In January we hosted a webinar titled “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution” discussing the intersection of indigenous knowledge and open sharing. Our conversation spanned a variety of topics regarding indigenous sovereignty over culture, respectful terminology, and the legacy of colonialism and how it still exists today.  While we strive for more open sharing, it is important to recognize the cases where culture should not be open to all.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples had a significant impact on the ability for indigenous people to advocate for their rights, and for institutions to have clearer guidance on the treatment of indigenous cultural expressions. But there is much more to be done. Institutions stewarding indigenous cultural expressions must be patient and  take the time needed to build relationships with the communities whose culture is in their collections in order to establish ways of sharing with consideration and consent.

In this webinar, we were  joined by:

• Jane Anderson, Vice Chair & Founding Member, Strategic Advisor, Co-Founder, Local Contexts
• Stephany RunningHawk Johnson, Executive Director,  Local Contexts
• Camille Callison, University Librarian, University of the Fraser Valley
• Erna Lilje, Curator, Indigenous knowledge & material culture, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen

Watch the recording. 

Learn More 

We shared a reading list in our announcement post, here are some more links as shared by the panelists and by some audience members during the conversation:

• Respectful Terminologies Project for Indigenous People Launches in Canada – SPARC
• National Indigenous Knowledge & Language Alliance: Respectful Terminology
• Te Hiku Media
• Awasəwehlαwə́lətinα wikəwαmok | They Returned Home – Local Contexts
• CARE Principles — Global Indigenous Data Alliance
• Citing Traditional Knowledge or Oral Traditions of Indigenous Peoples – APA Style (Seventh edition) – Subject Guides at Nova Scotia Community College
• Indigitization
• The Sustainable Heritage Network

What is Open Culture Live?

In this series, we tackle some of the more complex challenges that face the open culture movement, bringing in speakers with personal and professional expertise on various topics. Watch past webinars:

• Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject 
• Back to Basics: Open Culture for Beginners 

Save the date for our next webinar “Maximizing the Value(s) of Open Access in Cultural Heritage Institutions” on 28 Feb at 2 PM UTC. 

CC is a non-profit that relies on contributions to sustain our work. Support CC in our efforts to promote better sharing at creativecommons.org/donate

The post Recap & Recording: “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution” appeared first on Creative Commons.

2023 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin. As the team grew from one full time employee to a team of three, we have had increased capacity to carry out our programmatic work. At the same time, pandemic-related travel restrictions eased, allowing the Open Culture Team to lead and participate in events and convenings in diverse locations, including Morocco, Uruguay, USA, Switzerland, UK, Mexico, and Portugal, to name a few. This allowed us to connect with community members in person, further cementing pre-existing strategic partnerships and engaging with new audiences. In this blog post we look back on some of the year’s key achievements.

Here are the top 5 things we are particularly proud of (in no particular order):

1. We started the TAROC initiative (Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture) with the Lisbon Open Culture Roundtable. Our TAROC information brief is available in English, Shqip, français, Español, 日本語, Türkçe, italiano, عربي.
2. We launched Open Culture Matters, our bi-monthly newsletter, which now has 500+ subscribers and counting.
3. We debuted Open Culture Live: A Webinar Series with “Back to Basics: Open Culture for Beginners”. Other topics discussed in the series include “Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject”, and “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution.”
4. We completed Open Culture Voices — a series of insightful video interviews with open culture experts from around the world. It came to a close in November, gathering ca. 70K views across all platforms.
5. We created the Open Culture resources webpage. It includes numerous documents available in multiple languages thanks to our community of volunteers, including 2023 publications:
   • Pioneers of Open Culture,  a report on the success of open culture early adopters; and
   • Needs Assessment report, a survey of the needs and challenges of the cultural heritage community vis a vis the CC public domain tool.

In addition, we published blog posts, organized training activities, signed on to advocacy letters, took part in several events to promote open culture (notably our CC Global Summit, WIPO SCCR meetings, MozFest, Wikimania, WikiIndaba, GLAM Wiki, Wikimedia’s conference for the open culture movement, and much more!), and offered the CC certificate on open culture.

We also supported our community through the OC platform, community-led activities and our Medium Publication.

