November 2 Creative Commons Policy Roundup

[Timothy Vollmer]

Open Access Week 2017

There were hundreds of events, actions, and writings during the annual Open Access Week, including the open access release of Stephen Hawking's 1966 doctoral thesis. Said Hawking: “Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and inquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.” CC highlighted several aspects of the week's theme "Open In Order To..."

• Open In Order To…Maximize Reuse Possibilities of Research
• Open In Order To…Promote Knowledge Sharing, Not Criminalize It
• Open In Order To…Accelerate Research and Scientific Discoveries
  
• Open In Order To…Guarantee Access to the Laws That Govern Us
  
• Open In Order To…Fulfill Our Vision for Universal Access to Research and Education

There were many other interesting OAweek articles posted, including: 

• Erin McKiernan's Imagining the “open” university: Sharing scholarship to improve research and education
  
• Hindawi's take on A radically open approach to developing infrastructure for Open Science
• Open Knowledge on Why we need a public data infrastructure of publishing costs
• OECD's Toby Green on how open access can serve the distinct needs of readers and authors
• Wikimedia Italy on how it helped authors make over 3000 articles green open access
• Dave Hansen's post on who posted all those articles to ResearchGate anyway?
• An article on returning control of scholarly journals to their communities
• Scholarly Kitchen guest post on academics' views on copyright culture, and how it is typically misaligned with their preferred scholarly communication practices

NAFTA Modernization and IP

From Geist: "The solution is simple: NAFTA should require each party to meet international standards as found in global agreements on IP and e-commerce.  It is reasonable to expect all parties to meet international standards. It is not reasonable – nor advisable – to undertake significant domestic change on those issues through secretive trade negotiations that features limited consultation and distorts the traditional efforts at balance." Geist also submitted similar comments to the Canadian government in advance of the negotiations on the leftovers of the TPP. Now that the U.S. is out it's called TPP-11. Many have criticized the secretive, undemocratic policy process of trade negotiations. But to the extent they're going forward, we should look to the extensive framework of existing international copyright standards that work. 

The User Rights Database: Measuring the Impact of Copyright Balance

Sean Flynn and Mike Palmedo released the initial results of research based on PIJIP’s Copyright User Rights Database. This research tool maps changes to copyright limitations and exceptions and other “user rights” from 1970 through 2016 in 21 countries of different development levels around the world. The first results are based on tests of copyright limitation openness. It shows that developing countries in the sample are now at the level of openness that existed in the wealthy countries 30 years ago. Few countries, and almost no developing countries, have sufficient user rights most needed to support the digital economy, including for transformative use or text and data mining.

Intellectual Property for the Twenty-First-Century Economy

Editorial from Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker, Arjun Jayadev: "IP standards advanced countries favor typically are designed not to maximize innovation and scientific progress, but to maximize the profits of big pharmaceutical companies and others able to sway trade negotiations."

Leaked: These 3 EU governments want to give record labels control over what we can and can’t post online

MEP Julia Reda reports on documents leaked by Statewatch that show that "the governments of France, Spain and Portugal want to double down on a law proposed by the European Commission that would force all kinds of internet platforms to install a “censorship machine” to surveil all uploads and try to prevent copyright infringement. They want to add to the Commission proposal that platforms need to automatically remove media that has once been classified as infringing, regardless of the context in which it is uploaded (“staydown”)...By law, every video clip of your cat that you share with an app would need to pass through filters controlled by media companies. Essentially, they would have a veto right to any upload to the internet. These filters would be unable to safeguard your rights to quote, to make parodies, and to use existing works in any other way allowed under copyright exceptions." Related to Article 13, Open Media produced an awesome explanatory infographic. 

Broad coalition of organizations and associations voice concern over CASE Act

A coalition of organisations wrote a letter to Congress regarding the introduction of a new bill that would create an alternative dispute resolution program for copyright small claims. From the letter: "The undersigned organizations and associations appreciate the challenges low-value infringement cases pose to individual artists. Unfortunately, the small claims system established by the CASE Act would not successfully address the problem. Defendants rarely would consent to the jurisdiction of the small-claims tribunal because it would not be in their interest to do so; they likely would not waive the traditional benefits and protections of federal court litigation."

BONUS ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• In the U.S., Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced the BASIC Research Act, a bill to include secret non-science reviewers on federal research grant panels, apparently to ensure that the science being conducted is good for America. 
  
• Linux Foundation Debuts Community Data License Agreement. It's unclear why more licenses are needed. And apparently there was zero consultation with existing license stewards, for instanc Creative Commons.