Creative Commons Global Summit
From 13 to 15 April, when spring was already warming up Europe, IPI’s dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič and Saša Krajnc attended the pinnacle of annual Creative Commons events – the CC Global Summit in icy, yet still posh Toronto. For those not familiar with the organisation – Creative Commons provides free, easy-to-use copyright licenses to give the public permission to use creative work, but also acts as an organized network for advocacy and initiatives related to free sharing of copyrighted material, open resources and open internet.
© Sebastiaan ter Burg
For an entire weekend “the Commoners” gathered for workshops, discussions, seminars, and plenaries about the future of CC, the network and the community of sharing. The event brought together 192 speakers and 435 attendees from 64 countries, many more followed the event through the stream and social feed. The Summit, held at the Delta hotel, opened every morning with breakfast for Summit newbies and then continued throughout the day with a packed program of lectures and workshops in various areas, connected with the open internet, copyright, education, open access, new technologies and issues related to the present and future of the CC network.
The IPI team enthusiastically participated in copyright law sessions and actively contributed to them, as dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič was one of the hosts and speakers of the “Fixing Copyright to Meet the Needs of Educators” session, addressing the current issues of educators faced with copyright limitations when conveying knowledge and discussing in depth the education exception, proposed in the new EU Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market.
The participants, otherwise scattered in numerous smaller sessions, gathered every day for the presentations of keynote speakers. Wikipedia Executive Director Katherine Maher’s discussion asserted that free knowledge is inherently radical and called to resist enclosures of knowledge and learning. MIT Library Director Chris Bourg’s wide-ranging keynote “Open as in Dangerous” discussed the need to embrace the assertion that free knowledge is a political act. The packed room for Lawrence Lessig’s talk “From Unlocking Free Culture to Reviving American Democracy” listened as he outlined his career from copyright to representational democracy. Professor Ruth Okediji, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard University and Co-Director of the Berkman-Klein Center, gave the final, resonant keynote of the Summit, focusing on her work for a more just international copyright system and discussed her work on the Marrakesh Treaty, a copyright exception to support individuals with visual impairments.
By the end of the weekend, the IPI team was thrilled to have met old friends, made new ones, gained fresh drive to advocate for a better and balanced EU copyright and continue our work in the spirit of openness and sharing.
If you want to find out more about CC or want to apply for next years’ Global Summit, follow this link.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that maintains the Open Library, a digital library index, and is dedicated to preserving knowledge. As many of the works in the Internet Archive are under copyright, the Archive uses a system of controlled digital lending based on digital rights management to prevent unauthorized downloading or copying of copyrighted books. In March 2020, due to the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet Archive established the National Emergency Library, eliminating the waiting lists used in the Open Library and expanding access to books for all readers. In June 2020, the Emergency National Library faced a lawsuit from four book publishers and was ultimately closed.
The 43rd session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (hereinafter SCCR) made substantial progress on the issues advocated by the A2K Coalition (Access to Knowledge Coalition), which IPI is a member of. This year’s session was the most productive on the issues of exceptions and limitations. James Love (Knowledge Ecology International), a long-time observer at WIPO, described the outcome and the impact of the public interest community as the strongest since the conclusion of the Marrakech Treaty, which brought global copyright exceptions for the benefit of the blind and visually impaired.
Today, March 17, 2023, a symposium on law in the information society is taking place in the golden lecture hall of the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič will present copyright aspects of artificial intelligence at the symposium.
The third day of the 43rd session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is intended for discussion on the topic of exceptions and limitations to copyright, especially in connection with the right to research.