In 2024, we look forward to building on those achievements and continuing to help people (re)connect with their culture(s).

The post What did Creative Commons do for Open Culture in 2023? appeared first on Creative Commons.

In November 2023, the Court of Appeal in THJ v Sheridan¹ offered an important clarification of the originality requirement under UK copyright law, which clears a path for open culture to flourish in the UK.

A game-changing ruling

In setting the copyright originality threshold, the court stated: “What is required is that the author was able to express their creative abilities in the production of the work by making free and creative choices so as to stamp the work created with their personal touch.” Crucially, the court affirmed that “this criterion is not satisfied where the content of the work is dictated by technical considerations, rules or other constraints which leave no room for creative freedom.” For a thorough analysis of the case, see Professor Eleonora Rosatti’s take for the IPKat.

The case is potentially a game-changer in the UK open culture landscape, as noted by open culture advocates Bendor Grosvenor (paywall) and Douglas McCarthy. How so? Because by setting the standard for copyright to arise based on “free and creative choices” it effectively bars copyright claims from being made over faithful reproductions of public domain materials (i.e., materials that are no longer or never were protected by copyright).

No copyright for faithful reproductions of public domain materials

This is a position that Creative Commons (CC) has been championing for years as part of our Open Culture Program: digital reproductions of public domain material must remain in the public domain. In other words, no new copyright (or related right) should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.” Europeana and the Communia Association, among many other open culture organizations, share this position. It is also aligns with Article 14 of the 2019 EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which states that: “when the term of protection of a work of visual art has expired, any material resulting from an act of reproduction of that work is not subject to copyright […]”.

In practice, this means that CC licenses should not be used by cultural heritage institutions (museums, libraries, archives, etc.) to release digital reproductions of public domain works, since licenses can only be used in connection with in-copyright content. To share digital twins of public domain content, we recommend the public domain dedication tool (CC0) or the public domain mark (PDM).

A widespread but problematic practice

Alas, a great many institutions still claim full copyright or use CC licenses to share faithful reproductions of public domain material, often against payment of a (steep) fee — this is particularly prevalent in the UK, as reported by Dr. Andrea Wallace in her study for the Towards a National Collection program.

In an effort to curb this undesirable practice, in 2022, a CC Open Culture Platform working group led by Deborah De Angelis (CC Italy) and Tomoaki Watanabe (CC Japan) investigated this issue and developed proposals for technical, legal, and social interventions to address the problem of “PD BY” (i.e. the use of CC BY licenses to share reproductions of public domain works). On that basis, we are currently developing a set of guidelines to provide alternative design ideas and platform examples to cultural heritage institutions that wish to better share the digitized public domain cultural heritage material in their collections. Stay tuned for their release soon!

A new dawn for open culture in the UK and around the world?

This court case unlocks vast untapped potential for open culture to blossom in the UK cultural heritage sector. We are heartened that by offering enhanced legal certainty, this decision will give a boost to cultural heritage institutions to engage more deeply in the open culture movement and make these vast collections openly accessible to everyone.

Get Involved

For additional guidance and tailored support in developing or implementing open access policies or to get involved in promoting open culture around the world:

• Join the CC Open Culture Platform
• Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter
• Support our policy initiative Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture (TAROC)
• Take our CC Certificate online training
• Contact us at info@creativecommons.org

¹ THJ Systems Limited & Anor v Daniel Sheridan & Anor [2023] EWCA Civ 1354, https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/civ/2023/1354

The post UK Court Clears Path for Open Culture to Flourish appeared first on Creative Commons.

On Wednesday, 17 January, 2024, at 3:00 pm UTC, CC’s Open Culture Program will be hosting a new webinar in our Open Culture Live series titled “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution.”

As we observed a few years ago, there is growing awareness in the open culture movement about issues related to the acquisition, preservation, access, sharing, and reuse of cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples and local communities (including traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions), heritage in the context of colonization, and culturally-sensitive heritage. Many questions arise in the context of open access, for example:

• Who decides what can be digitized and/or made openly available online, and under which conditions?
• Who has control and who can make governance decisions over their contents?
• How are the consultation and decision-making processes designed and implemented and by whom?
• How can institutions communicate permitted uses to users (including but mostly going beyond CC licenses or tools)?
• When is restitution the answer?
• How do we share ethically, responsibility, and with respect and sensitivity?
• Who should be entitled to answer those questions and take action?

