While there was discussion last year of merging the two projects, it now looks as though they will remain complementary - with Freedom Defined focusing on cultural works, and with the Open Knowledge Definition retaining a broader conception of ‘knowledge’ that includes data (see e.g. Good news for open data).

Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons comments:

This added signaling is part of an ongoing effort to distinguish among the range of Creative Commons licenses — never say the Creative Commons license, as there is no such thing. Our license deeds have always communicated the distinct properties of each license with icons and brief descriptions.

This is great news and will hopefully contribute to the strengthening of a more robust sense of free culture/open knowledge within the plethora of liberal licensing options that are now available!

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After an initial plan to partner with a project called WikiBiblio, Jon Phillips of Creative Commons announced that WikiBiblio was going to merge with the Open Library (whom we’ve blogged about before). He also suggested that Public Domain Works becomes a partner - which is currently being arranged.

The plan looks to be to upload the Public Domain Works data to the Open Library, and to use read/write APIs to continue to develop different front-ends for different jurisdictions - each with its own algorithms to determine which works are in the public domain.

The Open Library will be an invaluable resource for open metadata about works in the public domain if all goes to plan!

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The organisers place an emphasis on community in content production, and aim to create what they call “a self-supporting networked ecosystem of projects”. They aim to educate participants about open licensing, meta-data and accessibility, as well as providing support for technical aspects of creating content. A list of proposed projects can be found here.

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All of the sessions were good but particular highlights included:

• The excellent panel on the philosophy of the commons which debated, among much else, whether having definitions of ‘Freedom’ or ‘Openness’ are useful or are just an obstruction (perhaps unsurprisingly given my prior, I still think definitions like the open knowledge definition or the free cultural works definition are valuable though I think we need to be very careful about distinguishing between a definition and a campaign).
• A very considered talk from Yochai Benkler (I was particularly struck by the vehemence of his “If you take anything from my work it is that I am not a techno-determinist”).
• The presentation from the Dutch National Archives (Beeld en Geluid) in which they announced that they have received an 173 million Euro grant in order to digitize their archive and make it available to the public. This is a massive undertaking covering 100 years of content including 137,200 hours of video, 22,510 hours of film, 1,239,000 hours of audio and 2,900,000 photos. A particularly interesting extra detail here was the fact that they had done a proper ‘economic’ study based on willingness-to-pay estimates, prior to obtaining the grant, which had indicated that the project would deliver societal benefits well in excess of its costs.
• And last, but not least, a conversation with Joi Ito and others on the nature of happiness (the question of the relationship of happiness, sharing and the increasingly networked nature of society seemed to come up frequently over the last few days).

Other important information included internal CC rumblings indicating that there will soon be a CC communique on the question of database rights along the lines that, where they exist, they should be waived and the licenses should be restricted to copyright. Personally, I’m still undecided on whether this is the best approach but conversations with John Willbanks and Jamie Boyle during the Summit have given me much food for thought. Another piece of big news was Lessig’s announcement that he is going to start reducing his current commitments on ‘Free Culture’ and ‘Open Knowledge’ issues — for full details see this summary of his keynote address.

There still remains a very great deal to be done in all of the areas covered by the Summit — from open education to film to sustainable business models. I also think we are going to have to be clearer about the fact that Creative Commons does not necessarily equal ‘open’ (non-commercial no-derivatives anyone?) and that the set of CC licenses are too broad to define a coherent ‘commons’ — far too often one heard people saying things like ‘my site takes CC content’ as if this defined a clear standard.

However this is to expected at such an early stage and when one contrasts this with the situation 2 years ago when it wasn’t even clear that iCommons would be anything more than the international license coordination group it is clear we have already come far. I will certainly be interested to see how the ‘movement’ (if we can yet call it that) will evolve and develop — I’d like to see greater prominence given to other areas of knowledge, after all the ‘commmons’ of data is as important as the ‘commons’ of culture — but events such as these mark important steps on the way to a more ‘open’ future.

