Survey: Most Italian Internet Users Think Ignoring Copyright Harms Publishers, But Not Society As A Whole

One of the heartening recent developments in the world of digital copyright is that we have moved on from manifestly biased surveys about the evils of piracy and how the solution to everything is harsher punishment for infringement and longer copyright terms, to independent analyses that seek to understand rather than judge and lecture. There's also been a ... [continue]

An article by Glyn Moody for Techdirt.com. Read the article here.

Copyright 2.0: Interests and Rules

source of the pic

Let us think for a moment about the set of rules which would appear to be appropriate to meet the demands of creators operating along the short route.

1. The Interests.

In the market based model it was essential for creators and even more so for businesses to control and restrict access to works, as the monopoly granted by expansive exclusive rights enabled them to charge whatever price the market would bear.
However, this would not appear to be the goal of creators currently operating along the short route. The great majority of them, be it 9 out of 10 or 95 out of 100, do not make a living out of “sales” of “copies” of their works; they earn their livelihood in another activity or business and devote a portion – often a  very large portion – of their spare time to creating, in a way which may give them a bit of extra income, professional credit and recognition which may have positive spill - over effects in their main line or just fun (or a combination of the three).
Even when the creators operating along the short route are professionally engaged in the creation of works, which is usually not the case, their business model usually is based on income flows different from the sale of copies as such. It would appear that there is a shift whereby even singers and songwriters increasingly rely on performances, tours, endorsements, merchandising and their likes rather than sales of albums and tracks.
This is the business model which the Grateful Dead pioneered, possibly taking a clue from open source software and IBM, and is currently expanding to an increasing number of business. So that the eminent economist Paul Krugmann a few years ago made the case that the demise of reliance on income based on “hard” copies was being generalized and, making his case, quipped that in the long run we will all be the Grateful Dead.
What is important for creators engaged along the short route is, it would appear, that their work can be disseminated as widely as possible, on two conditions: first, that the work is correctly attributed to them, and second, that
the creators may, if they so choose, reserve the right to prevent third parties
to make a commercial profit out of their work unless this is agreed to by the creator herself.

2. The Rules.

If this is so, then what may currently be needed is a new kind of copyright, which we may, if you wish, label Copyright 2.0. I submit that the new system would have four basic features. Old copyright, or Copyright 1.0, would still be available; but it would have to be claimed for by the creator at the onset, e.g. by inserting the old copyright notice, ©, as the US did in the past, before accessing the Berne Convention.

If no notice was given, Copyright 2.0 would apply; and this would give creators just one right, the right to attribution.
The notice could also be added after creation, but then it would only have the effect of giving exclusivity against specified non authorized uses (in particular:
subsequent commercial uses).
The Copyright 1.0 protection given by the original notice could be withdrawn, and may be it should be deemed withdrawn after a specified period of time (e.g. the 14 years of the original copyright protection), unless an extension period (of another 14 years) is specifically requested.
What is the purpose of the exercise I just sketched out? Well, I confess that, even a couple of years after airing this proposal, I am not so totally sure after all that the four features I just described are really what is appropriate for the needs of our societies and their creators.
The point I am making, however, is that thinking along these lines at least allows us to conceptualize how the different sets of rules correspond to the specific needs of the creators who create works along the long and short route. We assumed that Copyright 1.0 should survive; and we may anticipate that this is likely to be resorted to by creators (and businesses) choosing to operate along the long route. Indeed, the ultimate goal is not to displace old copyright, which seems to be alive and well in many situations, but to add to the menu a second possibility, Copyright 2.0, which should be better tailored to the characters of production and distribution of works prevailing in the current digital environment.
This line of reasoning might also help us in asking the next question. Which set of rules would then operate in each given situation? Well, in some way I already replied to this question: creators should opt-in for Copyright 1.0 at the time of the original release of their work; otherwise the new and more flexible Copyright 2.0 would operate as a default set of provisions.
This is why in the past I characterized this approach as “Lessig by default” or, in a less personalized way, “Creative Commons by default”. The idea behind the approach is that the very successful uptake of Creative Commons licenses and other copyleft licenses by creators operating along the short route shows that out there, in the digital prairies and wilderness, there is a very large number indeed of crea tors who prefer to reserve only some rights rather than all rights; and that the time has come for legal systems to recognize this fact of life by creating a regime in which downstream freedom is the rule and a system under which creators may have the option to reserve some rights or, if they like, all the old Copyright 1.0 rights, only if they wish and say so, giving appropriate notice.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

This is an excerpt of "Consume and Share: Making Copyright Fit for the Digital Agenda" by Prof. Marco Ricolfi (2011); under a CC by license.
See the entire paper (with all the footnotes and references) here.

