From Free Culture to Open Data: Technical Requirements for Access and Authorship

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/Creative Commons tools makes it easier for users, who are also authors, to share, locate and distribute reusable content, fostering remix and digital creativity, open science and freedom of expression. But reuse could be made even easier by the licensing framework, which does not yet handle the diversity of legal and usage situations pertaining to technical accessibility and reuse modalities of works and data. This paper will first discuss what additional legal regulation may be required to allow full accessibility, which includes not only a legal authorization to perform certain rights, but also the technical possibility to effectively access and reuse material. Then, based on the example of attribution and authorship requirements for reproduction and performances of works and derivative works, it will be examined what technical infrastructure may better support the enforceability of these licensing terms, namely a framework automating certain actions and pedagogy tools. From legal accessibility to technical accessibility and technical support of open content licenses, this article illustrates the intricate relationship between law and technology in the realm of copyright and focuses on access and authorship, two fundamental elements of (free) culture and (open) science

Algorithmic Transparency and Platform Loyalty or Fairness in the French Digital Republic Bill

Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, Researcher at the Institute of Communication Sciences, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Paris Sorbonne, and Visiting Fellow at the LSE, examines the Digital Republic Bill, a new French Bill on digital rights and the impact it might have on citizens and their data

Access to digital collections of public domain works: Enclosure of the commons managed by libraries and museums

This article is made available by the author under a Creative Commons Attribution license available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Digital copies of physical books and art objects curated by libraries and museums are being made available to the public online. Their access and reuse conditions are submitted to terms of use and policies defined by the institutions in charge of the development of databases and the digitisation of works, of which many are in the public domain. As no copyright applies to these works, their digital instantiation should in principle be freely accessible and reusable. However, in practice, some memory institutions databases contractual terms of use impose restrictions (for instance, reserving the commercial use of the version they digitalized or reserving the right to reuse photographies they funded), thus re-introducing physical barriers for resources which are supposed to be in the commons. The article analyzes a sample of online databases policies of libraries and museums public domain collections in various countries, and provides examples of best practices of institutions and collective actions to avoid adding unnecessary restrictions to public domain works. A good governance of the digital commons including adequate partnerships will enhance access to knowledge

The Circuits of Reading the Digital: Some Models

In theorizing the digital text, I will take a two-pronged approach: a) what aspects of reading cannot be accounted for by the types of digital textual analysis done so far in the digital humanities, and b) how can technology (be “used” to) account for such possibilities? To answer the second question, we need to stop seeing the computer as a “means” (i.e. we “use” a computer) and to start thinking about the computer itself as a part of the literary process. This is perhaps to blur the distinction between e-literature and media studies on the one hand, and digital humanities on the other. However, it presupposes that technology is not something to be feared (as “tampering” with the text), but that it is rather something intrinsic, to be conceived on its own terms. Indeed, the computer can enhance the literary experience and highlight aspects of the text that were not noticed before, and vice versa, in a sort of feedback circuit, bringing with it hermeneutic questions that hitherto have been only indirect. What might we discover from exploring the symbiotic relationship between the text and the machine and about the minds and bodies that encounter these? Such encounters occur not only through visualization, but through sonorization and through the body. Such hybrid encounters require a broader view of language than that provided by information theory, which has apparently dominated digital literary studies. I will use my own digital humanities project on the visualization of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s works (http://mallarme.uvic.ca) to explore models of reading the digital

