(Via electronic museum.) Smithsonian copyright revisited: “ Back in May 2007, there was a sudden spike in interest around the ‘outing’ of over 6,000 images from Smithsonian Images by a body calling itself public.resource.org. Essentially, they consider the images to be largely public domain, and therefore did something about it, scraping them from the Smithsonian [...]

Cross posted at opencontentlawyer.com **New survey on open content licences** Use of open content licences by cultural heritage organisations The Eduserv Foundation is funding a study into the use of Creative Archive, Creative Commons and similar open content licences by cultural heritage organisations in the United Kingdom. The study is being led by legal consultant [...]

Eduserv, together with legal consultant Jordan Hatcher, are conducting a study into the use of Creative Commons and similar licences by cultural heritage organisations.  This study is entitled: Snapshot and case-studies of current usage of Creative Commons (and other open content) licences by cultural heritage organisations in the UK The goal of this study is [...]

Session 4 and 5 Collecting societies Paul Keller of CC Netherlands updated the group on collecting socities. Key points: Two approches to Collecting Societies and their interaction with CC: A clause to allow people to opt out of the Collecting Societies (for jurisdictions that mandate their use). A hybrid approach where members (authors/owners) can do [...]

CC legal day session 3 – enforcement Key points from Lessig talk Discussed the reasons for retiring CC licences, most recently the stand alone developing nations and most of the sampling licences. Main two reasons — lack of use and the possibility of publishers using DevNations to avoid publishing under a “true” open access licence. [...]

Session 2 on trying to measure use of CC. Mike Linksvayer went through some of the problems in trying to track CC use.  Key points: Search for backlinks is very volatile because the numbers differ between search engines and can vary depending on which server (of the search engine) you happen to be on. Google’s [...]

Arrived in Dubrovnik — Many thanks to the entire iCommons team for everything! Session one – Localizing 3.0 After an introduction by Catharina and Heather, two representatives from CC-Netherlands discussed the versioning process to 3.0. CC-Scotland is in the middle of updating from 2.5 to 3.0, and this will prove helpful. For those that are [...]