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

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

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

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

La mise à disposition des œuvres et des informations sur les réseaux : régulation juridique et régulation technique

Technological developments lead to an exponential increase of the spread of works and information on the networks. Regulatory models from the analogical era based on physical medium scarcity and exclusivity are questioned by digital technology paradigms of copying, remixing and sharing. Copyright has been developed and adaptated at the same time than reproduction and dissemination technologies innovation, as an artificial corrective granting a limited monopoly of exploitation. But copyright can also lead to commons. We analyse how law and technology were conceptualised independently. Technical standards production process and the extension of exclusive rights are creating tensions between cultural industries and the public. This conception led to an intrication between regulation by law and technical protection measures, for the benefit of regulation by technology. Following research on lex informatica, we thus introduce a model based on the mutual influence between regulation by law and regulation by technology, toward legal categorisation redesign and an improved technical rights expression. The development of applications, ontologies and legal metadata allow to automate information and works exchanges management. Integrating regulation by law and regulation by technology, this model was built on the systematic analysis of various licensing models emerging on the networks, between access control and the constitution of Commons.Les développements techniques entraînent une croissance exponentielle de la circulation des œuvres et informations sur les réseaux. Les modèles de régulation de l'ère analogique élaborés sur la rareté du support sont remis en question par le numérique, fondé sur les paradigmes de la copie, de la réappropriation et du partage. Le droit d'auteur a été développé et adapté au rythme des innovations techniques de reproduction et de diffusion des œuvres, comme un correctif artificiel accordant une exclusivité temporaire d'exploitation. Il peut aussi conduire aux biens communs. Nous analysons comment droit et technique ont d'abord été pensés de manière indépendante. Les processus d'élaboration des normes et standards techniques et l'extension des droits exclusifs entraînent des tensions entre les industries culturelles et le public. Cette conception conduit à un enchevêtrement de lois et mesures techniques de protection au profit de la régulation technique. Nous proposons donc, dans la lignée de la lex informatica, un modèle fondé sur l'influence réciproque entre les disciplines, vers la reconception des catégories juridiques du droit d'auteur et vers une meilleure expression technique des droits. Le développement d'applications, d'ontologies et de métadonnées juridiques permet une automatisation de la régulation des échanges d'œuvres et d'informations. Mettant en œuvre une intégration plus équilibrée du droit et de la technique, ce modèle est notamment fondé sur l'analyse de licences et modèles contractuels qui se développent sur Internet, entre contrôle d'accès et biens communs

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

Alternative internet(s) – what are they and do they have a future?

This is the first post in a series on alternative internet(s), following a workshop on the topic at the LSE in September, organised by Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, Francesca Musiani, Alison Powell and Panayotis Antoniadis. The authors introduce the key topics that will be covered in the series here