Alternative policies for alternative Internets

International audienceOnline services’ Terms of Use (ToU) or End-user Licence Agreements (EULA) are often unfair, abusive and hard to read for users. They are also difficult to draft for alternative projects willing to develop fair and clear policies for their contributors. This piece provides examples of original and alternative clauses, containing fair and unfair terms, addressing some of the most common issues faced by online platforms when developing their legal policies regarding ownership of user-generated content, protection of personal data, liability for third-party content, and other legal questions affecting users’ or consumers’ rights and their enforcement.While specific model clauses can’t be drafted to fit a plurality of activities without knowing the details of the platforms’ features and setting, projects and values, this piece provides guidelines and practical information to communities aiming for a wide-reaching, easy to understand licence, to empower informed choices prior to the definition of policies reflecting a variety of alternative politics that may be embraced by alternative internet platforms. Alternatives can be defined as the “range of (media) projects, intervention and networks that work against, or seek to develop different forms of, the dominant, expected (and broadly accepted) way of ‘doing’ (media)” (Atton, 2004).Commons-based and privacy-enhancing or peer-to-peer services, as alternative to commercial services where users relinquish most of their rights, also need alternative policies in order not to deprive their users of their rights.Therefore, this contribution is intended to provide a practical, critical and normative contribution by proposing guidelines for platform developers drafting their terms of use. As a practical resource, it lists most clauses that are to be included in online terms of use. The objective to enclose a range of examples from the most abusive to the fairest for most of the topics aims at exemplifying worst as well as best practices. The definition of fair clauses is meant to implement the vision of platforms which respects users’ rights. My legal approach is grounded in commons-based peer production theory and practice from a continental European legal culture perspective, with the assumption that alternative internets have political concerns for freedom, autonomy, consent, privacy, independence, surveillance, asymmetries of power, security, unfair contractual and commercial practices and other fundamental rights. Neither universal nor exhaustive, and rather than legal advise, the purpose is to raise awareness on the possibility to draft alternative terms of use, in a context dominated by US corporate legal culture aiming at maximising profit and minimising risks (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple). Instead of embracing a neoliberal agenda, alternative policies may rather try to support the development of sustainable services and products, seen as commons. Most Terms of Use show a diverse mix of all criteria and choices, and there are no caricatural pure evil commercial models or universally desirable commons-based alternatives, unilaterally advantaging or disadvantaging users at all levels. Finally, it follows the European Directive on unfair contract terms according to which contracts should be drafted in plain, intelligible language, which do not preclude validity and non-ambiguity

Alternative internet(s): the benefits and challenges of distributed services

In our series on alternative internet(s), Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) Institute for Communication Sciences and a visiting fellow at the LSE, looks at the benefits and challenges of distributed internet architectures, including difficulties in assigning responsibility, liability, and identity. Read the introduction to the series that explains more about alternative internet(s) here

Memory hole or right to delist? Implications of the right to be forgotten on web archiving

This article studies the possible impact of the “right to be forgotten” (RTBF) on the preservation of native digital heritage. It analyses whether archival practices are likely to be affected by the new right, and if resources may become impossible to preserve for future generations, falling under the risk to disappear from memories and history since no version would be available in public or private archives. The article concludes that at the moment there is no room for concern for archives given the restricted application of RTBF

The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture

Digital technology has made culture more accessible than ever before. Texts, audio, pictures and video can easily be produced, disseminated, used and remixed using devices that are increasingly user-friendly and affordable. However, along with this technological democratization comes a paradoxical flipside: the norms regulating culture's use — copyright and related rights — have become increasingly restrictive. This book brings together essays by academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy makers, who were all part of the EU-funded Communia project. Together the authors argue that the Public Domain — that is, the informational works owned by all of us, be that literature, music, the output of scientific research, educational material or public sector information — is fundamental to a healthy society. The essays range from more theoretical papers on the history of copyright and the Public Domain, to practical examples and case studies of recent projects that have engaged with the principles of Open Access and Creative Commons licensing. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the current debate about copyright and the Internet. It opens up discussion and offers practical solutions to the difficult question of the regulation of culture at the digital ag

Defining a public domain for copyright and data legislation at the European Parliament (part 2)

MelanieBased on the report of MEP Julia Reda on the European Union Copyright Directive (Implementation of Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society) released in January 2015, the European Parliament voted in favour of a resolution on 9 July 2015, asking the Commission to take concrete steps towards copyright reform by proposing a revision of the 2001 Directive before the end of the year. As part of the LSE Law and Communications Research Network Seminar series, Melanie Dulong de Rosnay and Orla Lynskey compared default entitlements to information in the areas of copyright and data protection law. See the first post from Melanie on the report and relevant background in this two-part series here

Licensing Digital Content With A Generic Ontology: Escaping From The Rights Expression Language Jungle

International audienceDigital contents distributed over the internet are regulated by law and by technical management systems. The latter include a semantic component that describes licenses, i.e. rights of use which are granted to the user. These elements of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are called Rights Expression Languages (REL), they gather terms and relations needed to build licenses. Some are based on an ontology of online licenses, not necessarily related to applicable law and various legal systems, and cannot interoperate. As a consequence, there is a need for a more generic way to express licenses. Here, generic means that rightholders should only need to express the license they need once, and semi-automatic tools should then translate this license so it can be browsed by any specific system. Hence it implies the necessity to be able to model concept semantics in order to translate a license expressed in generic terms into more specific terms that are compliant with the specific standards used by distribution systems. This work comes as part of larger studies on legal ontologies, legal systems and RELs