ACTA Threatens Your Freedom

ACTA was written secretly by governments together with business; in effect, a conspiracy to restrict the people for business' sake. There were leaks, and public condemnation removed some proposed nasty provisions, but plenty more remain.
The proponents of ACTA use the term "intellectual property", which is meant to discourage clear thinking. That term refers to ten or more unrelated laws, which at the practical level have nothing in common. The term focuses on an irrelevant abstract similarity, and distracts attention from the real issues raised by one law or another.
A few of those laws have one point in common: megacorps want to change them to gain more power over future competition or the public, and ACTA is their latest try. ACTA has different rules for each law. The term "intellectual property" misrepresents the facts about ACTA.
ACTA's main effect in Europe would be on copyright law. ACTA gives copyright priority over human rights. It gives priority to copyright holders over the users of copyrighted works.
When the copyright lobby demands increased power to stop sharing, it bases the argument on exaggerated, unlikely claims of what they "lose" when people share. ACTA legitimizes these absurd claims, even in court, so you could be forced to pay hundreds of thousands of euros of imaginary "damages" for a little bit of file-sharing.
ACTA says governments can ask ISPs for "cooperation", which can include surveillance, filtering, deletion of pages, even punishment of users without a fair trial. Meanwhile, ISPs, hosting sites and search engines could be prosecuted if they do not censor.
Many aspects of ACTA are vague. For instance, it says governments must attack “means of widespread distribution for infringing purposes”. Will this ban blogging platforms? Bittorrent? File locker sites? Who knows?
Some aspects of ACTA are dishonest -- blackwhiting, to use Orwell's term (see 1984). For instance, it imposes criminal punishment on noncommercial copying by tying it to the word "commercial". Specifically, it says copying is "commercial scale" if it provides "direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage". What counts as "indirect economic advantage"? Arguably the benefit of not buying a second copy of something is enough to make noncommercial copying a crime.
Given ill will shown when governments negotiated ACTA, we must judge it by the worst possible interpretation. ACTA can be interpreted to make it a crime to share copies with your friends. Will the copyright lobby go to court and argue for this interpretation? Surely. Will it win? Don't give it the chance!
Some politicians say that ACTA is not something to fear, but they can't know what ACTA will morph into. One of the disasters of ACTA is that it can be altered later by agreement among the countries involved. In effect, these governments will together have the power to bypass their parliaments. To ratify ACTA is to give carte blanche to a rigged process.
The Internet needs some rules, but who should decide them? Traffic rules for cars should be decided democratically by the people, not written secretly by railroads. The Internet rules should be decided democratically by the people, with human rights as the first priority, and the people must reserve the right to relax rules if they prove too strict. That means, the rules must not come from ACTA! What should these rules be?
Copyright companies have too much power already; they have made copyright too strict. They are not satisfied and seek more power through ACTA, but that would be a change in the wrong direction. Their laws cause problems for us, and it is our turn now to be considered. Our governments must reduce copyright power: shorten copyright to 10 years, legalize noncommercial redistribution of exact copies (sharing), ban Digital Restrictions Management (the malicious features that turn digital devices into handcuffs), and ban EULAs on published digital works. Then we could consider small concessions to the copyright companies.
_________________________________

Copyright 2012 Richard Stallman -- Released under the CC-BY-ND 3.0 license;
first published in Poland, by Tygodnik Powszechny (taken from http://stallman.org/articles/acta-freedom.html)

Wired removed the CC license from the Italian website. Why?

