Over the past several years, Creative Commons has increasingly recommended free culture licenses over non-free ones. Now that the drafting process for version 4.0 of their license set is in full gear, this is a “a once-in-a-decade-or-more opportunity” to deprecate the proprietary NonCommercial and NoDerivatives clauses. This is the best chance we have to dramatically shift the direction of Creative Commons to be fully aligned with the definition of free cultural works by preventing the inheritance of these proprietary clauses in CC 4.0′s final release.

The concept of free culture has its roots in the history of free software (popularly marketed as “open source software”), and it’s an important philosophical underpinning to the CC license set. As with free software, the word “free” in free culture means free as in freedom, not as in price, but Creative Commons has not set or adhered to any standard or promise of rights or taken any ethical position in their support of a free culture. The definition of free cultural works describes the necessary freedoms to ensure that media monopolies cannot form to restrict the creative and expressive freedoms of others and outlines which restrictions are permissible or not. Although Creative Commons provides non-free licenses, the fact that they recognize the definition reveals a willingness and even desire to change.

Creative Commons started off by focusing much more on flexibility for rightsholders, but since its early days, the organization has moved away from that position. Several projects and licenses have been retired such as the Sampling, Founders’ Copyright, and Developing Nations License. It’s obvious that something like Founders’ Copyright which keeps “all rights reserved” for 14 years (before releasing into the public domain) is not promoting free culture. Giving rightsholders more options and easier ways to choose what rights they want to give others actually reinforces permission culture, creates a fragmented commons, and takes away freedom from all cultural participants.

What’s wrong with NC and ND?

The two proprietary clauses remaining in the CC license set are NonCommercial (NC) and NoDerivatives (ND), and it is time Creative Commons stopped supporting them, too. Neither of them provide better protection against misappropriation than free culture licenses. The ND clause survives on the idea that rightsholders would not otherwise be able protect their reputation or preserve the integrity of their work, but all these fears about allowing derivatives are either permitted by fair use anyway or already protected by free licenses. The NC clause is vague and survives entirely on two even more misinformed ideas. First is rightsholders’ fear of giving up their copy monopolies on commercial use, but what would be considered commercial use is necessarily ambiguous. Is distributing the file on a website which profits from ads a commercial use? Where is the line drawn between commercial and non-commercial use? In the end, it really isn’t. It does not increase the potential profit from work and it does not provide any better protection than than Copyleft does (using the ShareAlike clause on its own, which is a free culture license).

The second idea is the misconception that NC is anti-property or anti-privatization. This comes from the name NonCommercial which implies a Good Thing (non-profit), but it’s function is counter-intuitive and completely antithetical to free culture (it retains a commercial monopoly on the work). That is what it comes down to. The NC clause is actually the closest to traditional “all rights reserved” copyright because it treats creative and intellectual expressions as private property. Maintaining commercial monopolies on cultural works only enables middlemen to continue enforcing outdated business models and the restrictions they depend on. We can only evolve beyond that if we abandon commercial monopolies, eliminating the possibility of middlemen amassing control over vast pools of our culture.

Most importantly, though, is that both clauses do not actually contribute to a shared commons. They oppose it. The fact that the ND clause prevents cultural participants from building upon works should be a clear reason to eliminate it from the Creative Commons license set. The ND clause is already the least popular, and discouraging remixing is obviously contrary to a free culture. The NonCommercial clause, on the other hand, is even more problematic because it is not so obvious in its proprietary nature. While it has always been a popular clause, it’s use has been in slow and steady decline.

Practically, the NC clause only functions to cause problems for collaborative and remixed projects. It prevents them from being able to fund themselves and locks them into a proprietary license forever. For example, if Wikipedia were under a NC license, it would be impossible to sell printed or CD copies of Wikipedia and reach communities without internet access because every single editor of Wikipedia would need to give permission for their work to be sold. The project would need to survive off of donations (which Wikipedia has proven possible), but this is much more difficult and completely unreasonable for almost all projects, especially for physical copies. Retaining support for NC and ND in CC 4.0 would give them much more weight, making it extremely difficult to retire them later, and continue to feed the fears that nurture a permission culture.

Why does this need to happen now?

