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OCLN — Open content legal news, a worldwide selection of news and events about open content with a focus on the legal side of things from Jordan Hatcher, legal consultant.

iCommons received core grant funding:

2008 also marks the start of a five-year grant by two new trusts: Kusuma Trust and IETSI (International Electronic Trade and Services Initiative) that have made an endowment to iCommons of $1 million over a period of five years. The power of this core grant cannot be overemphasised. Anyone working in the non-profit field will recognise how difficult it is to raise core funds, and as a young organisation based in the developing world, iCommons is extremely grateful for this opportunity to consolidate and build an organisation that will have considerable impact into the future.

[Creative Commons » CC News] LugRadio to switch to CC-BY-SA:

Incidentally, the LugRadio podcast has been working to effect a switch from the most restrictive CC license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) to one of the most liberal (Attribution-ShareAlike) and this month made the announcement in the form of an essay, well worth reading.

[Creative Commons » CC News] ACLU Embraces CC Licensing

The ACLU has begun its first foray into CC licensing, releasing all the content from their new website, marijuanaconversation.org, under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

Oh and Lessig isn’t going to run for Congress, in case you missed it…

OCLN is a regular feature here at opencontentlawyer.

Anything I missed that you think should be here? Let me know!

FYI, IMPACT has posted a legal guide to CC licences.

(Via Creative Commons » CC News.)

1st CC Korea International Conference: “‘Open Culture in CC’ is the theme of the first CC Korea International Conference, a day-long event to be held on Friday, March 14th at the National Museum of Korea (map).

The CC Korea team, lead by Chief Project Lead Jongsoo Yoon, have organized the conference not only to celebrate the 3rd birthday of CC Korea and its localized CC licenses, but as a platform to promote Open Culture in Korea, both qualitatively and quantitatively, by discussing case studies and coordinating future projects.

It looks like they will have some public sector and open content licensing material:

The program is divided into four tracks, covering topics such as open access and peer review, case studies in public sector content usage, Government Information Licensing Framework (GILF) in Australia, and media tools for CC in businesses.

I just wanted to highlight quickly that music group R.E.M. has released content apparently under the Artistic License 2.0, a Open Source Initiative and Free Software Foundation approved license, meant to cover software, for 11 videos for the first song of their new album.

Coverage: Read Write Web | CNET | o’reilly

To get access to the content, you go to the album site:

http://www.supernaturalsuperserious.com/

It is a really neat flash site with a really cool way of integrating the videos. Down on the lower right corner are the track/video numbers. If you click on them, you get the download in a massive ZIP file. I downloaded number one and it was 245MB — this is because they are High Definition mp4 files. I didn’t see the actual license on the page, and it wasn’t included in the download ZIP file.

The Artistic License is an interesting choice as it is built for software and not content, though I’ll have to dig further into it and how they’ve labeled the content.

New CC licences

Puerto Rico launched their Creative Commons ports today, making PR the 44th port of the CC set of licences. CC announcement. CC Puerto Rico site.

Two new jurisdiction specific CC licences on their way as Norwegian and Ecuadorian draft Creative Commons licences are now available for comment. Ecuador. Norway. CC Announcement.

Queensland to use Creative Commons licences for public sector information, and the Australian federal government may soon follow suit. Guardian coverage.

New CCZero framework

Based in part on comments on CCZero such as those I’ve outlined here, Creative Commons is to change course and take a new approach for CCZero inspired by Open Data Commons and the Public Domain Dedication and Licence.

CC and free cultural works.

Creative Commons licences now distinguish which ones are compatible with “free cultural works” definition. They have a snazzy new logo on the CC licences that match the FCW definition, which would be the Attribution (CC-BY) and Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) licences.

The Open Gaming License is apparently getting a redraft. The Open Gaming License is used for Dungeon and Dragons.

Open content and business links

A new paper on the creative industries and small and medium sized businesses is out (via openbusiness.cc) Phase Three – The New Entrepreneurial Economy (February 2008) subtitle: The New Artisan Economy. I’d blockquote an excerpt of it, but the PDF file has technological restrictions on it.

Kevin Kelly and free. Kevin Kelly has some thoughts on internet distribution and content:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

Food for thought, especially given Chris Anderson’s move to FREE looking at the same area for his new book (more on the long tail blog).

And in related news..

In case you missed the facebook group or the new webiste, Lawrence Lessig, whose name is almost synonymous with Creative Commons licences, is very seriously considering running for US Congress.