Wired is one of my favourite magazines. I've been a subscriber since it arrived in Italy (actually very late, only in 2009).
The leadership of the Italian magazine since the beginning favored an innovative approach to the copyright issues. In 2010 Riccardo Luna (managing director for the first two years) also published a press release expressly in favor of this choice.
The outcome was that the print edition still was published under an "all rights reserved" copyright, but the website (with the entire blog section) went under a Creative Commons license ("some rights reserved").
In recent weeks, a substantial restyling of the website was completed and suddenly the link to the Creative Commons license has disappeared.
By clicking on the "terms of use" page, we discover that it is only a marginal reference to the CC, referred only to the contents uploaded by users (basically only the comments to the articles). Users who upload content, therefore, must agree to release them with a BY-ND 2.5 license (not clear why a 2.5 version and not a 4.0).
That is not all. In fact, within the terms of use appears a statement that seems to be in conflict with the guidelines on the use of CC licenses.
Come on, Wired! Why are you doing so? You have always been a good example (I remember your wonderful open content music CD). But now...
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Read more on the Italian (and extended) version of the post

If you want to fix EU copyright, this is the right time

If you want to fix the EU copyright system, this is the right time. In fact, we have just a few days to complete the consultation about the copyright reform that was launched and promoted by the EU Commission and its "iron lady" Neelie Kroes. The definitive deadline is February 5. [EXTENDED TILL MARCH 5]
N. Kroes in an official press release pointed out the importance of this initiative:

An effective, modern copyright system could play a significant role ensuring a vibrant single market for online content in Europe: not to mention supporting education, science and our economy. It also needs to stimulate innovation, and promote the production of new creative content.
I know there are many different views out there about copyright modernisation, and I hope we will hear from many different voices in our consultation.

The entire questionnaire includes 80 issues, but you do not have to fill out everything and can skip questions if you want to.
Here you can also find an online guide that make it much easier and faster.
If you are a EU citizen, don't miss this opportunity.

You may also be interested in:

• A survey about copyright in the digital age 
• Copyright and Open Access 2014
• (for Italian readers) Finalmente c’è fermento sopra il diritto d’autore

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UPDATING (20 Jan 2014, h. 16:44): This post has been retweet just by Neelie Kroes. I feel honoured.

What is Copyleft?

Copyleft is a general method for making a program (or other work) free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well.
The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software. They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away.
In the GNU project, our aim is to give all users the freedom to redistribute and change GNU software. If middlemen could strip off the freedom, we might have many users, but those users would not have freedom. So instead of putting GNU software in the public domain, we “copyleft” it. Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom.
Copyleft also provides an incentive for other programmers to add to free software. Important free programs such as the GNU C++ compiler exist only because of this.
Copyleft also helps programmers who want to contribute improvements to free software get permission to do so. These programmers often work for companies or universities that would do almost anything to get more money. A programmer may want to contribute her changes to the community, but her employer may want to turn the changes into a proprietary software product.
When we explain to the employer that it is illegal to distribute the improved version except as free software, the employer usually decides to release it as free software rather than throw it away.
To copyleft a program, we first state that it is copyrighted; then we add distribution terms, which are a legal instrument that gives everyone the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the program's code, or any program derived from it, but only if the distribution terms are unchanged. Thus, the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable.
Proprietary software developers use copyright to take away the users' freedom; we use copyright to guarantee their freedom. That's why we reverse the name, changing “copyright” into “copyleft.”
Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so would make copyleft impossible. The “left” in “copyleft” is not a reference to the verb “to leave”—only to the direction which is the inverse of “right”.
Copyleft is a general concept, and you can't use a general concept directly; you can only use a specific implementation of the concept. In the GNU Project, the specific distribution terms that we use for most software are contained in the GNU General Public License (available in HTML, text, and Texinfo format). The GNU General Public License is often called the GNU GPL for short. There is also a Frequently Asked Questions page about the GNU GPL. You can also read about why the FSF gets copyright assignments from contributors.
An alternate form of copyleft, the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) (available in HTML, text, and Texinfo format), is designed for programs that are likely to be used on servers. It ensures that modified versions used to implement services available to the public are released as source code to the public.
A compromise form of copyleft, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) (available in HTML, text, and Texinfo format), applies to a few (but not all) GNU libraries. To learn more about properly using the LGPL, please read the article Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library.
The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) (available in HTML, text and Texinfo) is a form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or other document to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially or noncommercially.
The appropriate license is included in many manuals and in each GNU source code distribution.
All these licenses are designed so that you can easily apply them to your own works, assuming you are the copyright holder. You don't have to modify the license to do this, just include a copy of the license in the work, and add notices in the source files that refer properly to the license.
Using the same distribution terms for many different programs makes it easy to copy code between various different programs. When they all have the same distribution terms, there is no problem. The Lesser GPL, version 2, includes a provision that lets you alter the distribution terms to the ordinary GPL, so that you can copy code into another program covered by the GPL. Version 3 of the Lesser GPL is built as an exception added to GPL version 3, making the compatibility automatic.
If you would like to copyleft your program with the GNU GPL or the GNU LGPL, please see the license instructions page for advice. Please note that you must use the entire text of the license you choose. Each is an integral whole, and partial copies are not permitted.
If you would like to copyleft your manual with the GNU FDL, please see the instructions at the end of the FDL text, and the GFDL instructions page. Again, partial copies are not permitted.
It is a legal mistake to use a backwards C in a circle instead of a copyright symbol. Copyleft is based legally on copyright, so the work should have a copyright notice. A copyright notice requires either the copyright symbol (a C in a circle) or the word “Copyright”.
A backwards C in a circle has no special legal significance, so it doesn't make a copyright notice. It may be amusing in book covers, posters, and such, but be careful how you represent it in a web page!
__________________________

