Creative Commons License and Public Domain Tools Infrastructure Modernization

Javaher Nooryani

Funding Area: Critical shared infrastructure / Infraestructura compartida critica

Problem Statement: Creative Commons (CC) provides free and standardized licensing alternatives to copyright. Without financial support to sustain and update the CC licenses, creators and open movement advocates across the world will lose the sharing tools needed to advance a collaborative, just, and equitable Internet. CC seeks necessary improvements to the technological and legal infrastructure of our licenses, which many platforms, institutions, and individuals use to freely access and share art, research, educational resources, and cultural heritage artifacts. Our tools were made in an earlier digital landscape and now require upgrades to their underlying infrastructure and user interfaces. With appropriate support, we can modernize and sustain our tools, making them more efficient, resilient, and easy to use. Resolving immediate technical shortcomings and establishing an agile and streamlined maintenance routine will allow the licenses to thrive and evolve. CC license infrastructure is vital to the public’s defense against corporate and government capture of the Internet. Funding our infrastructure updates would give our organization more operational strength to promote a robust and inclusive Internet, which continues to be at risk due to privatization and monopolization. Unlike profit-driven players, CC remains a non-profit, mission-driven organization, and we need support from like-minded funders to champion sharing practices and tools that oppose the enclosure of the digital commons.

Proposed Activities: Our infrastructure advancement goal has a set of objectives and corresponding activities with an estimated timeline, which are all subject to securing appropriate funding. This year we aim to complete server migration, launch the new website, and work on enhancing the License Chooser (currently in beta). The deployment of the new website will require new hosting that supports security and robustness of operations. The recently redeveloped License Chooser aids users in determining which CC license best suits their copyright needs. This tool still requires enhancements to its capacities. With support, we can automate and modernize this tool–making it an easy add-on to any publishing platform, irrespective of language or underlying technology. We want to extend the License Chooser so that it easily integrates with websites and platforms, directly where content lives, and make it simple to navigate for as many users as possible. Funding will also support license translations and interface layer upgrades, in 2024 and beyond. CC has already reexamined the underlying infrastructure of legal code and is ready to use all the best programming mechanisms in order to manage systems more effectively. With the multiple versions of CC licenses and the jurisdiction specific ports of previous versions, we currently have over 600 distinct legal tools. Each license has three layers–deed, legal code, and machine readable (metadata)–plus translations, which amounts to almost 30,000 documents, with only a three person IT team to manage them. The legacy ccEngine was created in 2007 and only partially manages the documents, so we are replacing it with a complete rewrite that fully accounts for all of the CC licensing documents. This change will not only allow us to address issues with more agility, but also to enhance the end-user experience. It is also designed to significantly simplify the hosting requirements to ensure that the CC legal tools never go offline. The upgrades will also shore up weaknesses and minimize security risks like data breaches. In the process of completing these upgrades, CC will flag future and routine server and applications maintenance needs. We know that lack of sustained and regular management creates security threats and makes it expensive to fix or replace outdated infrastructure. Fortifying our legal tools apparatus and strengthening our routine maintenance schedule and systems will make our licenses and CC0 public domain tool more adaptable, sustainable, and resilient to inevitable changes in technology and copyright law.

Openness: CC legal tools empower and promote open sharing practices, and themselves are freely and readily accessible to the public online. Our proposed work to upgrade the license infrastructure will be a collaborative effort, engaging with the CC community and open source technicians to help complete the upgrades. The new CC legal tools project is licensed under the Expat/MIT license. We actively maintain a free/libre and open source portal for CC work (opensource.creativecommons.org) that provides a foundation not only for participation by the free/libre and open source community in general, but also for our participation in work programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy. It is very rarely done, but our server infrastructure is also maintained in the open (also licensed under the Expat/MIT license) using free/libre and open source software (ex. git, gnupg, salt).

Challenges: Continuing to secure further funding and volunteer or consultant help will be an ongoing challenge, as CC is a small non-profit. The technology team is burdened by a significant amount of technical debt due to a previously long period of understaffing. It is essential that we maintain existing staff so that CC can successfully deliver existing technical obligations and participate in innovating an open and distributed Internet that facilitates better sharing. Beyond this proposal, the challenge will be to secure funding for the remainder of our upgrade plans. The next stage of improvements will require collaboration from staff and volunteers and an expansion of the team that sustains the CC licenses and CC0 public domain tool. Future funding would be used for in-person networking to recruit the help of open source technicians, with the potential for hiring specialized consultants. Another challenge is tackling necessary improvements for the translation workflow. Improvements to the technical stack could support translation efforts with the text processing and analysis tools that programmers rely on. Additional staff could better support translation volunteers and increase the availability of the CC legal tools across the globe. Without translations, many communities are prevented or discouraged from the start. With your support, we can complete the technical upgrades we’ve proposed and move on to these next challenging stages of our license infrastructure improvement goals.

Neglectedness: Preserving and modernizing CC license infrastructure has not been prioritized properly in the past. CC has used general operating support to fund the efforts of our small IT and Legal staff, with the help of sporadic volunteer work, support from our global network, and short term contractors. We are now dedicated to securing the funding necessary to make valuable improvements. It has been challenging to fundraise for CC licenses, since many users are unaware that their infrastructure has no underlying revenue stream. Although the licenses are used by emerging technologies and by contemporary creators, many funders prefer to support new or experimental projects instead of proven frameworks. This year we submitted a proposal to the Sovereign Tech Fund, but were not awarded despite their own use of our tools–STF asks grantees to publish funded work under CC licenses. The Open Tech Fund is another prospect, but their current narrow definition of public interest technology excludes our work–we hope that will change, since CC licenses are public-focused tools. CC also recently soft-launched an initiative called the Open Infrastructure Circle to obtain recurring support from funders. Previous supporters have expressed interest in joining, but only a few-including Microsoft and Hewlett Foundation–have signed on so far. CC is working on new fundraising and marketing efforts to spotlight and stimulate interest in CC licenses as vital tools for sharing.

Success: Short-term or immediate success will be completing our server migration and launching our new website within the proposed time frame. That will set the foundation for all other technical upgrades. Long-term and ongoing success will be measured by our ability to implement and execute a maintenance routine to keep CC license infrastructure up to date. Our future goals are to ensure that legal educational material and supporting documentation stays current as tech evolves, while also being accessible to a global user base. CC licenses must be made accessible to a variety of language speakers and for a variety of learning abilities and preferences. With future funding, beyond this grant proposal, we can network to build a diverse group of volunteer and consultant legal teams from across the world and use their expert input for license translation and accessibility. Increasing global participation around international copyright laws will allow CC legal tools to live up to their true open access potential.

Total Budget: 25,000

Affiliations: Creative Commons

LMIE Carveout: No

Team Skills: CC’s IT and Legal teams have the knowledge and expertise required to manage and complete the license infrastructure improvements. Both our IT Director and General Counsel have years of experience, in technology and copyright law arenas respectively. They are well-positioned to lead their teams, and recruit external help from their professional networks. Our Operations, Finance, and Development leadership are well-skilled in grant management and will keep the project on track. CC staff has successfully fulfilled numerous mission-aligned grants, which have improved our core operational work and broadened our programmatic reach. Despite underfunding, Creative Commons has been stewarding the CC licenses for two decades, which have unlocked access to an estimated 2 billion works. With your support, our small but mighty staff can focus on license infrastructure improvements and therefore expand our impact on open practices in the digital commons.

Submission Number: 50