People have been vocal about this issue for a long time, and awareness of the problematic nature of ND and NC has been spreading, especially in the areas of Open Educational Resources (such as OpenCourseWare) and Open Access to research. With the percentage of CC-licensed works that permit remixing and commercial use having doubled since Creative Commons’ first year, it’s clear that there is a growing recognition that the non-free license clauses are not actually necessary, or even good.

Both NC and ND are incompatible with free licenses and many, if not the vast majority, of NC and ND licensed works will not be relicensed after CC 4.0, so the longer it takes to phase out those clauses, the more works will be locked into a proprietary license. There will never be a better time than this. Creative Commons has been shifting away from non-free licenses for several years, but if it does not abandon them entirely it will fail as a commons and divide our culture into disconnected parts, each with its own distinct licence, rights and permissions granted by the copyright holders who ‘own’ the works.

In December of 2006, Creative Commons implemented a subtle difference between the pages for free culture and non-free licenses: green and yellow background graphics (compare Attribution-ShareAlike to Attribution-NonCommercial). This was also when they began using license buttons that include license property icons, so that there would be an immediate visual cue as to the specific license being used before clicking through to the deed. In February of 2008, they began using a seal on free culture licenses that said “Approved for Free Cultural Works“, which was another great step in the right direction. In July of this year, Creative Commons released a completely redesigned license chooser that explicitly says whether the configuration being used is free culture or not. This growing acknowledgement of free vs. non-free licenses was a crucial development, since being under a Creative Commons license is so often equated with being a free cultural work. Now, retiring the NC and ND clauses is a critical step in Creative Commons’ progress towards taking a pro-freedom approach.

The NC and ND clauses not only depend on, but also feed misguided notions about their purpose and function. With that knowledge, it would be a mistake not to retire them. Creative Commons should not depend on and nurture rightsholders’ fears of misappropriation to entice them into choosing non-free CC licenses. Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining a wider set of conflicting licenses, Creative Commons as an organization should focus on providing better and more consistent support for the licenses that really make sense. We are in the perfect position to finally create a unified and undivided commons. Creative Commons is at a crossroads.This decisive moment will in all likelihood bind their direction either being stuck serving the fears that validate permission culture or creating a shared commons between all cultural participants.

We don’t want the next generation of the free culture movement to be saddled with the dichotomies of the past; we want our efforts to be spent fighting the next battles.

What should we do?

There have been lots of discussions on the CC-license list about promoting free culture licenses and discouraging proprietary ones. A couple of proposals have been made to encourage the use of free licenses over the non-free ones.

One is a rebranding of the non-free licenses. They could be differentiated in a much more significant way than it currently is, such as referring to NC and ND as the “Restricted Commons” or “Limited Commons” or some variant thereof. License buttons could also be color coded in the same way that license pages are (green for free culture licenses, yellow for proprietary ones). Another proposal is to rename NonCommercial to something more honest such as CommercialMonopoly.

While these proposals and other ideas are certainly worth supporting, we should not lose sight on our ultimate goal: for Creative Commons to stop supporting non-free licenses. We should not feel like this is impossible to achieve at this point, as it will be much more difficult to do later. More people than ever are starting to advocate against proprietary CC licenses, and there is clear evidence and reasoning behind these arguments. We have the power to prevent the inclusion of non-free clauses in this upcoming version of the Creative Commons License set.

To join us in resisting the inclusion of proprietary clauses in CC 4.0, there are a few important things you can do:

It’s that time of the year again… Nominations for the coming term’s SFC Board of Directors is now open!

Please see the following details about who is eligible to be nominated, how to nominate, and what to do if you are a nominee:

Who is eligible?

In order to be a candidate for the SFC Board, nominees must either be a current member of a SFC chapter or currently serving on the Board, per our Bylaws.

How to nominate someone:

Let the person you are nominating know that you are doing so.  Then, visit the Nominations page to make your nomination official by filling out the nominee’s information using the template provided.

To accept a nomination:

Once your sponsor has added your information to the wiki, you can accept the nomination by updating your bio and statement.  In order for your nomination to be considered accepted, you must write at least “Nomination Accepted” before the close of nominations at Midnight PDT on April 25, 2010.

On campaigning, etc.