Original source: www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.en.html
Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
 

Definition of Free Cultural Works

Stable version This is the stable version 1.1 of the definition (take from http://freedomdefined.org/Definition). The version number will be updated as the definition develops. The editable version of the definition can be found at Definition/Unstable. See authoring process for more information, and see translations if you want to contribute a version in another language.

version 1.0

Summary

This document defines "Free Cultural Works" as works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose. It also describes certain permissible restrictions that respect or protect these essential freedoms. The definition distinguishes between free works, and free licenses which can be used to legally protect the status of a free work. The definition itself is not a license; it is a tool to determine whether a work or license should be considered "free."

Preamble

Social and technological advances make it possible for a growing part of humanity to access, create, modify, publish and distribute various kinds of works - artworks, scientific and educational materials, software, articles - in short: anything that can be represented in digital form. Many communities have formed to exercise those new possibilities and create a wealth of collectively re-usable works.
Most authors, whatever their field of activity, whatever their amateur or professional status, have a genuine interest in favoring an ecosystem where works can be spread, re-used and derived in creative ways. The easier it is to re-use and derive works, the richer our cultures become.
To ensure the graceful functioning of this ecosystem, works of authorship should be free, and by freedom we mean:

• the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
• the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
• the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
• the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

If authors do not take action, their works are covered by existing copyright laws, which severely limit what others can and cannot do. Authors can make their works free by choosing among a number of legal documents known as licenses. For an author, choosing to put their work under a free license does not mean that they lose all their rights, but it gives to anyone the freedoms listed above.
It is important that any work that claims to be free provides, practically and without any risk, the aforementioned freedoms. This is why we hereafter give a precise definition of freedom for licenses and for works of authorship.

Identifying Free Cultural Works

This is the Definition of Free Cultural Works, and when describing your work, we encourage you to make reference to this definition, as in, "This is a freely licensed work, as explained in the Definition of Free Cultural Works." If you do not like the term "Free Cultural Work," you can use the generic term "Free Content," or refer instead to one of the existing movements that express similar freedoms in more specific contexts. We also encourage you to use the Free Cultural Works logos and buttons, which are in the public domain.
Please be advised that such identification does not actually confer the rights described in this definition; for your work to be truly free, it must use one of the Free Culture Licenses or be in the public domain.
We discourage you to use other terms to identify Free Cultural Works which do not convey a clear definition of freedom, such as "Open Content" and "Open Access." These terms are often used to refer to content which is available under "less restrictive" terms than those of existing copyright laws, or even for works that are just "available on the Web".