In this webinar, we will discuss the many complex considerations around such heritage and explore some of the different approaches to respectful, sensitive, responsible, and ethical — in sum, better sharing. We will be joined by experts including:

• Jane Anderson, Vice Chair & Founding Member, Strategic Advisor, Co-Founder, Local Contexts
• Stephany RunningHawk Johnson, Executive Director, Local Contexts
• Camille Callison, University Librarian, University of the Fraser Valley
• Erna Lilje, Curator, Indigenous knowledge & material culture, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen

Register here.

CC is a non-profit that relies on contributions to sustain our work. Support CC in our efforts to promote better sharing at creativecommons.org/donate

Background reading

• Beyond Copyright: the Ethics of Open Sharing by Josie Fraser, 2021. Creative Commons – We Like to Share Medium Blog.
• Traditional Knowledge and Copyright Intersections by Connor Benedict, 2023. Creative Commons – We Like to Share Medium Blog.
• Collaborate, Communicate, and Navigate Ethical Considerations with the Ethical Sharing Card Game by Isaac Oloruntimilehin, 2023. Creative Commons – We Like to Share Medium Blog.
• An Africa centered approach to restitution data  by African Digital Heritage, 2021.
• Response to the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report: Statement on Intellectual Property Rights and Open Access relevant to the digitization and restitution of African Cultural Heritage and associated materials by Mathilde Pavis & Dr. Andrea Wallace, 2019.
• Restitution with a Catch? The Copyright Perspective on the Sarr-Savoy Report by Camille Francoise, 2020. IFLA Blog.
• Open and Equitable – Questions on how to handle digital copies in collections from colonial contexts (Part III) by Andrea Wallace, 2022. Wikimedia Deutschland Blog.
• Decolonization and Indigenization by Andrea Wallance, 2021. OpenGLAM.
• Preservation or plunder? The battle over the British Museum’s Indigenous Australian show by Paul Daley, 2015. The Guardian.
• Traditional Knowledge and Creative Commons White Paper by Mehtab Khan, 2018
• Sharing Indigenous Cultural Heritage Online an Overview of GLAM Policies by Brigitte Vézina and Alexis Muscat, 2020
• Taking Care Conference 2022 Keynote, Brigitte Vézina

Films

What is Open Culture Live?

In this series, we tackle some of the more complex challenges that face the open culture movement, bringing in speakers with personal and professional expertise on the topic.

• Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject 
• Back to Basics: Open Culture for Beginners 

The post Upcoming Open Culture Live Webinar: “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution” appeared first on Creative Commons.

Jill Baron, a librarian at Dartmouth College (USA) shared some of her learnings from a project to change subject headings in the United States Library of Congress after working with a student who encountered the subject heading “illegal aliens” in Dartmouth’s library catalog. The journey is captured in the documentary Change the Subject that she co-produced. Marco Redina spoke about his work on the DE-BIAS project, identifying harmful terms and adding context and more appropriate terminologies to more than 4.5 million records currently published on the Europeana website. Amanda Figueroa spoke about her efforts on the Curationist team where reviewers work to recontextualize collection descriptions with more contemporary and respectful descriptions through review and research. Carma Citrawati, a lecturer at Udayana University (Indonesia) spoke about her efforts to preserve traditional Balinese manuscripts in consultation with communities in Bali.

In the conversation, you will hear more about some of the nuances around the choice to keep legacy terminology in the record in order to preserve the history of harm, or replace it in order to make for a less harmful experience during discovery today. You will also hear from the experts about how they have engaged their communities around the work they do and get some advice on how you might think about confronting some of the harmful histories that have made their way into descriptions and metadata at your institution.

