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Leaving Kennisland (pt. 2)

The text below is an adapted version of a text first published on the Kennisland website under the title “Time to move on: what we have done to improve copyright and access to cultural heritage”. Both texts are identical except for the last section. The version published here provides a more in depth reflection on the challenges ahead for digital policy making.

At the end of 2018 we will end our activities in the areas of copyright and cultural heritage. Kennisland has been working on these themes for over a decade but with the departure of Paul Keller, who has been leading these efforts, we have decided to focus our energies on innovation in Education, Cities and Care.

Internet access, civil society media and open content

Over the past fifteen years our efforts to create an open, knowledge driven society have taken a lot of different forms. Driven by the conviction of our founders that the technological revolution started by increasing access to the internet presented a lot of benefits to an open, inclusive and diverse society, we have worked on a wide range of projects that tried to leverage new technologies for social progress. This ranged from initiatives to improve internet access in disadvantaged communities like Digitale trapvelden (‘Digital playing fields’) to ideas ahead of their time like WIFI in de trein (‘WIFI in the train’)1.

The main catalyst in this area turned out to be the Digital Pioneers programme we ran from 2002 to 2010. Through this programme, designed to support small civil society organisations in setting up technology driven activities, we learned a lot about the potential and the challenges posed by the rapid digitisation of society. One of these challenges that we identified early on was how copyright and other forms of intellectual property were not evolving at the same speed as technology. This meant that technology enabled many activities that were in conflict with copyright and other laws. Therefore, in 2003, we started the project DISC (Domain Innovative Software and Content). Together with Waag Society we helped civil society organisations to leverage the power of open source software and open content. Our involvement in the emerging field of open content led us to set up Creative Commons Nederland, which Kennisland ran (together with the Institute for Information Law) from 2005 until 20182.

Working on the development and promoting the use of the Creative Commons licenses was our first step into the area of copyright, and brought us in contact with the copyright establishment. In the fall of 2007, after years of discussion and relationship building, we launched a pilot project with Buma/Stemra that for the first time allowed members of a collective management organisation (music authors) to share some of their works under an open license. This breakthrough later provided the basis for a flexible model that gives Buma/Stemra members more say over how their rights are managed.

Opening up cultural heritage

Also in 2007, Kennisland, together with the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision, the EYE Filmmuseum and the National Archives embarked on an ambitious project to digitise the audio visual memory of the Netherlands. At the time, the project called Images for the Future was the largest digitisation project in Europe. Kennisland was responsible for the copyright, communication and business model aspects of the project. During the project (2007-2014) the project partners restored, preserved and digitised over 90,000 hours of video, 20,000 hours of film, 100,000 hours of audio and 2,500,000 photos.

As one of the initiators of Images for the Future our priority was to make sure that the digitised works would become available online under conditions that would allow reuse. With regards to this objective the project turned out to be less successful. Regretfully only a small percentage of the overall collections could be made available online, mainly because of unresolved copyright issues. Copyright turned out to be a much more thorny issue than we had expected. The original project plan was based on the assumption that copyright owners would provide permission for the digitised material to be used in return for payment. In reality, most of them did not, as the economic incentive never materialised3.

However, we did manage to demonstrate the impact of making cultural heritage collections available under open licenses through platforms such as Open Images4 and the collaboration between the National Archives and Wikimedia. The latter illustrated that by sharing content on open platforms, institutions could reach new and larger audiences. These experiments around opening up collections for reuse became very influential for the nascent OpenGLAM movement. Realising that opening up GLAM collections (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) was primarily a matter of working with public domain works and metadata, we worked with Creative Commons on developing the tools to facilitate this5.

From 2009 onwards we also worked with collective rights management organisations on a number of pilot projects that explored the possibility of extended collective licensing as a mechanism to get more digitised cultural heritage available online. These projects proved to be successful and in response in 2013 cultural heritage institutions and collective rights management organisations joined forces (article available in Dutch only) to ask the Dutch legislator to provide a legal basis for extended collective licensing6.