Nominees will have until April 25th to add to and finalize their bios and statements on the Nominations page.  The statement is an open forum for information relevant to your candidacy and an opportunity to address questions, thoughts, or concerns from the SFC community to board nominees.

Nominations close at Midnight PDT on April 25th, 2009.

As many of you know, following the Free Culture 2008 Conference, Students for Free Culture began the Open University Campaign – an initiative to increase collaboration, sharing, and openness at the level of higher education. With the academic year about to begin, we want to invite all interested parties to assist the with project; after all, we wouldn’t be very genuine if we didn’t do this in an open manner ourselves!

About the Open University Campaign

In October 2008, Students for Free Culture drafted and adopted the Wheeler Declaration which declared that:

“An open university is one in which:

1. The research produced is open access;
2. The course materials are open educational resources;
3. The university embraces free software and open standards;
4. The university’s patents are readily licensed for free software, essential medicine, and the public good;
5. The university’s network reflects the open nature of the Internet,

where “university” includes all parts of the community: students, faculty and administration.”

Out of this agreement has grown the Open University Campaign, of which a major goal is to produce objective, reliable indicators of individual universities’ levels of openness. A primary method through which this will be accomplished is through “report card” style profiles of leading institution of higher learning, similar to College Sustainability Report Cards. Students for Free Culture has already begun this work by defining principles of measurement, researching available resources, and developing surveys to be distributed to universities.

What Will the Open University Report Cards Entail?

Mirroring the Wheeler Declaration, the Open University Report Cards, as currently envisioned, will evaluate schools on five topics:

1. Open Access: Are faculty required to make their scholarship open access? Is the university press publish open access materials?
2. Open Educational Resources: Does the university create OERs? Does the university use OERs?
3. Free and Open Source Software and Standards: Does university computing use FOSS? Are students and faculty required to use proprietary software?
4. Intellectual Property: Is IP revenue transparent? Is IP used to promote innovation, or restrict knowledge?
5. Network Management: Is the network neutral? Is user privacy respected?

Establishing credible criteria under which schools will be assessed will be essential to creating a respected resource. For example, Which schools’ open access policies are currently lacking important criteria? Or, To what extent should a school actively support FOSS? The volunteers currently involved with the project are working through these questions on the wiki page, and we encourage you to join the conversation.

What the Open University Campaign Needs

In order to make this a successful endeavor, Students for Free Culture needs your involvement!

• Are you a student who can research official university open access policies?
• Are you passionate about FOSS and can develop a questionnaire for IT administrators about FOSS policy?
• Are you statistically-inclined and can handle data on universities?
• Are you a web developer who could create a public website for the Open University Report Cards?
• Are you a graphic designer who could create posters to raise awareness on campuses?

In Closing…

The Open University Campaign recognizes that scholastic advancement occurs most readily in an environment of sharing, openness and collaboration. By providing a cross-index of leading universities, the project will add important comparative measurements to encourage increased academic openness. Our hope is that these resources will provide a platform from which openness activists can endeavor to improve the scholastic environment.

Join us by jumping into the wiki, signing up for the Open University mailing list, or emailing board (at) freeculture (dot) org with suggestions or questions!

It’s been about six months since the Free Culture 2008 Conference—time flies! Berkeley is happy to report that the conference was a great success. We got some good press, made some great connections, and generated a little money for the national organization. We were also treated to a barn-burner of a talk by Larry Lessig and finally got everyone together in one room. We’re so grateful to everyone who made the trip and can’t wait for the next event; we hope you had as much fun in the Bay Area as we do on a regular basis. Get hyphy.

What follows is an extremely tardy wrap-up post—call it a post-mortem. Many folks wondered where to find resources, so read on to see what’s available online.

Videos of the conference are now available in three ways. First, check out Free Culture @ Berkeley’s Blip channel (http://freecultureberkeley.blip.tv). Like any good video site, Blip will let you embed the videos on your blog and also download them for archival. They’re available in OGG at archive.org—search “free culture.” Alternately, you can check out FreeCulture.tv on Miro. The videos are licensed CC-BY, so go nuts—spread them all over the world, chop and screw them, burn them on DVDs and sell them. Just make sure SFFC gets a shout out. If you’d like source files, drop us a line at berkeley@freeculture.org.