→ Watch the recording 

Further reading, as shared by webinar participants:

• Change the Subject Documentary | Full Length 
• Respectful Terminologies Project for Indigenous People Launches in Canada
• The New York Public Library Research Guides The Change the Subject Project at NYPL, BPL, and BookOps About
• DE-BIAS – Detecting and cur(at)ing harmful language in cultural heritage collections | Europeana Pro
• 1 The Plan for Dartmouth’s Freedom Budget: Items for Transformative Justice at Dartmouth We, the Concerned Asian, Black, Latin
• Cataloging Lab

Sign up for our newsletter, Open Culture Matters, to learn about our upcoming webinars and keep up to date on news and events related to Cultural Heritage and Open Access and join the Open Culture Platform to get involved in our work.

The post Open Culture Live Recap & Recording: Respectful Terminologies & Changing the Subject appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today we conclude the Open Culture Voices series, which over two years has showcased more than 65 open culture experts and practitioners from around the world. Over these two years we have had the privilege of engaging with remarkable individuals, each bringing their unique insights and stories to our community.

As we bid farewell to this enriching series, we want to take a moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to the interviewees who made this series possible. Your willingness to share your time, expertise, and experiences has left an indelible mark on our collective narrative. This journey has been more than a collection of interviews; it has been a tapestry of diverse stories that have inspired, educated, and connected us all. Your openness and authenticity have fostered a sense of community that goes beyond the digital realm: your perspectives are gathered in the CC report “What are the Barriers to Open Culture?” and several other resources which will continue to provide guidance and advice to the community.

Here are some of the experts’ insights:

“Standardized licenses support interoperability and compatibility with other collections. All of this means that users are able to find, access and use our content with fewer barriers and less friction, and this makes it easier for them to learn, share their learning, to create and innovate.” — Christy Henshaw

“When done right, the greatest advantage for open cultural heritage is digital equity. Removing paywalls means that more people can afford to access these materials. We live in a wildly inequitable world, and access to our culture should not contribute to this.” — Nicole Kang Ferraiolo

“Open culture is kind of a key building block for positive interaction and social inclusion” — Nkem Osigwue

“Weʼll often find that the benefits of being open with the collections outweigh the level of investment and cost, and the profit eventually made from generating income, selling, and controlling the use of collections.” — Dafydd Tudur

15, which ran from January 2022 to November 2023, the videos had more than 20,000 views on YouTube and more than 30,000 engagements here on the CC Blog. 

Thank you everyone who has watched and learned from these videos already. We hope they continue to be a valuable resource for the blossoming open culture community.

All episodes can be watched from the Creative Commons Blog. The videos are licensed CC BY 4.0 to be easily adapted, reused and shared across the web.

To stay up-to-date on all things Open Culture, subscribe to the Creative Commons Open Culture Matters newsletter and join the Open Culture Platform today!

The post Celebrating Two Years of CC’s Open Culture Voices appeared first on Creative Commons.

GLAM Wiki is an extraordinary international gathering that brings together cultural heritage professionals (from Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, etc.) with the vibrant Wikimedia communities. More than 150 participants from all over the word came together with the goals to:

• Identify strategic priorities for the GLAM Wiki communities that promote knowledge equity, diversity and inclusion.
• Exchange and build capacity around GLAM Wiki tools, outreach and collaborations.
• Reflect, discuss and think of new roadmaps for our existing tools and platforms.
• Reconnect after the pandemic, network and discuss the future of GLAM Wiki.

The program was rich and diverse and included four sessions organized by CC, summarized as follows.

Creative Commons sessions’ highlights

1. Remixing Open Culture: Get Creative with Creative Commons

In this session, we provided a short presentation about remixing open culture. ALL culture is a remix, and everything we create draws inspiration from the art we have seen and been inspired by. We asked participants to think about why open culture is important to them as an individual. Using public domain images, attendees created “propaganda” for open culture, openly licensing their new creations, as in the example below. The CC licensed works have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under the category: Open Culture Remix Posters. Create your own poster to promote open culture and upload it to Wiki Commons with the category “Open Culture Remix Posters”.

2. Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture – What, When, How?

In this session, we presented an overview of our work around the TAROC initiative and invited participants from the audience — coming from Chile, Morocco, India, Finland, Mexico, Serbia and Portugal —  to share their open culture experiences in order to inform this international, community-focused initiative. Some of the topics raised include: the notion of culture is much broader than fine art or even “the arts”; open culture raises specific questions in the context of heritage preservation during armed conflict, where the risk of looting is heightened; better sharing might imply “conditional” sharing in certain contexts; the control over access and use of cultural heritage might be shared by a multitude of stakeholders; open culture raises financial challenges that must be addressed; and more.