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Though having a different form and layout, the principles enshrined in the FCWD and the Open Knowledge Defintion are almost entirely identical (so identical that we’ve been exploring with them for a while how the two could merge). This similarity is very encouraging given the importance of staking out such a clear (shared) meaning for what it means for a piece of knowledge to be free/open. As stated in the introduction to the Open Knowledge Definition:

The concept of openness has already started to spread rapidly beyond its original roots in academia and software. We already have ‘open access’ journals, open genetics, open geodata, open content etc. As the concept spreads so we are seeing a proliferation of licenses and a potential blurring of what is open and what is not.

In such circumstances it is important to preserve compatibility, guard against dilution of the concept, and provide a common thread to this multitude of activities across a variety of disciplines. The definition, by providing clear set of criteria for openness, is an essential tool in achieving these ends.

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This involves an effort to establish a simple common standard for video metadata distribution, right now heavily leaning towards use of the Atom syndication format. Digging around, I found some parallel assessments, particularly Lisa Rein’s research on video metadata models for microformats.

I attended the meeting to argue, amongst other things, that the group should consider specifying data license as a required field and not as an optional one in their metadata model. In stating the case for this, I am thinking particularly of Rufus’ essay on the importance of being explicit about openness. He cites examples of collections of contributed works which have “died” because the right to re-use the material is unclear; the rights technically reside in each individual contributor, who has to be consulted before the work can be legally re-used and redistributed.

[to] my second question: ‘am i allowed to redistribute/reuse their material’ the simple answer was: No — I’d would have to go out and identify, and then gain permission, from each contributor; an endeavour that would clearly be prohibitively time consuming.

…when engaging in any kind of collaborative effort — the norm on the web — the adoption of an explicitly open approach can be considered as providing a form of social contract among the participants which is clearer than the informal tacit arrangments which would otherwise operate.

The network organisers have set up a small metadata working group and I hope they will be able to seek opinions from Free Culture UK, and perhaps get the chance to learn from some of the data modelling and licensing decisions that were made in the context of the Creative Archive project.

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[snip.]
Tom Chance wrote [in response to an email by Saul Albert]:
> Maybe. Or maybe if you spoke to more people who use NC you'd realise that, for 
> many of them, CC BY-NC-SA represents an ideal social contract that ensures 
> they will benefit from the fruits of their labour most fully. They may be 
> wrong about that, largely because of the practicalities of the license and 
> actually getting permission, but those could be ironed out as I suggested 
> above. Saying "I want a slice of the action" is pretty commonsense, if only 
> it can be guaranteed without making things worse for yourself.

While I agree it is commonsense it is exactly the kind of commonsense 
that sits ill with a 'share and share-alike' philosophy and leads to few 
positive externalities. It is also pretty close to the reason most 
people use full copyright: 'if you want to use it you can just come and 
ask me' -- and we know the problems with that. This doesn't make it 
wrong in any way at all -- just as I don't think it is any 'wrong' for 
people to use copyright (it's their right to use whichever license they 
want).

> I think there are really two issues here. First, why the current NC system is 
> flawed. There can't be much mileage left in that debate, but there's lots of 
> scope for good proposals to implement a better NC-type system. Second, why 
> any NC system is flawed, and there I've only come across a handful of erudite 
> opponents (Rob Myers being one) and lots of simplistic libertarian rebukes :/

I don't think it would make sense to say 'all NC systems are flawed'. 
It's horses for courses after all. However for me it is important to 
have some idea of the community norms. After all we are going to need to 
draw a line about what is 'open' content is at some point especially 
when it comes to questions of what gets hosted and where. I am happy for 
people to write proprietary software, copyrighted books etc etc but 
knowledgeforge.net/archive.org/remixreading won't host it (in this 
regard it is worth noting that at knowledgeforge the position is to only 
go with work licensed under terms compatible with the open knowledge 
definition or open source definition. archive.org and remixreading 
meanwhile both allow nc restrictions but my understanding is that 
remixreading wouldn't host Creative Archive material with all its extra 
restrictions).

With a 'copyrighted culture' you've got an overly restrictive (and 
overly extended) default that creates huge transactional burdens and 
complexity. So with restrictions on commercial use: we create a bunch of 
restrictions -- less burdnesome than with traditional copyright to be 
sure -- but burdensome nevertheless that in /many cases/ are just acting 
as obstacles while doing little for the producers of the work. Sure, 
just like full copyright, nc provisisons give the creator more control 
over the use of their work but it's a control with large attendant costs 
for the community and often few benefits for the creator.