Also, Alaskan FC-warrior Jacob Caggiano has some great interviews from the conference up on his Vimeo page.

Some great summary posts were written by Tim Hwang, Kevin Donovan, and others (if you’re ever in Mexico and need a Spanish translation of Lessig’s speech, look no further).

Lastly, you should also check out the fc2008 Flickr pool (just watch out: we share #hashtags with FurryCon 2008). I’m particularly fond of the lewd dancing at the afterparty—thanks again to Lone Wolf, ripley, Kid Kameleon, and Refusenik for spinning on the one’s and two’s.

By now everyone who needs reimbursement for travel should have received a check. If you haven’t, contact berkeley@freeculture.org and we’ll check the status. We apologize again for the delay in processing; the travel grants made possible by our generous sponsors Google and Mozilla required that we work with UC Berkeley’s business services, resulting in a longer-than-average reimbursement period. It’s definitely something that SFFC will be working to improve on for future events.

Speaking of future events—it’s about the right time to start plotting the next one. What should we focus on? Who should be there? What are our goals? Speak your mind in the comments!

(photocred: thanks, mecredis!)

Since the Board has been elected we’ve been meeting a lot IRL and putting our heads together to figure out the next steps of the Students for Free Culture organization. Here are the links to the minutes from our recent meetings:

• Board Meeting 04-27-2008
• Board Meeting 03-08-2008

We’ll be updating this page on the wiki: Meetings with future links to minutes so keep an eye out there if you’re interested in following SFC’s board meetings in excruciating detail.

But if you’re not interested in digging through the minutes here are a couple of things we’ll be working on over the next couple of months:

• New T-Shirts are on their way.The wonderful Patrick Moberg of BustedTees has graciously agreed to create some new art for shirts that we’ll be printing soon. He’s done a great job and the designs are almost done, so we’ll be releasing more info about that soon. We should have the t-shirts printed and ready by the end of the summer.
• The Fall 2008 Students for Free Culture Conference. Mark your calendars for October 10th-13th 2008 as we’ve scheduled Columbus Day weekend for our next big conference. We’ve chosen Berkeley, CA as the location for the summit and we’ll be raising funds to make sure we get the right people there to learn, help, and grow the organization and their chapters.
• Incorporation. Thats right, you heard it here first. SFC will soon be an official non-profit entity. This will allow us to file for 501c3 status and solicit tax free donations. Creative Commons‘ original counsel Diane Cabell has been an enormous help through this process and we should be done with it soon.

As always, please feel free to contact anyone on the board, or leave a comment here if you’d like to give feedback about our ideas.

Thanks & Good luck with finals!

Some of you may know that lately have been working on new bylaws, and in particular holding an election for the first Board under those bylaws. Before I announce the winners, I want to thank all the candidates this time around, and I also want to emphasize that presence on the Board does not diminish your ability to contribute to Students for Free Culture. Quite the opposite – local chapters and the Core Team, both of which have comparatively little bureaucracy and low barriers to entry, are were the majority of day-to-day actions of Students for Free Culture lie.

Let me also thank Benjamin Mako Hill for letting us use his Selectricity software. You can read his acknowledgments here.

Our five board members are:

• Elizabeth Stark
• Fred Benenson
• Brendan Ballou
• Christina Ducruet
• Kevin Driscoll

Read the rest of this entry »

In accordance with our new bylaws, Students for Free Culture is having an election for a new board of directors.

The candidates, in alphabetical order:

Brendan Ballou, Columbia University
Fred Benenson, New York University*
Kevin Driscoll, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Christina Ducruet, Brown University
Jan Hendrik Grahl, University of Florida
Nicholas LaRacuente, Swarthmore College
Ben Mazer, Swarthmore College
Hani Morsi, The American University in Cairo
Nelson Pavlosky, George Mason University School of Law*
Parker Phinney, Chadwick School
Karen Rustad, Claremont Colleges*
Elizabeth Stark, Harvard Law School*

*incumbent

Chapter liaisons will be casting their votes between now and February 3. You can read the candidates’ platforms and their responses to questions during one of our IRC debates.

Good luck to all the candidates!

