Hi Michael,

Thanks for checking in on the copyright strategy! Indeed, there hasn’t been much recent activity on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Copyright_strategy/Issues. That’s not because the copyright strategy is dormant, though, or because we on the WMF legal team haven’t been doing copyright-related work.

An important aspect of initially building the copyright strategy was to develop a process for thinking about, organizing, and directing our work of providing the projects with copyright support. That process is still useful to help guide us going forward. 

We’ve been working over the past months on copyright policy issues in the US[1, 2] and EU[3]. We’ve admittedly done a better job providing updates on these efforts to this mailing list than on the copyright strategy page. We also held a  consultation later last year on upgrading the default license for text from version 3.0 to version 4.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license[4], and we continue to look into how to implement that change.

Another significant development is the commitment of resources to enable structured data on Commons.[5] Structured data is mentioned in several of the issues discussed as part of the copyright strategy, and we  will be helping structured data be implemented in a way that is useful for copyright analysis and enabling licence-compliant reuse. 

There are some issues on the copyright strategy page that I still hope to work on, such as finding ways to improve the media upload process/form and to improve the usability of on-wiki copyright guidance. Part of why these things are happening slower than I would’ve liked is because the legal team hasn’t had as much capacity to work on them as we had hoped when we launched the copyright strategy. In addition to advising on copyright related work, our team is also responsible for a range of other legal services for the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm very interested in developing new ways for volunteers to be involved in implementing the copyright strategy. I really appreciate everyone's comments and suggestions, and I still watch the page on meta. I encourage you to follow up on any of the stalled discussions there, and direct discussions of project-related copyright issues you find elsewhere to that page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Copyright_strategy/Issues

Best,
Charles

[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/publicpolicy/2017-February/001592.html
[2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/publicpolicy/attachments/20170131/44772c76/attachment-0001.pdf
[3] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/09/13/european-commission-copyright-leaks/
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use/Creative_Commons_4.0
[5] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/01/09/sloan-foundation-structured-data/

==
Charles M. Roslof
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 839-6885

NOTICE: This message might have confidential or legally privileged information in it. If you have received this message by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer.

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 10:19 AM, Michael Maggs <Michael@maggs.name> wrote:
Hi

I see there hasn't been much action on the Meta pages recently.  Would you be able to provide an update please?

Regards

Michael

Charles M. Roslof wrote:

Hi policy folks,


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tl;dr: Please check out and participate in the new copyright strategy on Meta, and attend the accompanying IRC office hour on September 15.

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As you may have already seen on other mailing lists or through messages on-wiki, we on the WMF legal team have been putting together a new strategy for identifying, prioritizing, and addressing copyright issues that affect Wikimedia. The goal of the strategy is to improve how Wikimedia does its copyright-related work by providing a centralized place for everyone—staff and non-staff alike—to organize and collaborate on that work. There’s more information on Meta:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Copyright_strategy


The strategy is designed to work with all sorts of issues, including things like MediaWiki feature design, Creative Commons license compliance and project copyright policies. I’m hoping the copyright strategy pages will also become a place to track and discuss copyright-related public policy opportunities and developments. If a copyright lawsuit is filed, copyright legislation is proposed, or an opportunity arises to share Wikimedia’s perspective on copyright with policymakers, it can be added to the strategy’s list of issues. We can then all talk about it and propose responses or activism.


The goal of the strategy is not to replace this mailing list, the public policy portal, or anywhere else where policy discussions are already thriving, but to supplement existing forums. By documenting discussions and keeping them active on-wiki, we can help make sure we don’t lose track of anything.


If you have questions about all of this, I encourage you to leave a comment on the copyright strategy talk page. The legal team will also be holding an office hour on IRC to discuss the strategy on September 15 at 14:00 UTC.


I hope you’ll participate!


Best,


Charles M. Roslof
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 839-6885

NOTICE: This message might have confidential or legally privileged information in it. If you have received this message by accident, please delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer.
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