13. Creative Commons - Lisbon 2022

hey folks this mic feels a bit funky so if I sound strange somebody start waving their hands around please um and uh I I apologize I'm definitely the thing between you and Cocktails I there no more surprises after me but um but I should I'll keep it pretty brief and I'm very grateful that creative comments has the opportunity to even talk at um a gathering like this because I recognize that we're coming at um questions around public goods and impact and value from maybe not quite as technical of a standpoint as this community but I think there's a lot of opportunity for collaboration so I appreciate it um in the event that people are not familiar with Creative Commons I feel like maybe just I should give like a really rapid background it was founded 21 years ago and 21 20 years ago this coming December marks the release of the first set of the CC licenses and so they came about during a time of um rapid change on the internet people remember that era uh Y2K era there was some interesting things happening at that time there was what what essentially the create the founders of the licenses saw is um failed sharing there was Napster bit Torrance um the uh extension of copyright um in the US had just taken place at the end of end of the 90s at the expense of the public domain so suddenly the public domain was life of the author plus 70 years so we actually had like a couple decade dry spell in the US of no new works entering the public domain and then the the lawyers that came together and founded Creative Commons they also actually challenged that um challenged the constitute constitutionality of that legislation um all the way to the US Supreme Court and unfortunately lost but um the creative Commons license Suite it builds on copyright globally and um it gives anyone authors creators could be individuals it could be groups just the power to decide what you want to do with your work so if you want to allow somebody else to reuse it or remix it or even gain commercial benefits from it there are six different licenses and they go from being very very permissive to the least permissive But ultimately it gives you the power that instead of reserving all your rights you just reserve some of your rights and you give some of them away um at the end of the day all of our licenses require one thing which is crediting the Creator and this is something where I think there's a lot of interest in emerging Technologies because of opportunities around provenance and tracking where things have been and where they were originally created and who contributed to what um which is again well I think I think it's relevant to think about the broader Creative Commons as a as a public good and sort of the context that we are talking about here um today Creative Commons is the global Norm for how content is shared for reuse it's used by government institutions journals musicians artists all over um an important thing to note it has nothing to do with ownership so it's just copyright it's not ownership of tangible Works um and that's where I think there's also a ton of room for Innovation and so the thing that we went to ask ourselves is you know how in this new world of emerging technology can we incentivize creators to share openly and sort of challenge some of these Norms around copyright Obsession which I would venture to say is a little bit like a lottery ticket system these days um there's a whole emerging movement that have adopted public domain tools that Creative Commons created in stewards um cc0 might be one that you are familiar with that is a public domain dedication so if I take a photo of my adorable bulldog and I dedicated the public domain using that uh anybody can use it for any purpose anywhere I don't have to wait to die and then another 70 years before that Bulldog photo is usable by you all so um and I mean I think that's a public good right there but um since we're here talking about public goods I just want to acknowledge that the definition of that varies greatly by context so you could be talking about physical highways you could be talking about information highways um regardless of what it is uh maintenance comes to mind as the important thing to consider and so I'm grateful that there's both an online and offline focus in the discussions that have been going on here today um but for us you know we were a product of the internet and as such we see our legal tools as a digital public good and sort of the part of the core infrastructure of the open web um and the broader Creative Commons even though you can openly license something you wrote on the back of an afin typically this will apply to digital works so I'm curious before I keep rambling on here um I think we're in a pretty sympathetic audience when thinking about public goods and how we want to support them and so on and I'm curious if there are folks here who are currently supporting financially whether through like you know your $5 a month on PayPal or whatever it is open infrastructure projects on the web so if you'll humor me with a show of hands and say just and similarly open open knowledge projects like any supporters here for like Wikipedia or internet archive or yes lovely so highly highly sympathetic audience to this um and you know you already understand how important public goods are to Civic life and democracy and prosperity and so on um for cc our biggest challenge is is making the invisible visible because there's this license layer that sits there that enables some of these things to happen and so it's it's less of a thing like like the picture of the Bulldog is like a really clear thing but the license is just this infrastructure layer that ends up being hidden um and I would imagine in this room yall are supporting a whole host of other things beyond the digital so good good humans um but it makes me think about the people who are not sympathetic to this kind of work right when we're talking about value and impact and so on so uh you probably know folks who don't necessarily appreciate it when they drive on a road that is not bumpy or um in my neighborhood it's not uncommon for somebody to like roll up to pick up their kids from school and they like open the side door