable worldwide open access to creative content.
We salute the Getty for supporting a thriving public domain and encourage other institutions to engage more deeply in the open culture movement and make the world’s vast collections of public domain materials openly accessible to everyone. We recently released guidelines promoting CCØ and the Public Domain Mark alongside best-practice norms incentivizing users to refer back to institutions.
Get Involved
For additional guidance on using CCØ to release cultural heritage materials and tailored support in developing or implementing open access policies or to get involved in promoting open culture around the world:
One of the most common concerns we hear about the decision to go open is the impact on an institution’s revenue through selling licensed images. With this webinar, we aimed to shed light on those concerns and imagine alternative models that both support openness to collections while preserving institutions’ financial sustainability.
Panelists generally spoke about how the values and benefits of going open far exceed any potential loss of income. They also pointed out that cultural heritage institutions that go open get much better visibility and outreach online, thereby becoming a trusted source for information and images of their collections. This triggers new interactions with collections, fostering inclusive engagement and new forms of storytelling that are respectful of source communities. This in turn might lead to more onsite visits, increasing ticket sales.
Kicking off the conversation, Kristofer Erickson, Professor of Social Data Science at the University of Glasgow, offered evidence of the increased distribution of openly licensed images — with an estimation that if one assigned a commercial license rate to all 50 million files on Wikimedia Commons, the downstream economic value would equal about 22.5 billion US dollars. He said: “there’s a tremendous amount of value in free and open license materials both from cultural heritage institutions and from other informal, volunteer collective projects. And the challenge is making that material available and unlocking it so that it can be used by downstream users of all types.” He also emphasized the multiple layers of downstream uses and the positive spillovers that might be indirect but eventually link back to institutions.
Next to take the floor was Giovana Fontanelle, Program Officer, Culture and Heritage at Wikimedia Foundation. She presented data showing the comparison of page views to artworks at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts between the Met’s website and the Wikipedia articles in English and in all languages. Later in the conversation, she asked “does the sharing of culture, heritage images on social media, for example, cause negative financial, commercial and economic impacts for institutions? I believe that in 2024 most organizations right now understand that sharing their files on closed platforms doesn’t bring their financials down but actually helps to improve it in other ways down the line.”
We then heard from Elliott Bledsoe, Co-Lead of Creative Commons Australia and Wikimedia Australia Committee Member, who brought up the issue of the costs of digitization, and suggested considering a different approach: “We strive to make as much of our collection available to the public in a digital format online as we can, bearing in mind that there are reasons why we can’t make everything accessible, such as privacy or Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP), or other types of considerations. But if we take as a baseline that institutions want to make as much of their material accessible as possible, you can frame the idea of trying to get material digitized rather than being a transactional thing, a way of jumping the queue.” In this model, users would pay for the first instance of digitization of cultural heritage materials, which could then be made freely available online. In that new framing, payment would form part of a much bigger process: not as a condition for access, but as a contribution to supporting general access to cultural heritage for all.
Last but not least, Douglas McCarthy, Open GLAM Researcher and Author, critiqued institutions who choose to charge for image licenses with the headline that: “hardly any institutions actually turn a profit from that model. So the model of licensing content, asserting copyright or using contract law to control and attempt to monetize digital collections, was a bit more successful, slightly healthier, 20 years ago when I started in this area. That really isn’t the case now. Very rarely will you see a number in the black rather than the red, profit being returned from the classic picture library model, if we can call it that today.”
The discussion also touched upon alternative models for generating revenue which are not all-or-nothing, including charging for the first instance of digitization of a given work, which can then be shared publicly, as mentioned above, as well as a pay-what-you-can model. With equity at the center of many institutions’ missions in 2024, open access helps to ensure that audiences around the world can find and use cultural heritage that belongs to the public. Furthermore, open access creates more digital pathways back to the museum, leading to more financial stability through opportunities like partnerships as well as enhanced reputation through increased citations in academic papers. Other key takeaways included exposing and needing to escape the false binary of “free” versus “paying,” and uncovering the opportunity cost of not making collections freely and openly accessible: when collections are held behind (pay)walls, part of an institution’s impact and influence vanishes.
Thank you to the experts who joined us and shared their thoughts and research.
Learn More
During the webinar, panelists and participants shared some relevant resources.
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 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.
Creative Commons joins the Digital Public Goods Alliance
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Today, Creative Commons (CC) joins the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) as a new member. The DPGA is a multi-stakeholder initiative with a mission to accelerate the attainment of the sustainable development goals in low- and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods (DPGs). “We are thrilled to welcome Creative Commons to the Digital Public Goods Alliance. Their licenses and legal tools are pivotal for enhancing the sharing of DPGs, enabling more open, accessible tools to tackle global challenges. Similarly, Creative Commons’ commitment to training and capacity building supports governments and institutions in adopting open policies and practices, enriching the DPG ecosystem and equipping advocates with the needed knowledge. Their Open Climate Campaign and Open Climate Data project, is a testament to the power of open access in addressing critical issues like the climate crisis and biodiversity preservation. Together, we look forward to making significant strides towards a more open and sustainable world.” – Liv Marte Nordhaug, Chief Executive Officer, DPGA Secretariat
CC is delighted to be contributing to this mission. Solving the world’s most pressing challenges requires the open licensing and sharing of digital knowledge and cultural heritage assets about those challenges. By advocating for the use and implementation of DPGs, global communities can work together in prioritizing and mobilizing resources to help solve these challenges. CC’s legal tools and our programs play a critical role in helping to achieve the DPGA’s mission and advance the DPG ecosystem overall.
CC’s work aligns with that of the DPGA in the following ways, which will be included as part of the DPGA’s Annual Roadmap. CC will:
Enable the sharing and use of DPGs via International Creative Commons Licenses and Public Domain Tools.CC provides and stewards the CC licenses and public domain (PD) tools that give every person and organization in the world a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works; ensure proper attribution; and enable others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works. CC legal tools are the digital public infrastructure that make better sharing of DPGs possible.
Open Up Knowledge and Culture to Help Solve the World’s Most Pressing Problems. In 2024, the Open Climate Campaign will advance open access to climate research to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. We are also looking to open educational resources about climate change for everyone to learn, discover, and contribute. A parallel project on Open Climate Data will help facilitate the opening and sharing of climate datasets and data models to spur additional research and learning. And as cultural heritage is directly at risk of irremediable loss due to climate change, open access to cultural heritage helps put scientific, historical, and socio-cultural knowledge into context and fosters the creation of new knowledge. With open culture, we can raise awareness about SDGs, using cultural heritage as a medium, and empower people with the knowledge to collaborate on a global scale to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
Provide Commons Training and Consulting.CC offers the public a variety of training, including regular CC Certificatecourses (in-depth courses for people interested in becoming experts in creating and engaging with openly licensed works), office hours with our legal team, as well as customized consulting and facilitation. Through our consulting, we help governments and institutions develop and implement open policies, work toward greater open practices, build capacity in open licensing, and connect with open advocates to promote the creation and sharing of openly licensed DPGs.
For us, being a member means working with other DPGA members and CC’s extensive member network to build capacity, develop practical solutions, and advocate for better open sharing of knowledge and culture that serves the public interest. When the world uses CC legal tools to share their knowledge, everyone has access to DPGs including: open educational resources, open access research, open cultural heritage assets, open data, and AI algorithms and models.
A lot of exciting and critical work awaits us in 2024. While I steer Creative Commons as interim CEO, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and share details of our key priorities in the upcoming year.
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