Based on our work in the cultural heritage sector we were an early partner of Europeana, the EU funded platform that brings together digitised cultural heritage from thousands of libraries, archives and museums across the EU. Europeana provided us with an opportunity to apply the lessons that we had learned in the Images for the Future project on a wider scale. Together with the Institute for Information Law and the Bibliothèque Nationale de Luxembourg we developed a licensing framework that ensures full reusability of the metadata aggregated by Europeana. It encourages institutions to make their collections available for reuse under open licenses7. Today, ten years later, Europeana is the biggest aggregator of openly licensed cultural heritage resources, hosting more than twenty million freely licensed works8. The success of the Europeana Licensing Framework, which focuses on clear rights information for end users promotes reuse, has inspired other cultural heritage aggregators around the globe9, such as the Digital Public Library of America. Over the years of our collaboration Europeana has developed into one of the leading voices advocating for open access to cultural heritage and for the protection of the Public Domain10. We are proud to have been a driver of this.

Since 2016 we have also worked with Europeana on making sure that the ongoing EU copyright reform will improve the ability of cultural heritage institutions to make more of their collections available online. While the reform process is not concluded, there are indications that the EU copyright reform package will finally provide a workable answer for the copyright problems faced by libraries, museums and archives engaged in large scale digitisation efforts.

But our fight for better copyright rules11 extends further than improving the position of cultural heritage institutions. As a founding member and core contributor of the International COMMUNIA Association we have been advocating for a more user-friendly and modern EU copyright framework. Together with our partners we have been advocating for Europe-wide rules12 that benefit educators13 and scientists, and encourage innovation and broad access to knowledge and culture. The fight for a more sensible copyright system remains an uphill battle. The legislative fight over the Digital Single Market Copyright Directive14 is still ongoing, and while it looks like we (together with our partners) have achieved substantial improvements for the cultural heritage and the educational sectors, it is also clear that copyright will continue to serve as a major barrier to unlocking the full potential of digital technologies for public institutions and civil society at large.

What’s next?15

As we look back at almost fifteen years of activities, it is clear that many of the hopes that drove us to invest in these areas have failed to materialise. Instead of contributing to a more decentralised, democratic and equitable society, the digital revolution has brought us an increasingly centralised digital space that is undermining democracy and personal self-determination. At the same time, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is likely to raise an entirely new set of issues.

So why are we stopping our activities in this area when there is more urgency to act than ever?

We feel that after fifteen years we have exhausted our ability to intervene in meaningful ways. As an organisation that is entirely project-funded we need to find funders that are willing to pay for our interventions. Most funders that we have worked with prefer to fund activities/interventions that directly address a specific problem or issue that is relevant to their own mission (such as cultural heritage institutions for whom we have worked on copyright reform) or business (such as tech companies who have supported our copyright reform work). Such funding is usually tied to concrete opportunities or threats (like the ongoing EU copyright reform) and as such a lot of our work in the past years has been reactive to these kinds of threats and opportunities.

This has allowed us to change a lot of things for the better for the organisations and sectors that we have been working for. At the same time it is clear that we (as part of a bigger movement) have failed to counter the general trend towards an online space that is more and more dominated by a small number of powerful platforms that have built their dominance by extracting more an more of our private and public information. This situation poses a challenge for those like us who are part of the open movement. By advocating for opening up access to data, culture and information we have contributed to a favourable environment in which these platforms have come to dominate the online space.

If we want to reverse these developments and double down on our efforts to create a more decentralised, democratic and equitable society, there is a clear need for developing a more strategic, forward-looking policy agenda that furthers the policy objectives of the open movement.

Despite our long and successful track record in this field, Kennisland is no longer the place where this can happen. Both the funding model (dominated by relatively short-term project funding) and the relationship with our network of partners with whom we work on concrete social challenges (and who expect us to deliver concrete interventions in their immediate reality) drove us to the conclusion that Kennisland is no longer the place for long-term strategic policy work with an international focus. This is why I have decided to take these ambitions elsewhere.

