Thanks Dimi, will try and have a look before then. On 18 September 2014 17:07, Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov < dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Stevie Benton Head of External Relations Wikimedia UK +44 (0) 20 7065 0993 / +44 (0) 7803 505 173 @StevieBenton Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.*

If someone with less rusty coding skills wanted to play with some of these questions, by the way, it might be interesting to poke at commoncrawl.org's data set to answer some of these questions. For example, you could see what %age of works there indicated a CC license as an attempt to understand the overall number of/popularity of CC. It has also been suggested to me (off-list) that someone could do something like this to investigate the open license infringement question: 1. Identify 100-200 most common openly-licensed java libraries (.jars) 2. Find instances of those in commoncrawl (if commoncrawl does not discard code files) 3. Attempt to identify what, if any, license compliance was occurring around redistribution of those libraries. Same approach could be done with popular commons images, of course, though .jar files may be easier to identify/focus on. Thinking out loud- Luis On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 9:22 AM, Luis Villa &lt;lvilla(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: -- Luis Villa Deputy General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation 415.839.6885 ext. 6810 *This message may be confidential or legally privileged. If you have received it 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 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*

Salut la liste! I had an Observatory meeting of the WG "IP in the digital world" which will deal with our study. Had a chance to discuss things with the Observatory's economists and we decided to engage in a more intensive discussion over email, phone and at the annual plenary in Alicante next month. In the room it was basically just me and the economist speaking as no other member (i.e. none of the industry representatives) seemed to show an interest in this one. Here the main requests and my comments: 1. They really want us to compile a list of sectors. I asked for a economic modelling study that assess the whole situation, but they aren't keen on this. Apparently their budget for this for 2015 is 25.000 Euro and - I am really quoting here - they want something "quick&credible". Additionally they want to make this study a counterpoint to their IP contribution study [1], which was released last year. This was also our initial starting point, as we wanted to be able to say "yes, IP is important but it builds up on a thriving commons". In the first study they just used a number of industry sectors and looked at it. They proposed we should start by taking this list and amending it as we see fit. ([2] page 27 ff.) My feeling is that we should go for this approach as a start, but I am a bit scared that this could limit the results not in our favour. A longer list with sectors we know free&open is king would help. Also, the Observatory has a tendency to do follow-up and complementary studies, so I could very well see them continuing with such research after this initial experiment. 2. They really want to know if infringements is a problem for us The official name of the Observatory being "EU Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights", they seemed really keen on including infringements of PD&OL in the study. I said I could give them a few case studies or examples, but hadn't heard of any studies on this. Should we give in and let them do research on this, although it might take focus off the economic contribution part? 3. They are grateful for any help or pointers, especially on evaluation methods Their economists seem a bit... excited to tackle a completely new field for them. Frankly speaking, they are a bit usure what to do, which is why they want to stick to a limited list of sectors. They are also asking for advice on evaluation we might give them. I promised to point them to the 'Wikipedia evaluation study' and the Polish 'study on the reuse value of open data'. Anything else we might pitch in? Feel free to share this with your circles. Also, we'll be integrated and get to comment pretty much every step of the way, so there will be many opportunities to contribute and to nudge things in our direction. Thanks for reading, Dimi [1]https://oami.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/web/observatory/ip-contribution [2] https://oami.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/document_library/obse… 2014-09-19 20:18 GMT+02:00 Timothy Vollmer &lt;tvol(a)creativecommons.org&gt;rg>:

2014-09-27 1:39 GMT+02:00 Luis Villa &lt;lvilla(a)wikimedia.org&gt;rg>: I think key to this question is the 'problem' part. For Public Domain that is easy: no it is not. At all. For the free licenses, it would require more of an opinion survey than an economical approach. Something very interesting, but perhaps not the kind of study they are best at? It would (in my view) require mostly asking contributors if they are limiting their contributions because of infringements. Interesting, and sounds like something CC or in general open license movements (including free software) might have investigated to get some base numbers? I wouldn't suggest to start off with this though. -- Lodewijk

Good news, everyone! The Communia Association [1] has just joined the Observatory with the goal of working on this study. Communia is a European network dedicated to the public domain (which includes free licensing by their definition). Members include Kennisland, Creative Commons and many universities and research institutions. Their manifesto has, among others, been signed by WMFR, WMIT, WMAR, WMNL, WMCH, WMUK, WMCZ and many board members from other chapters. This year's plenary during which the study will be partly discussed is next week on Tuesday and Wednesday. I will keep you posted on the discussion. Cheers, Dimi [1]http://www.communia-project.eu/about 2014-09-29 18:37 GMT+02:00 Luis Villa &lt;lvilla(a)wikimedia.org&gt;rg>: