TELL US YOUR STORIES
Share Your Recollections About the Ford Foundation HERE
MEMBER FORUMS
Affinity Groups (2) |
Events (5) |
Volunteers (2) |
Classifieds () |
Recollections (1) |
 |
NEWSLETTER
|
Ford's New Approach To Licensing Grantee Products By Alan Divack
(The full text of the announcement is available at fordfoundation.org.)
The new policy also brings the practice of the Ford Foundation in line with that of many of its philanthropic peers, such as the Open Society Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But it raises several questions: What exactly does a Creative Commons license do, and what does it not do? What has changed as a result of the adoption of this policy? Are there any exceptions?
In U.S. law, copyright is actually a bundle of intellectual property rights that govern the use and distribution of ideas fixed in a tangible medium of expression. The ideas themselves are not protected by copyright until they are fixed: recorded, written down or captured in some way. Subject to certain exceptions and limitations, the holder of copyright may determine whether and under what conditions a work is performed, copied or used. Copyright protects the rights of copyright holders to derive some benefits, generally monetary, from their works, and to receive credit for work that they have done. It also protects the rights of the public to use these works once these conditions have been met.
Copyright protection is intended to encourage the creation of new work by both providing benefits for creators and rights holders and protecting the public’s right to use. While earlier incarnations of copyright required creators or copyright holders to register with the Copyright Office in order to have their rights enforced, the Copyright Act of 1976 established that works were protected by copyright as soon as they were “fixed”. Formal registration was no longer required to obtain protection.
It is ironic that this happened just as the internet was about to change the way information is produced and distributed.
The default mode of copyright was that all rights were reserved by the copyright holder, who might be the creator or an entity that inherited or purchased these rights. With certain very specific exceptions, such as fair use, the use or sharing can require explicit permission from rights holders.
With the coming of the internet, however, sharing information widely became easier while those who wished to use information that was readily accessible in order to produce new works often had to go through a lengthy and sometimes difficult process of obtaining rights. Rights clearance can be a significant cost to many projects, and is occasionally an impediment to undertaking the project in the first place.
Creative Commons is meant to be a solution to this dilemma. Rather than a default of “all rights reserved”, creators have the option of a variety of licenses that enable them to share their work broadly, subject to conditions that they choose. For example, a creator may stipulate that a work may be used only for non-commercial purposes, or in its entirety, or with attribution. The Foundation has adopted Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which is the most open form. It allows users to share by copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format, and to adapt it by remixing, transforming and building upon it for any purpose, even commercial, provided the user gives credit to the creator and does not impose additional restrictions on the material.
What does this mean in practice? Whereas the Foundation’s grant letter in its earlier form left copyright with the grantee, the new letter requires the grantee to use this CC license. In this way, work whose production is funded by the Ford Foundation will be able to be shared and used widely, which ultimately supports the mission of the Foundation.
Since one of the main purposes of copyright is to enable rights holders to monetize their rights, and since many products supported by the Foundation have little commercial value, whatever their intellectual value, this will rarely present a problem.
However, the policy does allow for many exceptions, which are outlined in the Guide to Foundation Actions. If, for example, a grant is intended to enable a grantee to monetize its products, the grant agreement will allow it to retain commercial rights. This would be so for a documentary film, an artistic production or even a training manual. The Foundation’s interest in these cases may be both in seeing that a useful or beautiful work is produced, and in providing a revenue stream for the creator or grantee.
Likewise, some grant products are meant to be confidential and would not be subject to CC licensing. For example a grantee may receive support to review its financial situation. Any report produced in this case would not be widely shared, so a CC license would be irrelevant.
What does CC not do? It does not guarantee dissemination of information. Rather, it removes impediments to the open sharing of information. A work that is licensed with the least restrictive license will not automatically be available to those who might wish to use it. This requires an information infrastructure that goes beyond the question of licensing and rights.
In order to be truly available, the creators and funders, such as grantees and foundations, must make work available on a robust site, one that will not disappear when decisions are made about issues such as website design that often are unrelated to content. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive estimates that the average web site lasts 44 days, which is not much help for a user who looks for something after 44 weeks.
In addition to being exposed to search engines that will make information easier to find, technical and professional literature benefits from being included in specialized sites and databases, such as the Foundation Center’s catalog of nonprofit literature.
The extent to which copyright that is held by entities other than creators encourages the production of future work is an important issue but beyond the scope of this article. What is important now is that the Foundation has taken a significant step toward, as it said in its announcement, “reaffirming its commitment to make the philanthropy sector a leader in information sharing and knowledge transfer.”
Alan Divack, who worked at the Foundation from 1988 through 2009 in Information Services and Program Management, is a program officer at the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation.
|