Defining Free Culture Licenses

Licenses are legal instruments through which the owner of certain legal rights may transfer these rights to third parties. Free Culture Licenses do not take any rights away -- they are always optional to accept, and if accepted, they grant freedoms which copyright law alone does not provide. When accepted, they never limit or reduce existing exemptions in copyright laws.

Essential freedoms

In order to be recognized as "free" under this definition, a license must grant the following freedoms without limitation:

• The freedom to use and perform the work: The licensee must be allowed to make any use, private or public, of the work. For kinds of works where it is relevant, this freedom should include all derived uses ("related rights") such as performing or interpreting the work. There must be no exception regarding, for example, political or religious considerations.
• The freedom to study the work and apply the information: The licensee must be allowed to examine the work and to use the knowledge gained from the work in any way. The license may not, for example, restrict "reverse engineering".
• The freedom to redistribute copies: Copies may be sold, swapped or given away for free, as part of a larger work, a collection, or independently. There must be no limit on the amount of information that can be copied. There must also not be any limit on who can copy the information or on where the information can be copied.
• The freedom to distribute derivative works: In order to give everyone the ability to improve upon a work, the license must not limit the freedom to distribute a modified version (or, for physical works, a work somehow derived from the original), regardless of the intent and purpose of such modifications. However, some restrictions may be applied to protect these essential freedoms or the attribution of authors (see below).

Permissible restrictions

Not all restrictions on the use or distribution of works impede essential freedoms. In particular, requirements for attribution, for symmetric collaboration (i.e., "copyleft"), and for the protection of essential freedom are considered permissible restrictions.

Defining Free Cultural Works

In order to be considered free, a work must be covered by a Free Culture License, or its legal status must provide the same essential freedoms enumerated above. It is not, however, a sufficient condition. Indeed, a specific work may be non-free in other ways that restrict the essential freedoms. These are the additional conditions in order for a work to be considered free:

• Availability of source data: Where a final work has been obtained through the compilation or processing of a source file or multiple source files, all underlying source data should be available alongside the work itself under the same conditions. This can be the score of a musical composition, the models used in a 3D scene, the data of a scientific publication, the source code of a computer application, or any other such information.
• Use of a free format: For digital files, the format in which the work is made available should not be protected by patents, unless a world-wide, unlimited and irrevocable royalty-free grant is given to make use of the patented technology. While non-free formats may sometimes be used for practical reasons, a free format copy must be available for the work to be considered free.
• No technical restrictions: The work must be available in a form where no technical measures are used to limit the freedoms enumerated above.
• No other restrictions or limitations: The work itself must not be covered by legal restrictions (patents, contracts, etc.) or limitations (such as privacy rights) which would impede the freedoms enumerated above. A work may make use of existing legal exemptions to copyright (in order to cite copyrighted works), though only the portions of it which are unambiguously free constitute a free work.

In other words, whenever the user of a work cannot legally or practically exercise his or her basic freedoms, the work cannot be considered and should not be called "free."

Further reading

• See Licenses for discussion of individual licenses, and whether they meet this definition or not.
• See History for acknowledgments and background on this definition.
• See the FAQ for some questions and answers.
• See Portal:Index for topic-specific pages about free cultural works.
  

Versioning

New versions of this definition shall be released as soon as a consensus (achieved directly or through a vote, as per the authoring process) has developed around suggested changes. Numbering shall be 0.x for initial draft releases, 1.x, 2.x .. for major releases, x.1, x.2 .. for minor releases. A minor release is made when the text is modified in ways which do not have an impact on the scope of existing or hypothetical licenses covered by this definition.

A survey about copyright in the digital age

a brief introduction

Maybe you all need a recap of the previous episodes.