This served as a continuation of our ongoing community consultation, after a session on Values at the CC Summit in October, where we polled the audience to learn more about some of the core principles that underpin the movement’s aspirations. These consultations will continue in-person and online with the Open Culture Platform.

3. Open Culture on Wikipedia

In this collaborative session, participants worked together to draft and publish the first Wikipedia articles dedicated to open culture. In one hour we managed to publish pages in English, French, and Spanish, which are now open for anyone to edit and contribute to. We started articles in Finnish and Swedish as well.

4. The CC Certificate for GLAM: learn about it by becoming part of a human sculpture collection

This workshop highlighted considerations from the CC Certificate for Open Culture, a professional development training that builds expertise in open licensing and open practices for cultural heritage professionals. With participants, we put the teaching into practice by creating an exhibit of human sculptures, “digitizing” the works, then evaluating the ethical, cultural, logistical, and copyright considerations around the digitized collection.

GLAM Wiki and the broader open culture context

In running our Open Culture Program, we strive to hold space for conversations about the complexities of openness and the practical implementation of better sharing, our strategic north star — sharing that is contextual, inclusive, just, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable.

As we engage with diverse stakeholders around the globe and as the landscape of the internet continues to evolve, we face new and important questions around how culture should be shared in a variety of contexts. For example, how can we envision exploration, and not exploitation, of the commons in the age of AI? What does equity look like in a global context where not all GLAMs have the resources for digitization? How can we think of “open” as a means to support wider cultural policy ambitions, not just an end in and of itself?

Our participation in GLAM Wiki was a way to tackle these questions and continue some of the exciting conversations we have had in the past months, including at the CC Summit, on TAROC, traditional knowledge and Indigenous cultural heritage, open culture and generative artificial intelligence (AI), and the future of the open movement.

We will continue to explore these complex topics to gain fresh perspectives in our Open Culture Live webinars, publications, Open Culture Platform calls and activities, and at in-person events where we can connect with the open culture community.

For more information on how to get involved, including in translations of our Open Culture resources:

• Join the Open Culture Platform
• Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter
• Register for the CC Open Culture Certificate
• Write to us at info@creativecommons.org

The post Highlights from GLAM Wiki by the CC Open Culture Team appeared first on Creative Commons.

We are excited to host the second installment of Open Culture Live with our next conversation:
Changing the Subject & Respectful Terminologies
29 November 2023 at 4:00 UTC

For centuries, cultural heritage institutions have been undertaking the work to document and catalog objects in their collections — sometimes this work suffers from a legacy of colonialism and discrimination in the way their collections are labeled and categorized. Some institutions are working to update these labels with more respectful terminology. Hear more from some of the changemakers working to update labels and metadata with more respectful terminologies during this CC panel.

As CC’s Open Culture team works to promote better sharing, we think it is important to address some of the key challenges and concerns that come along with promoting open access to cultural heritage. These challenges are not always simple to address, but they are important to ensuring that open access policies and practices go hand in hand with harm reduction, and do not perpetuate or amplify historic injustices.

Learn from the experts involved in addressing harmful labels in cultural heritage institutions in this conversation. We will ask the experts if any institutions serve as a good model for rethinking their labels, acknowledging that many are in the process of ongoing work. We will discuss where to start, how to think about some of the challenging decisions, why and how to preserve historical metadata, and how digital archival practices can support this work. We hope that this will provide a guide of some of the ways you might consider adopting better metadata practices and using more respectful terminologies in your collections.

The panel will feature:

• Jill Baron, Dartmouth College
• Marco Rendina, European Fashion Heritage Association
• Oscar Ruben Cornejo Casares, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University
• Amanda Figueroa, Platform Director, MHz Foundation
• Carma Citrawati, Lecturer, Udayana University

With introductory remarks from Brigitte Vézina and moderation by Jocelyn Miyara.

Register here to attend >

→ To stay informed about our open culture work:

• Join the open culture platform
• Join our global network
• Visit our website on open culture
• Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter

The post Open Culture Live Webinar: Changing the Subject & Respectful Terminologies appeared first on Creative Commons.

