December 18 Creative Commons Policy Roundup
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Timothy Vollmer
Dec 18, 2017, 1:33:49 PM12/18/17
to CC Staff, CC Affiliates, copyrigh...@creativecommons.email, iol-n...@googlegroups.com, Open Policy Network, pol...@wikimedia.de
The battle for the net continues after FCC erases net neutrality rules
"A free and open internet is an essential utility of everyday life and Creative Commons licensing is only one factor in a healthy open internet ecosystem. A strong digital commons requires universal access to basic digital infrastructure, and enforceable rules that promote fair competition and freedom of information."
Congress Shouldn't Turn the Copyright Office Into A Copyright Court
"The CASE Act is not the right solution. First, it would create a new quasi-court within the Copyright Office. Aside from the constitutional questions that raises, the Copyright Office is not known for its neutrality on copyright issues. Second, the powers given to this new tribunal would invite gamesmanship and abuse. Third, it would magnify the existing problem of copyright’s unpredictable civil penalties. Finally, it would put this new tribunal in charge of punishing DMCA abuse, but sharply limit the punishment available, undermining what little deterrent effect still exists in the statute."
Dreaming of the Big Open
"Across the open movement, many projects like to think of themselves as agnostic to politics. In Open Education, the field in which I do a lot of my work, people often treat free licensing as a non-controversial move that supports innovation, equity or cost efficiency. We forget that current times are marked by an ongoing struggle concerning our rights to access and use knowledge and culture. At the turn of the century, the rise of Napster was like shots fired at the start of a revolution. And today Sci Hub exists to remind us of the highly political stakes in access to knowledge. Advocates of open need to treat their work as political and address in particular regulatory and economic barriers."
EU-Mercosur FTA Puts At Risk Access To Medicines In Brazil, New Impact Assessment Study Finds
"Throughout the many years of negotiations, the Mercosur countries have been opposing the adoption of any clauses that provide further protection for IPR than is already required in the WTO TRIPS Agreement. However, according to recent press reports[2] the EU is still pushing for those measures. It is suspected that they are deliberately delaying the issue of patents and public health to try to force an agreement at the last minute, when negotiations around other issues will already have been reached and the pressure will be high on Mercosur not to lose everything."
Canadian Trade Committee Warns Against Unbalanced U.S. IP Demands in NAFTA
"The recommendation is important as it signals that the Liberal government recognizes that some of the NAFTA IP demands from the U.S. – notably including copyright term extension, increased copyright criminalization, and a notice-and-takedown system – would alter the Canadian copyright balance between rights holders and users. It is also an implicit rejection of the website blocking proposal raised by Bell, which would radically alter the copyright balance. Moreover, the emphasis on flexibility on domestic reforms reinforces that Canada should maintain the right to create its own copyright and IP laws that reflect international norms."
How Open-Access Journals Are Transforming Science
Eisen: "journals have monopoly control because scientists give it to them"
Open-access journals broken down by CC license
From DOAJ:
- CC-BY = 4,633 = 43.8%
- CC-BY-NC-ND = 2,361 = 22.3%
- CC-BY-NC = 1,768 = 16.7%
- CC-BY-NC-SA = 677 = 6.4%
- CC-BY-SA = 585 = 5.5%
- CC-BY-ND = 94 = 0.8%
- Total with CC licenses = 10,024 = 94.8%
- Total without CC licenses = 543 = 5.1%
Could intelligent machines of the future own the rights to their own creations?
"But yet despite calling it “intelligence”, many people are unwilling to countenance the idea that machines with AI can own intellectual property. The other side of the argument goes that intellectual property does not only seek to protect intelligence per se. It aims to uphold a particular form of intelligence – that which is human, something that has long been the case across societies. People on this side of the argument believe that what intelligent machines are doing is just the execution of a program or algorithm ultimately produced by a human programmer. As such, the latter should be given any intellectual property rights that flow."
The Price of Ignorance: The Constitutional Cost of Fees for Access to Electronic Public Court Records
Cost of storing and transmitting data has approached $0. PACER still charges users 10 cents *per webpage* to view public federal court records. 2016 revenue was $150 million. These tolls impede transparency and public understanding of the law.
How some are spreading confusion about scientific evidence to push through an extra copyright for news sites in the EU
The European Parliament commissioned an independent study on Article 11, which found that the neighboring right for press publishers is a terrible idea. But you wouldn’t know that after listening to today’s workshop.
"It’s not entirely different from commissioning a study on whether climate change exists, then after the study concludes that it does, inviting an academic with a different opinion who also happens to be a lawyer for the fossil fuels industry – and then claiming that the jury is still out."
Upload Filters: Heads—They're Illegal; Tails—They're Illegal
"To summarise: Article 13’s automated general upload filters are either voluntary, in which case they are illegal under the GDPR, or they are mandatory, and therefore illegal under the E-commerce Directive. There’s no other possibility. What’s clear is that upload filters are illegal in all situations, and must therefore be dropped from the Copyright Directive completely."
UK government report: The right to read should be the right to mine
"We agree with the report that publicly funded research and data should be shared as open data under permissive open licenses (such as CC BY, or even put into the worldwide public domain using a tool like the CC0 Public Domain Dedication). The public sector should do this not because it is legally required in order to conduct text and data mining or other techniques related to artificial intelligence, but more generally in order to ensure an open, communicative, and generative environment where the public gets the access they deserve and need in order to be informed on current scientific research, learn about promising medical innovations, and collaborate to solve problems. And at the same time, we need to continue to advocate for a permissive legal system that protects and expands fundamental user rights, such as a broad copyright exception for text and data mining that applies to any user, for any purpose."
Australian tech start-ups stand to lose out in proposed copyright reforms
"Excluding platforms from safe harbours doesn’t make much difference to tech giants like YouTube and Facebook, since they already operate within the United States safe harbours. But it does discourage Australian tech start-ups from the chance to experiment in a reduced-risk environment."
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