and just like a styrofoam cup falls out and maybe some trash and then the kid piles in and off they go and you know that's their phone cup they're not caring about the environment they're not caring about the community and cleanliness they're maybe not even caring about the school where they're picking their kid up at and these are conversations we need to bridge with people like this if we're going to bring people along in the public goods journey and the sort of like shared like we all share in this wealth and in these Commons and and I I recognize that like it would be naive to think we can bring everybody along but we should we should really start thinking about like the challenges we have in bridging this conversation with with with with broader audiences um so for instance like measuring the impact of open content so the broader Creative Commons is incredibly difficult uh there is a number of items out there we estimated it to be about two billion at this point uh that does not speak to the value of the broader creative comments So when you say value like that's a value judgment in and of itself but you know are the photos from my family vacation equal in value to the broader public as you know documentation of war crimes I don't think so I just don't and these are all going to be like personal value judgments that take place but at the same time me saying oh I think there's you know there's we estimate there's about two billion works that are opening licensed that doesn't actually tell you what they have gone and done you know what impact those have had on people's lives how they may or may not have changed things and and it's hard to keep track is of this as well in in the web two environment and I use web two and web 3 terms sort of broadly and Loosely and trust that you sort of follow with what I'm up to there um there are some projects underway on web too that pull these things together Creative Commons actually La launched one um was a search engine for openly licensed content and has transitioned that over to Wordpress so if you are curious about it it's called open verse and it's one area where you can go and like see everything that's opening licensed but again you know we're very privacy focused we don't know what somebody's going to do with that thing are they going to go and like create a presentation for high schoolers are they going to write a book and put it on the cover like the TR tracking sort of like the use and the subsequent value that's derived from this open content is is very very challenging and we might ask our ourselves like do do we have to like if I've given something away like does it does it matter well the creators in our broader Community say I am happy to give my work away I'm happy I'm happy for others to reuse it but if there is financial benefit being gained from the work that I have carried out yes it would be nice to be rewarded even if it's just a bit if you think about it um and so so you know what we have now in terms of speaking about the value of the broader Creative Commons and applying open open licenses to your work it's it's mostly anecdotal so like photographers have come up to us and said hey you know I showed my work openly it's spread across the web people always saw my name on it they contacted me to become their professional photographer we talk to journalists who will publish their stories under an open license and they say it expands the reach by over 50% because then those are picked up for publication without any fear of you know licensing issues amongst other nonprofit newsrooms typically um and there are more and more examples like that museums that you know maybe digitize their collections but nobody goes to their site but people do go to the Wikipedia Commons for instance and there they have a 500 fold you know audience expansion because their work is is more broadly available so again these are all these all end up being typically pretty pretty anecdotal or as a result of qualitative surveys because just hard numbers on this front are very very challenging but I do think emerging technology is really interesting for this this conundrum of measuring impact um and I think there's also a whole movement of creators adopting the public domain Dedication that are relying on this I'll put a little asterisk there and say like I'm not quite sure that uh just being able to point to provenance is always going to be the way to ensure that the original Creator gets the credit that they deserve because I think history has shown us that that is not always the case so even if you can say I was the first with this somebody else maybe came along and did it better and you gave it away so there's a balance there and um there there may be other there may be other tools or or Norms that we should develop that would be more useful for those communities um right now I'd say a lot of the attention is focused on nfts I mean makes sense like there's a strong digital remix culture happening there but like beyond that in terms of public goods this is open access week actually and there's if you if you search that hashtag on Twitter or anywhere on the web like there's tons of talks going on in relation to open access and that's an example of Another Broken business model where if you want to publish in an Open Access Journal often you the author or submitter have to pay and uh that's because these these Publications are going to get you coming or going either you're going to have to pay to read it or you're going to have to pay to publish it and often um that discriminates even further against people in lower resource institutions or for marginalized communities who maybe don't have access to the funds to be able to openly license and then share their research but if it goes behind a paywall then those same institutions may not have access to those journals and so you get into this like self-perpetuating hellacious cycle of lack of access um when really we would all benefit from having more information so there are a few models on web to that record sort of the sum of all parts and this is where I think it gets interesting to think about sort of Provence and value creation and and and sort of proportional rewards for folks but like