I should leave the last word to Tom who in responding to my final paragraph above summed up the nub of, what we might term, the ‘advocacy’ problem:

Amen. However, this is quite a hard message to sell to artists who don't 
consider themselves to be remixers. Until they come up against a copyright 
holder or free culture advocates it won't seem a big deal. Playing devil's 
advocate: So what if the community doesn't benefit, there's a chance I might 
benefit from my exclusive control somewhere down the line. With software, 
programmers can quickly grasp the advantage of everyone sharing code openly. 
Why should a poet, band, painter or journalist jump on the bandwagon?

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While appreciating this concern, for reasons I elaborate below, I think the adoption of the ‘non-commercial’ restriction is a big mistake. Removing the restriction would deliver significant gains in terms of greater freedom for reuse and it would demonstrate a commitment to full ‘openness’ helping to prevent fragmentation of the ‘commons’. At the same time the downside of doing this would be minimal.

First, a by-sa license is clearly ‘freer’ than a by-sa-nc in that it places fewer restrictions on the use of the work. In general this is a good thing since it means fewer occassions on which people have to /ask permission/.

The Open Knowledge Definition following the approach of the F/OSS community prohibits discrimination against fields of endeavour (article eight) including restrictions on commercial use. Just as for open source I think it is important to have commercial users join the community. Furthermore this kind of restriction not only adds further complexity (what exactly counts as ‘commercial’ use?) but also is the basis for the introduction of a whole panopoly of further cases of ’special treatment’ (for developing nations, against military use, etc etc) leading rapidly to a fragmenting of the ‘commons’. I’d therefore go as far as to say that a license which incorporates ‘nc’ type provisions should not be described as ‘open’ and should be avoided wherever possible.

Second is all commercial usage bad? I know someone who made a documentary about Chavez and distributes it for free. At the same time he has received payments when it has aired by commercial tv stations (they often pay even when they don’t need to). This would make his work ‘commercial’ but it seems a far cry from, say, use in a coca-cola advert. Do you really want to prevent that kind of usage? If you do you’ve just cut out most of the main avenues for ’serious’ reuse of your work — ultimately most documentary makers would like to see their stuff get out to as wide an audience as possible and that means broadcast on a commercial network.

Third for the types commercial usage that I imagine you would most object to (e.g. adverts) the share-alike clause should be a sufficient obstacle — the makers of a major ‘brand’ advert probably do not want to have ‘reshare’ their work. They would need to come and relicense from you and at that point you are in the same position as with an nc license.

Further Reading

I am by no means the first to consider this issue. See e.g. Erik Moller’s essay: http://intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC

And Lessig’s response: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-lessigletter/2005/000008.html

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I’ll definitely be heading down and am looking forward to some joint hacking on the the public domain project that we’ve been working on as well as the chance to have a good discussion of FCUK’s current and future activities.

More Information

= Free Culture UK Meeting 2006-04-08 =

http://www.freeculture.org.uk/meetings/2006-04-08

== When ==

Saturday 8th April 2006, 11am - 7pm.

== Where ==

Limehouse Town Hall, 646 Commercial Road, London, E14 7HA

The venue is in east London near the docklands and about 30 mins from central London by bike or public transport.

See http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/wiki/WsfiiGettingThere for details on how to get there.

Any difficulties contact Rufus Pollock on 07795 176 976.

== About ==

The meeting will be: * An informal get-together for discussion and hacking * Fun and friendly, no speakers, panels, lectures, etc. * Sharing experiences, things that did and didn’t work * Facilitated discussions about what we think a free culture movement should actually do. * There will be food! (pizza at lunchtime and joint meal in the evening)

=== Workshops/Sessions ===

• FreeCultureConstitution ratification
• What could/should the free culture movement be doing
• PublicDomainBurn: update and hacking session
• 14plus14 petition system: evaluation and fixes
• BBC Creative Archive: what’s good, what’s bad

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