Over the course of 2019 I hope to develop the foundations for a new entity that can be the host for these ambitions and that can become the basis for policies that rethink the digital environment in the light of what we have learned over the last decade and a half.


  1. Our 2005 project proposed to install WIFI networks in all trains. It took more than ten years before a majority of the Dutch trains were equipped with WIFI. These days most of them (with the notable exception of the “Intercity direct” service between Amsterdam and Rotterdam) broadcast our old project name as the SSID of their free WIFI networks. ↩︎

  2. In 2018 Creative Commons Netherlands was relaunched as a chapter of the Creative Commons Global Network. The Dutch chapter is chaired by Maarten Zeinstra (who previously worked at Kennisland) and our own Lisette Kalshoven serves as the global network representative. ↩︎

  3. You can find a more in-depth analysis of the results of the project in our publication ‘Images of the Past – 7 years of Images for the Future’. ↩︎

  4. Open Images became an important source of historical video content for Wikipedia, with large audiences. For example, in October 2018: 5,6 million pageviews↩︎

  5. In 2010 Creative Commons launched the CC0 public domain waiver which later became the de facto standard for sharing cultural heritage metadata. In 2010 Creative Commons launched the Public Domain Mark intended to label works that are in the Public Domain. ↩︎

  6. In 2015 the government responded by announcing that they intended to introduce Extended Collective Licensing into the Dutch copyright act. In the light of the 2016 EU copyright reform proposals this process is currently stalled. ↩︎

  7. To set an example, we developed Art Up Your Tab (together with Studio Parkers and Sara Kolster), a browser extension (plug-in) that shows users inspiring hi-res images from the rich collection of Europeana and the MET with every new tab or browser window that they open. The extension generates over 6 million views per year. ↩︎

  8. Since earlier this year our former colleague Harry Verwayen serves as Director of Europeana. ↩︎

  9. In 2016 together with Europeana and the DPLA we launched rightsstatements.org to better allow cultural heritage institutions around the globe to clearly communicate the copyright and reuse information of objects in their collections. ↩︎

  10. As expressed in the 2009 Public Domain charter which Kennisland drafted for Europeana. ↩︎

  11. Over the years we published numerous opinion articles on the subject of copyright reform. Read more about our efforts to modernise copyright law in the EU↩︎

  12. See copyrightexceptions.eu for research on the fragmented nature of user rights in the EU copyright framework that we have undertaken in 2016. ↩︎

  13. The education community (teachers, educators, lawyers, researchers, librarians, activists, experts on copyright) joins forces to ask for a better copyright for education. Check out the campaign website copyrightforeducation.eu ↩︎

  14. A controversial proposed European Union directive intended to ensure “a well-functioning marketplace for the exploitation of works and other subject-matter … taking into account in particular digital and cross-border uses of protected content.” Read more ↩︎

  15. You can find the (much shorter) original version of this paragraph that provides the perspective of Kennisland on the Kennisland website↩︎

Young and reckless / bye bye facebook

20 Aug 2013 | 204 words | facebook messengers social media vancouver

So I finally killed (well deactivated) my Facebook account this morning after not using it for a month. in order to do so I had to log on one last time. Turns out that while I was away had tagged me in this picture taken at the 1st human powered rollecoaster in Vancouver in 1996:

Young and reckless

Guess this is facebook’s farewell present to me: A picture where I am young, reckless & blond! If my memory serves me correctly this shot was taken after I had been eliminated in the semi (or quarter) finals of the main competition in Vancouver by crashing my bike so badly that i twisted my rear wheel. At that point I had been the last rider competing on a fixed gear bike after having edged out a victory from Riche Ditta (on the left with the white cap) in the previous round. Richie helped me finding a replacement rear wheel (with tubulars!) so that we could have another race in the fixed gear only competition, which he then won from me.