The day after Christmas, President Bush signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), part of which contained a mandate for all research funded by the National Institutes of Health to be made publicly accessible within a year of publication in the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. This is huge news for many reasons, as SPARC’s Peter Suber notes, in particular because

The NIH is the world’s largest funder of scientific research (not counting classified military research). Its budget last year, $28 billion, was larger than the gross domestic product of 142 nations. As my colleague Ray English points out, it’s more than five times larger than all seven of the Research Councils UK combined. NIH-funded research results in 65,000 peer-reviewed articles every year or 178 every day. … Its OA mandate will not only free up an unprecedented quantity of high-quality medical research. It will also make a giant step toward cultivating new expectations –among researchers, funders, governments, and voters– that publicly-funded research should be OA.

Around the same time, the European Research Council also released its guidelines for open access, which affirm academia’s principles of sharing knowledge as widely as possible and make open access mandatory for all ERC-funded research.

Of course, there’s still work to be done. The federal government funds plenty of research through agencies other than the NIH, not to mention research not funded by the government at all. The yearlong embargo in getting the latest medical research is also less than ideal. But this is still a great step forward, one which will hopefully encourage other agencies and individual academics to release their research freely.

Students for Free Culture is proud to have participated, along with many of its member chapters and other organizations, in last February’s National Open Access Day of Action to raise awareness of access to research issues among students and pressure congresspeople to support HR 2764.

Read Students for Free Culture board member Gavin Baker’s analysis of the bill’s passage and the NIH’s subsequent policy changes.

Also, the winner of SPARC’s viral video contest, of which I was a judge, was announced at last weekend’s American Library Association Midwinter Meeting. Check it out:

One result of the new bylaws that our chapters just ratified is that our name is changing officially from “FreeCulture.org” to “Students for Free Culture”. While we finish the name change, there will be a period where our branding is inconsistent and confusing… we apologize in advance!

One problem that we’ve run into repeatedly in the past is that people have been confused about the exact nature of our organization upon hearing our name. For example, at our last US national conference, many people showed up who were not aware that we were a student organization, and many of them didn’t figure this out until the end of the conference. This name change reaffirms our focus on student activism on campuses across the country and around the world.

There has been some talk about starting an alumni organization for people who have graduated and are no longer involved with a chapter, as well as talk about starting a separate organization that is open to anyone regardless of whether they are a student or involved with a university community or not. If either of those things happen, you can rest assured that you will read about it here. Until then, we will put our efforts into educating and organizing the next generation of movers and shakers, and do that one thing to the best of our abilities.

I’m pleased to announce that the new FreeCulture.org bylaws have been approved by our beloved chapters. The bylaws require no quorum and simply that 3/4 of the votes given by registered chapters be in support of their approval. (Earlier today I misunderstood those bylaws and thought that 3/4 of the chapters must actually vote. I’d like to apologize again for that. That’s probably the first substantive misinterpretation of the bylaws, and I wonder if it will be the last.)

The votes are: 13 for, 1 against, and 4 votes I couldn’t count in the real total. This brings to a close a hard process that I dropped out of because it was so hard, and it should set the stage for more clarity in the role and activity of FreeCulture.org. Here are the votes I received in no particular order:

Chapters voting for the bylaws were: UNC Chapel Hill, Swarthmore College, Brown Free Culture, the American University in Cairo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NYU, Virginia Tech, University of Southern California, Chadwick Free Culture, Seattle University Law Free Culture, Florida State University, Northeastern Free Culture, Free Culture 5C.

Chapters voting against the bylaws were: Harvard College.

Groups not yet registered with us but sending in votes (all were for ratification) claimed to represent: Northwestern University, Monterrey, University of Chicago.

Chapters voting late (all were for ratification): Columbia University.

It’s been a pleasure receiving your votes, even as I am now embarrassed that I urged some of you to vote under the misunderstanding that a quorum of 3/4 of the chapters was necessary.

(One thing I’ve learned from this, which I secretly already knew, is that the chapter registration system is confusing. Sorry about that, too.)

UPDATE: Nelson sez: If you’re wondering why passing the bylaws was good/important, you might want to check out Gavin Baker’s comments on the bylaws.