OCLN is a regular feature here at opencontentlawyer.

Anything I missed that you think should be here? Let me know!

I have a new article out that I’ve written for the Open Source Business Resource, which is now available in the February issue.

Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons Project

In it, I explain the brief history of the Open Data Commons project and the Public Domain Dedication and Licence, which should be released soon once necessary updates are complete. Any thoughts or feedback, please feel free to contact me.

The BBC reports on a new use for iris scanning technology: online copyright enforcement. Iris scanning and recognition technology is being used for biometric identification, such as the IRIS — Iris Image Recognition Immigration Service used by the UK Home Office for immigration purposes. A picture of the iris is made and used much like taking fingerprints is used for law enforcement today. According to the article, Canon has filed a patent that would embed iris information of the photographer into the digital image file:

The system works by scanning the iris as the eye is put to the viewfinder when the shot is composed.

So this is a combo of digital watermarking technologies and iris recognition hardware and software that produces images that can be linked back to the photographer. Digital watermarks are invisible information hidden within a digital file that can be used to identify information about the digital file. You can use them in online copyright enforcement to track the origin and subsequent usage of content. The iris scanning watermark idea raises some interesting privacy and data protection issues, but those comments are for another blog. In terms of online copyright enforcement, it looks like the main advantage is an easy way to watermark images as they are created so that they can later be tracked.

Watermarks can fall into what is often called “digital rights management” in that it can be used to associate the rights granted with that digital file. A much narrower area of DRM are TPMs — technological protection measures that try to actually restrict what can and can’t be done with a work through the use of “digital locks”. Watermarks are much less invasive in that they can only associate information with a digital file, and don’t involve — on their own — locking what can be done with the file.

Creative Commons licences don’t allow for the use of technical means of restricting the rights granted to users of the work. In section 4a of the unported Attribution license (CC BY 3.0 unported), for example, it states:

You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.

However, as I’ve argued elsewhere in an article titled “Can TPMs Create a Commons? Looking at Whether and How TPMs and Creative Commons Licences can Work Together.” [SSRN] [Indicare article], watermarking technologies could fit with use of CC licences:

Watermarking … is the least invasive method and thus most likely to comport both philosophically and legally with the Creative Commons family of licenses. Simply placing some information in the work would not hamper the ability to copy and distribute the work. They would perhaps be most useful for those using the “No Derivative” CC license. Watermarking could allow for users to authenticate the integrity of the content and for content creators to track use. The use information can then be passed on to funding agencies or used internally in order to assess the usefulness of the licenses in encouraging re-use. These watermarks could also help prevent commercial use for organizations using the non-commercial (NC) option.

So from a CC/Flickr perspective, you could take a photo with one of these Canon iris cameras, upload your photos to Flickr and select a CC licence, such as the non-commercial no-derivatives version (CC-BY-NC-ND), and you would have an additional tool to try to enforce your rights if they were used without your permission by a commercial image company.

New US case law resource launched, already using CCZero beta.

Lessig announced this week on his blog that the public US caselaw resources that Public Resource has been working towards has now gone live:

As announced at public.resource.org, CC and public.resource.org have announced the first release of material to support our free law project. After raising a large chunk of change from great and generous sorts like David Boies, John Gilmore, the Omidyar Network and the Elbaz Foundation, we’ve purchased a database of a substantial part of all federal cases. Carl’s team has now made all the data available in a beautiful, xml format for developers to take and use however they want. The however they want part is what’s assured by the CCØ mark on all cases — no rights, including attribution rights, are asserted over these data at all. Free law available for anyone to build search engines, or collections, or whatever else they want.

They’ve released the material under the beta version of CCZero, but note that CCZero has still not been officially launched or its use encouraged. At the public.resource.org site you can find the case law and materials and the developer file.

New Creative Commons and commons (more broadly defined) research discuss list. The list is run by Giorgos Cheliotis, who has done some really interesting research on measuring use of CC [PDF abstract link] [blog post].

And in related news…

NESTA report “Beyond the creative industries: mapping the creative economy in the United Kingdom” [PDF Link]. This looks like it could be part of the evidence base for the upcoming Gowers Copyright Exceptions consultation.

Google’s Canada Policy Counsel answers the question, “What is a balanced approach to copyright reform?“.

The European Commission is looking to push the term in copyright sound recordings up to 95 years. [EC press release] [IPKat commentary].