My name is Simone Aliprandi and I am an Italian independent researcher working in the intellectual property field. On February 1, 2011 I announced on the web (via several mailing-lists and blog posts) the opening of a survey about some sociological issues related to copyright in the digital age. It was a pretty long online questionnaire that I realized as a part of my PhD research. Since that initial announcement I have always “solemnly” promised that all the results would be released with an “open approach”. Now my PhD has closed, my thesis has been defended (successfully), and the data has been adequately processed and commented; so it is the moment to publish them, using open content licenses, both on the web and in open access journals.

a pilot research

Please consider that this research study (as it is) does not claim to be anything hard and incontrovertible. I did all the best I could did within a PhD program and with the limited resources concerning a PhD project, but I am aware that it has some methodological limitations. More than anything else, I wish you could appreciate this project as a “pilot research” with the main purpose to explore how copyright can be analyzed from a sociological point of view. I really hope that in the future I will have the opportunity to pose the survey again (or maybe a similar/new one), thus to collect much more information and make much more observations on it. That is why all your comments and suggestions will be very precious; you can leave them writing in the provided field under each article of the website or sending me a private message. The project is really “open”, and not only on the license side.

mission and objectives of the research

This research study aims at providing a sociological impartial approach to an analysis of intellectual property issues that takes into direct account the viewpoints of "average citizens", as opposed only to those of stakeholders and experts. As a matter of fact, very few studies address such framework so far. In fact, most of them have been produced by major entertainment or software companies in order to monitor and anticipate market trends, thus considering common individuals as consumers and potential buyers, instead of users in more general terms. This strategy gives way to a distorted perception of collected data, or at least provides a very limited perspective on their outcome and analysis.
Therefore, this study focuses on a different perspective and will address three broader research fields:

• most common behaviors of Internet users when they get, distribute, or otherwise deal with online content under copyright;
• the average perception of Internet users about copyright itself, that is, whether they see it as a primary or minor problem, a useful tool or a useless burden, etc.;
• the level of awareness of Internet users about mechanisms and principles currently governing copyright law, in order to expose their actual level of knowledge on related issues.

learn more

A web-presentation of the results of the survey is available at http://copyrightsurvey.blogspot.com/.
There you can also find several articles related to the project and the complete report with more than 500 charts extracted from the dataset.

Since all the material is provided for free under open content licenses, the intellectual acknowledgement of my authorship is the only compensation that I require. So help me in sharing correctly my work. Remember also to respect and correctly link the CC license applied to the work.
This web-presentation is an offspurt of my PhD thesis “Copyright in the digital age. An empirical research about behaviours, social perceptions and level of awareness between internet users", defended on January 2012 within the PhD program in Information Society at Bicocca University of Milan.

Suggestions for National Constitutions

Aside from the specific articles below, I think that laws should require approval by a vote of the legislature and a direct vote of the people. The use of direct democracy as a part of the process seems to have protected the people well in Switzerland and Iceland.

 

 

Human rights

Human rights apply to all physical persons under the state's power or jurisdiction. They do not apply to legal creations such as corporations, which have whatever rights are granted to them by legislation.

 

Sovereignty

No treaty or international agreement may infringe the state's power to regulate the kinds of goods and services that may be offered for sale under its jurisdiction, or the allowable ways of producing them (regardless of where production is done); or to make such regulations consistent with human rights as are needed to protect society's public health, the country's financial health, its general standard of living, the environment, sustainability of economic activity, workers' rights, or human rights.
The state's exercise of the above power does not incur compensation to any party except as required by the state's own legislation.

 

Democracy

Aside from individuals spending small amounts, private spending to influence elections may be limited by legislation and the spenders may be required by legislation to identify themselves.

 

Closing the Revolving Door

The participation of former state officials in commercial activities that aim at influencing government, or were regulated by them in their official capacity, may be limited by legislation for up to 10 years.

 

Privatization

No state activity may be privatized unless the resulting private entity will sell its products or services in a competitive market that consisting mostly of private buyers.
If a former state activity was previously privatized in a way that contradicts this rule, the state can renationalize it paying, as compensation, the amount that the state received for it when it was privatized, minus the profit gained during the privatized entity's existence by that entity, and through that entity by related entities.

 

Right of reverse engineering

The right of an individual to study the functioning of any technological product that she owns or rents, and to publish what she learns about it, shall not be limited by any law, or by any contract agreed without individual negotiation.