Dave talks about how many “institutions are on a mission to expose their collections to the world and make them available for everyone.” Dave sees this as a major evolution from a time not too long ago when it was only those with means who could access collections in any way.

Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Dave is the Executive Director at Authors Alliance which is a non-profit focused on sharing work broadly with the public together with authors in the US.

Dave responds to the following questions:

1. What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
2. What are the barriers?
3. Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
4. Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?

Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.

Want to hear more insights from Open Culture experts from around the world? Watch more episodes of Open Culture VOICES here >>

The post Dave Hansen — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 33 appeared first on Creative Commons.

As in previous sessions, our main objective was to drive copyright reform towards better sharing of copyright content in the public interest and in tune with the sharing possibilities of the digital environment. In this short session, we addressed the proposed broadcasting treaty and exceptions and limitations in our opening statement, as reported in the​​ “Statements” information document (SCCR/44/INF/STATEMENTS).

We also offered views on exceptions and limitations for cultural heritage institutions, i.e. libraries, archives and museums; you can watch our intervention on the WIPO webcast. These views are in line with our Open Culture Program’s recently launched initiative Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture (TAROC) which aims to develop policy to recognize the role of open culture to reach wider policy goals notably in relation to copyright and access and use of cultural heritage — see our TAROC Two-Pager in English, Shqip, français, Español, 日本語, Türkçe, italiano, عربي.

Overall, we are rather satisfied with the session’s outcomes. On broadcasting, we remain concerned that discussions on the draft broadcasting treaty are being maintained on the agenda despite evidence of a clear stalemate in the discussions; we are nonetheless heartened by the acknowledged need to work towards a balanced approach on exceptions and limitations in the draft treaty.

On exceptions and limitations, we are pleased that the SCCR Secretariat has undertaken to prepare a detailed implementation plan for the Work Program on Exceptions and Limitations; in CC’s views, this plan should provide for open and transparent engagement opportunities and wide participation from civil society of which CC is a leading voice. It should notably allow for real progress on substantive issues to support meaningful access and use of cultural heritage for preservation and other legitimate purposes.

We also welcome the organization of a virtual panel discussion on cross-border uses of copyright works in the educational and research sectors open to all member states as well as observers. As an accredited observer, CC places high value on broad and inclusive participation to ensure balanced and diverse perspectives can be brought to the table for a constructive debate. We recall that licensing falls short of addressing the problems that libraries, museums, archives, educational and research institutions, as well as persons with disabilities, face on a daily basis. Licensing is not a substitute for robust, flexible, mandatory exceptions and limitations to empower those who teach, learn and research, those who share in and build upon cultural heritage, and people with disabilities.

We note Group B’s Proposal Information Session on Generative AI and Copyright (SCCR/44/8) and look forward to the Secretariat organizing an open, inclusive, and balanced session at the next SCCR under the item of Copyright in the Digital Environment. As we have stated at the WIPO Conversation on Generative AI and Intellectual Property last September, generative AI raises important issues and is having an enormous impact on creativity, the commons, and better sharing, i.e., sharing that is inclusive, equitable, reciprocal, and sustainable. Our consultations on the matter have revealed a wide variety of views among creators, AI developers, and other stakeholders in the commons. They have also shed light on the fact that copyright is but one lens through which to consider generative AI; what is more, it is a rather blunt tool that often leads to black-and-white solutions that fall short of harnessing all the diverse possibilities that generative AI offers for human creativity. Our interventions on copyright and generative AI in the United States and the European Union contexts attest to those nuanced views. We thus call on the Secretariat to ensure the session will offer a balanced and representative set of perspectives.

We look forward to participating in the Committee’s next session, to take place from April 15 to 19, 2024, and to bring our expertise on copyright, better sharing of cultural heritage, and generative AI in order to help create a fairer and more balanced international copyright system in the public interest.

→ To stay informed about our policy and open culture work:

• Visit our blog for regular updates on our work on AI
• Sign up for our open culture mailing list
• Join the open culture platform
• Join the copyright platform
• Visit our website on open culture

Sign up for our Open Culture Matters newsletter >

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