imagine if you had a GitHub type system but for for Content so like let's say you wrote a math textbook and there it was and then I came along and I added a chapter and then somebody else came along and they took half of it and they translated it into another language um and all of this then ends up subsequently getting used one way or another and ideally ideally not everything is free in this glorious future World um and your efforts on the textbook and mine on the additional chapter and the translators efforts they all get rewarded or at least acknowledged in some way like it's track that we did this and if there is value to be had from this subsequently somehow that that is shared amongst us so what this comes down at least to me when I think about this is less about licenses and it's less about standards and it's more about norms so CC licenses for open knowledge for creativity like it's the norm if you're going to share your work you're going to use the CC license it's not actually even a formal technical standard per se but we are very Pro standards like we don't want like massive splintering and all these different systems and people are confused and they don't know how they can use things differently I think it would be very messy if we had 30 odd you know open content licenses out there we're we're very lucky that we have we have sort of settled on a global standard but more than anything it's it's it's it's build this Norm around this is how you share content and so um it allows you to end up without silos and as long as you can ensure compatibility between these systems you know interoperability then we should be fine and we ask ourselves like how can we come together and shape a culture that cares about better sharing and Open Access and so on and does it as a nor Norm because I think that um when it comes to technology I think if we could code our way into getting good behavior from people we'd probably already be there I can tell you that the sticker charts that I have tried to use and failed repeatedly my tiny humans tell me that game theory has its limits um and so so it's more about like how do we just like engender this good behavior amongst all of us recognizing that there there's always going to be outliers there's always going to be the person that just doesn't care the styrofoam is now in the sewer s sew sewage drain so which is very unfortunate um but I really think that you know when we Define public goods for ourselves you know we go beyond infrastructure or software or Hardware or physical world we need to just remember that like we have a we have a large shared responsibility and a huge privilege to to take care of these Global Commons um and and we need to protect them as well so we we are not existing in an apolitical environment on this front unfortunately and there are persistent threats to access to knowledge every day which I'm sure many of you are aware of um so very excited for Technical Innovations um and and hoping that that they can help us a lot especially when it comes to Discovery and decentralization like the work that filecoin is doing and uh reimagining storage is excellent and and their focus on cultural heritage institutions um I think is critical there are other um web3 protocols out there like R we integrated metadata related to licensing so when you go to put something on the Perma web you can indicate how it can or cannot be reused um and when we look back at our recorded history our Horizon in the future should be you know we're not we're not looking for like the technical solution we're looking for like the next way to make this better and the next way to make it more accessible and more Equitable and more just in our sharing but we're not going to we're not going to reach a final end point I think hovercrafts will probably happen before we know it um so the challenges that we're facing right now to just get I would say from like our current walled Gardens and broken business models on web to from the perspective of the Global Commons and helping people move into the these emerging Technologies are obviously usability this is not news to anybody here but making it user friendly and accessible to people we want to make sure that things are compatible like I personally fear for another fragmented Commons in in in web 3 I think it would be wonderful if we could find a way that folks could agree on like this is how you're going to find things these are how the systems are going to talk to each other um and I think I think there's there's excellent opportunity there um also credibility like much like I say like you know how do we bring people along who don't currently care like how do we get people to care who currently question whether this is actually the future um and that's that's something we can chat chat about over Cocktails so um keeping in mind that I promise to keep this brief and I have not uh I'm wondering about what to do next and I'd say we need to talk more about these things uh we also need to embrace flexibility because you know when you're trying out new systems and so you need to be okay with them like failing a little bit and um maybe this one working a bit with the other um but maybe not so well to figure out that this is actually where we want to land I don't know I was I was an alter vista baby I loved Babel Fish but you know we have Google translate today and you know like it's probably okay that I'm not selling B fish um if that's how it's pronounced um but yes I would just encourage us also to remember that tools and Technology it's just one part of this equation and cultural and social norms are really the critical component for us to sort of bring this all together so you know let's let's figure out ways that we can fund these broader Commons together the multiple definitions of the commons because you know to US public interest values really matter um currently those are pretty overwhelmed by proprietary commercial interest and uh we have users that take digital public infrastructure and you know free and open knowledge for granted and so at the end of the day we're still dealing with people and so a community leading by example like Ys hosting important conversations like these I think is is the critical