43(B)log has lots of coverage to the recent Columbia Fair Use conference.

New academic paper on servitudes that includes comparison to free and open source software licences and Creative Commons / open content licensing:

In this article I develop a comprehensive account of the evolving jurisprudence of servitudes as applied to both land and personal property, identifying the sources of traditional servitude skepticism in order better to evaluate the new generation of running restrictions on intangible informational goods. I apply the lessons I draw from the old servitudes to paradigmatic examples of contemporary licensing practices - including Microsoft end-user license agreements, the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License, and Creative Commons licenses.

Van Houweling, Molly Shaffer, “The New Servitudes” . Georgetown Law Journal, Forthcoming Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1028947

Discussion from University of Chicago, and hat tip to Madisonian.

OCLN is a regular feature here at opencontentlawyer.

Anything I missed that you think should be here? Let me know!

Reported at techcrunch (HT to Trademark Blog), Gum Gum is a new platform for licensing images:

Attributor, a Silicon Valley startup, helps content owners track their intellectual property to find examples of infringement. But until now, no one has really thought about a better way to license content on the Internet, so that both large and tiny publishers have an incentive to avoid simply stealing stuff.

That’s where GumGum comes in. Images today are generally licensed for a flat fee, exclusively or non-exclusively. GumGum founders Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir think a better way is to charge for impressions, or on an advertising-supported basis. But tracking image impressions isn’t trivial, so they first had to build a platform to do that.

Images are available either ad-supported or on a cost per impression basis, and are in flash to serve the ads or track the impressions (as appropriate). Interesting way of monetizing content on the web.

Alan Toner notes on his blog that when releasing Steal This Film 2, that having English Subtitles enabled the film to be translated into multiple languages almost immediately, thus increasing its worldwide distribution:

English subtitles were made available for the film on its release, a gambit which has paid off as almost immediately people began translating them into their own native languages. So far there are working subs available in Russian (tnx Beast + Lord Russian Nightmare), Finnish (tnx Janne Peltola), Italian (tnx to Chiara Micheli), German (thx Christian), Spanish (tnx Habladorcito) and Portuguese (tnx Felipe) on the website; Dutch, French, and Greek translations are on their way.

This is something that I identified and commented on in my article “Of Otaku and Fansubs: A Critical Look at Anime Online in Light of Current Issues in Copyright Law” [via SSRN] [via SCRIPTed]. Anime fansubs are fan translated and subtitled versions of Japanese-language content (usually TV episodes). Fans obtain raw content via Japanese p2p networks or through other means and then, often in a distributed production process much like open source, subtitle and encode the resulting content for distribution:

The English-language fansubs produced by fans aimed at the American market, of course, serve all parts of the English-reading world. In addition, English, either as a first or second language, is more widely known than Japanese, and so many fansub groups that translate into languages such as Turkish use the English fansub as a base for their translations.[171] Continuing to allow at least some English-language fansubs could be a way to expand the market for distributors intent on markets outside the U.S., whether English speaking or not.

Having an English version acts as a key that unlocks the door to greater distribution. However in the context of fansubs, this translation and distribution isn’t authorized. The legality of taking unauthorized content off of a p2p network and translating it and further distributing it is very doubtful.

Creative Commons licences that allow adaptations of the work allow for translation:

“Adaptation” means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, adaptation, derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a literary or artistic work, or phonogram or performance and includes cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably derived from the original, except that a work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License.

The above is from the CC Attribution Unported licence [CC-BY], but is present in all six of the basic CC licences. CC has a “No Derivatives” option that prohibits adaptations as defined above, including translations. So licensing your work under Creative Commons only allow translations if you use:

• Attribution (BY)
• Attribution | Noncommercial (BY-NC)
• Attribution | ShareAlike (BY-SA)
• Attribution | Noncommercial | ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)

So if you were going to distribute content and wanted to give permission to your users to translate your work into their own language — and use a CC licence to do it — you could use one of the above. There is another option however when considering one of the No Derivatives options that prohibit translation. You could have a supplementary licensing document that grants a specific right to translation, but not other adaptations. Just because you have placed the work under a No Derivative CC licence, doesn’t mean that you’ve given up the right to license derivatives. You could also, as I mentioned in an earlier post, not give permission up-front for translations but take a ‘light enforcement’ strategy when thinking about how to enforce your rights against unauthorized translations.