 

Copyright and patent power can be decreased, not just increased

Copyrights and patents are temporary privileges created as artificial incentives, meant to achieve a balance between two public goals: the publication of new works and ideas, and the freedom to use existing published works and known ideas.
The state may through legislation increase or decrease the extent of existing copyright and patent privileges, or future ones. Decreasing a privilege does not entitle the holders of the privilege to compensation.

 

Freedom from computerized surveillance

The right of privacy from technological surveillance shall not be infringed without justification. Therefore, no party, whether public or private, may use information technology to systematically and automatically store beyond a short time any information about individuals or their activities, except when inherently necessary for dealings entered into by those individuals, for determining the taxes they owe, for enforcing regulations on their business activities, or pursuant to a court order detailing the persons to be surveilled and the information to be stored.

 

Freedom of recording

Persons' rights to openly carry out occasional photography and/or recording in places open at that time to the public, and to publish the results, shall not be infringed.

 

Agricultural Freedom

Farmers' rights to save, propagate, breed, and sell the food plants or animals that they have lawfully grown shall not be infringed.

 

Prohibition of general-purpose identity documents

Because general-purpose identity documents promote general surveillance, the state shall not issue credentials to individuals except for a specific limited purpose, and no such credential shall be checked for any purpose other than the one for which it was issued except pursuant to due process of law.
Published in 2013 in the public domain by Richard Stallman.
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Version of 7 July 2013.
Published in 2013 in the public domain by Richard Stallman (take from http://stallman.org/articles/constitution-suggestions.html)

Copyright Week: Read-only access is not enough

Today is the third day of Copyright Week, and today, we’re focusing on open access. As EFF put it in the Copyright Week principles:

The results of publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public online, to be fully used by anyone, anywhere, anytime.

This is a principle that Creative Commons has always upheld. It’s crucial that the public has free online access to the research it pays for. It’s important, too, not to forget the second part of the principle: “…to be fully used by anyone.” In CC’s opinion, simply giving the public access isn’t enough. It’s impossible to enable full use without communicating the legal rights available to downstream users of those works. The definition in the seminal Budapest Open Access Initiative makes this point clear:

By “open access” … we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

The open license attached to open access publications has enabled innovations that would have been impossible without it. For example, Daniel Mietchen (co-winner of the Accelerating Science Award Program), developed a software tool to crawl and export multimedia files from openly licensed science articles in PubMed Central. The tool has uploaded over 13,000 files to Wikimedia Commons, where they’ve been subsequently used in more than 135 English Wikipedia articles.
In some ways, 2013 was a great year for open access. In the United States, the White House issued a groundbreaking directive requiring that most publicly funded research be made available to the public, and Congress introduced the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), a bill that would require those federal agencies with yearly external research budgets exceeding $100 million to provide the public with online access to research articles stemming from such funding within 6 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. And several states are considering public access policies of their own. In Europe, Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission for the Digital Agenda, helped launch a pilot to open up publicly funded research data.
But the march toward open access is long and slow. Open licensing requirements for publicly funded research should really go hand in hand with those for other publicly funded materials, including educational resources and cultural works. Creative Commons recently formed the Open Policy Network and the Institute for Open Leadership to equip advocates for open policy across disciplines.
A few months ago, we published these infographics to help make the economic case for open access to publicly funded research:

The point is obvious: the fewer restrictions are put on the public’s use of materials, the more swiftly scientific progress, the more efficiently those research grants can achieve their purpose of advancing knowledge.
Related

• Public access to publicly funded materials: What could be
• The past year in open access
• Copyright and Open Access 2014  

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An article by Elliot Harmon (January 15th, 2014) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (taken from http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/41744)