First Step so thank you very much let's have some cocktails unless you have questions talk about this stuff all day clearly but thank you very [Applause] much yes sir gosh now I hope I have answers um so we just there was just a presentation on hypers Sears and yes the way to retroactively fund contributions and you're just talking about how how to track uh contributions to a large knowledge commment it's so wild right so how do you see the hypers seer's sort of retrospective funding model working to manage a more creative Enterprise rather than a specifically impact driven one so that's a really good question and in the entire 45 minutes that I've had to digest hypers certs I've got a very uh educated response no well so what I thought was fascinating about that talk too was the acknowledgement too that sometimes you do just have to go with blind Grant like if you want to get something off the ground um and it got me thinking about is is there a way where you can have sort of like a minimum so a thing can function so you trust that a thing can function um and then hypers SWS can subsequently come when the thing that you have supported to function is is creating greater value or a larger reward so for instance um you know here's Alice and Bob and they're writing this math textbook together and you're like all right I just need to give you you know a basic income so you can work on this book for three months or whatever but maybe subsequent to that I was talk about this wonderful world where we all collaborate then on this textbook and then goes places and does good things and teaches a bunch of people math that might be an example um of where I would say like a retroactive value you'd be like oh this actually went on and had a huge impact it changed how people learned suddenly third graders are doing calculus I don't know it's all magic so um I think I think there's a lot of opportunity there and truly it was like fascinating listening to people go through these ideas novel ideas today um and I am really excited for the cocktail hour because there's people I want to on a chat too it's a good question is there time for one more sure yeah uh since we're talking about content I got to ask uh where do you feel that the field of content is going with quote unquote AI generated content and you know turning all these masses of public availability available data a lot of it which is publicly available because it was published on on CC licenses and now it's all getting mashed up and generated you know into you know Frankenstein art and Frankenstein music where where is it going and how do you how do you actually and a lot of it can be claimed to be original as well right so and a lot of it is now in encoded in open source algorithms that can be run by anyone and they they they will generate that their their new art that's based on on that original stuff and where does it go so this is this is a super challenging uh situation or space we find ourselves in um Creative Commons is actually hosting a couple of webinars on this in the beginning of November because it's such a challenging uh ecosystem so we sort of think about we think about it from an inputs and outputs perspective separately so on the inputs front to your point like a lot of people have used or a lot of the creat creers of these data sets have said oh it's fine like it's CC licensed so like that's that's going to be a real safe way to use this um the the actuality is there's a lot more than just openly licensed content being used to train these data sets and depending on like the region where it's happening like in the US I believe it's like under fair use you can do so like text and data mining is is you know permitted um but I think I think it the flag has been raised on openly licensed content being used because they someone is intentionally giving giving their work for like a a greater cause and now suddenly it's being like massively commercialized um and we still the outputs of some of these systems and I'm specifically thinking about like the image ones right now but like I just saw an article about a new um a new music one as well uh is that um it's it's potentially disruptive for the Creator industry which is which is also really challenging obviously for us as creative comments um and so we don't currently think that if if I sit here and I go to one of these systems and I punch in you know cute bulldog that that's not authorship like there's not human creativity that's just that's just a prompt and so whatever that spits out however scary that may look that should be in the public domain that's our current view on this um and I say current because like these Technologies are evolving and the the way people are are handling inputs and outputs is evolving um I definitely I would definitely say come come to our webinars as we dig more into these um but I think just like there is a challenge there is also opportunity here I don't know about the computing power that would go into this but I have started to read early reports of systems where they're going to give value back to the creators that help train the model for instance so there might be like incentivization like if you are a musician to just go out there and put a whole bunch of riffs into this model and you know see see what spits out out because you know sudden you're a big contributor there um not entirely related to this but because of some of the copyright cases that have been brought um on the music front specifically there's a project out there called all the music I don't know if you've heard of it but they yeah like yeah tell us something we don't know anyway it's fascinating if you haven't heard of it check it out but it's it's a great way to show that like all creativity is really built on other creativity knowledge is built on knowledge and so this like sort of like measure of human authorship um and like the individual pulling something together doesn't go down to like you know these three words in a sentence or these three chords together um definitely didn't answer your question properly but it's it's complicated we can talk more over cocktails any other questions before yall are free and clear on this beautiful Wednesday thank you very much