Copyright and Open Access 2014

This week has been proclaimed Copyright week by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and today, Wednesday Jan 15, is Open Access Day 2014. It is almost exactly 1 year ago that Aaron Swartz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz) died in the middle of his struggle for open knowledge and it would be a good thing to make this week and in particular Open Access Day, a recurring event in his honor.
The open access movement has gained momentum in the past year and too much has happened to list every thing. Instead lets focus on a few key events and developments.
In 2013 the White House has issued a directive stating that all publicly funded research should be made publicly available in repositories. The reaction of the scientific publishers has been to allow this, but under the condition that there is an embargo time of 6 months or 1 year. Many have thought that this would be a necessary transition measure, but recently they have been proven very wrong in this assumption because a powerful lobby of publishers is now even demanding for embargo times of up to 3 years!
In our opinion any embargo time for making publications open access is the wrong thing to do: it is not in the interest of science, not in the interest of society, it seems designed only to protect the rights of the publishers in order to maintain their profits. Any paper, especially in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths disciplines, refers to work done at least 1-2 years previously. Combined with the inherent fast pace of science, any embargo period – especially prolonged embargo periods – will make sharing of the information less useful and less efficient by prolonging this time span further. Instead we should strive for Zero-embargo publication and push for SHORTER review and handling times, which can sometimes be as long as 6 months!
We should remember Open Access is not only about having information freely available to view. People should also be able to reuse the information freely with no restrictions other than the requirement to attribute. Instead of traditional copyright rules and property rights open access publishers increasingly use a set of licenses developed by Creative Commons. These licenses provide a basic choice of rules for the usage of the work, in combination with the stringent demand for attribution of the work to the original author(s). In this way copyright remains (forever) with the author while allowing for unrestricted (or in other cases somewhat restricted) use of the information.
The original copyright rules that evolved around 1700 (Statute of Anne) were developed to protect the right of the owner of a work for a limited time (2x 14 years) in exchange for having the work in the public domain after this time period. So in a sense these rules were aimed at allowing to share the information. Because information did not travel that fast in those days, this ‘embargo period’ was then considered enough. When through technical advancements information started to move more quickly the copyright period was gradually extended to 70 years and more (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988). However, in the process the copyright ownership had shifted from individual copyright to corporate copyright owned by publishing businesses. The ultimate goal of the copyright laws no longer reflected the ultimate goal of sharing information after a short period of time, but instead have a new role of defending business interests for as long as possible.
Today, thanks to the invention of the Internet, we see the making of a sharing economy. Many sharing communities exist already, but the community of sharing scientists is slow in coming. Although the internet was developed by scientists to exchange information the public has been much more quick in seeing and using the possibilities for sharing ideas, goods and information. Sharing of scientific information is still in its infancy, not in the least because of the ongoing efforts of traditional publishers to shield information for as long as this is profitable, but open science communities have started to form all over the world. This can be seen by the rapid growth of the Open Knowledge Foundation, with over 40 local open knowledge communities worldwide, many more than only two years ago. And it is also illustrated by the steady growth of older open access publishers like PLoS, BioMedCentral, as well as the very successful introductions of new journals like eLife and PeerJ.
Political and scientific support is also growing. The next European research program Horizon2020 aims at 100 % open access for all publicly funded research. And a scientific society like the Max Planck society has just organized its tenth anniversary Berlin conference on open access in Berlin.
However not only political and scientific support is important. We want to have citizens, students, entrepreneurs, and everyone else who needs (specific) information to push for global open access to all academic literature. And we need your help to do this.

• You can contact the Open Knowledge Foundation by registering on the website
• You can subscribe to any of the mailing lists of the OKF for instance the open access list and take part in discussions
• You can share your stories on difficulties or success with accessing information on the website WhoNeedsAccess
• You can download the OpenAccessButton and start registering where you hit paywalls when trying to access information
  

Tom Olijhoek and Michelle Brooks from the Open Access Working Group/ OKF
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Original source published here under a CC by 3.0 license (January 15, 2014).

Lessig thanks Google for the new "labeled for reuse" feature

A brief and effective post by Larry Lessig about the new feature in Google Images. Now we can search images also by reuse rights. Nice! I think this is a positive side effect of the Creative Commons revolution (started just by Lessig).
Now reusers have no excuses for not respecting the licenses of the images published on the web. It is so clear and easy to understand.

Glorious day! Google has launched a simple way to filter Google images by reuse rights. Click the search tools, and select your license. Thank you, Google!
(published on Lessig Blog v2, 14 January 2014)