Bonus: probably also the earliest photographic evidence of me wearing the bicycle chain wristband which I am still wearing on this day about 17 years later.

Apparently the Dutch do not understand the internet...

02 Dec 2009 | 257 words | netherlands social media stupidity

So there is this theory that while technology progresses to produce ever more intelligent technology most of humankind are actually loosing intellectual and cognitive capacities as a result of their dependence on these technologies. The obvious example of this is the proliferation of GPS navigation devices that has resulted in most people loosing even the most basic navigation skills (like finding the way to the next coffee-shop).

The 2009 end of the year zeitgeist that has just been published by Google contains even more proof for the inverse relation between technology and cognitive capabilities. Lets take a look at the 10 most popular search terms for the Netherlands:

Eight of these are the names of websites without their respective top level domain endings. Guess this means that the majority of the Dutch internet population is either too stupid to remember TLDs or to lazy to type them into the browser bar. Both explanations do not necessarily shine a good light on the cognitive capacity of those using google.nl.

Even more worrisome is the fifth most popular search term (‘google‘). Not sure how to interpret this (extremely bad short term memory? boredom that results in the urge to get lost in endless feedback loops? …?). The third most popular search term (‘online’) seems to fall in almost the same category. Apparently people are not realizing that they are online when they have access to google. And in case you are done finding you favorite website whose URL you cannot remember you can always talk about the weather (#6).

The human factor

16 Mar 2006 | 468 words | migration technology pakistan social media

One of the more prominent themes at CeBIT this year was the whole security/surveillance/biometric systems complex. hall 6 and 7 where full of companies demonstrating that you can stick an RFID chip on just about anything in order to then read it and know where just about everything comes from or goes to or belongs to or how much it costs. (only thing they did not show was that thanks to RFID you can now infect your cat with a computer virus).

On extremely popular sub-genre of things you can slap an RFID tag on are passports (interesting to think of what happens if your passport gets infected by an RFID virus transmitted by the cat of your host in a far away country, but i am getting distracted here…) and lots of countries showed their ePassport systems on the floor. The booth of Pakistan’s National Database & registration Authority (NARDA) was extremely entertaining not only because they had these wonderful multi identity passports to demonstrate their machines but also because they where extremely detailed in explaining their system and allowed me to take photographs of just about everything. As a good-bye present i got a bunch of brochures including one about the ‘Multi Biometric e-Passport Project’ currently being implemented in Pakistan:

The aim of this project is to create a highly secure integrated system encompassing immigration - Automated Border Control and passport issuance […] while ensuring the genuinenness of the holder as a valid Pakistani citizen. […] The system requires minimum human intervention that ensures transparency while maintaining ease of exit/entry of citizens without the ordinary people being harassed unnecessarily.

While i do not want to contribute to unnecessary harassment of the ordinary people (unnecessary harassment should be strictly reserved to criminals and terrorists who can easily be spotted because they have a beard?behave differently?will not get a passport because they are not ordinary? …??) i do have a slight suspicion that either the system minimizes human intervention so much that the operators get bored that the operators do not really regard security as their prime concern. otherwise it would be difficult to explain why a number of screen shots in the brochure reveal that next to the Pakistani passport system application the machine is running a anonymous web based chat client (see the iloveIM.com and x7.iloveim.com tabs in the task bar):

Screenshot of pakistani passport system

I am not sure if it really makes sense to develop a highly secure system and then have the operators IM with unidentifiable others while having access to the sensible data in plain text. On the other hand being on IM is getting a more and more important part of the social fabric and why should one not use the connectivity provided by the employer for a chat or two?

More subway craziness

24 Oct 2005 | 129 words | social media public transport sao paulo

Seems that not only the people on the São Paulo Metro like strange combinations, but so do the vending machines (Vending machines for books on public transport systems have been covered elsewhere). In any case the book vending machine at the Barra Funda metro station offers an interesting combination of titles for R$ 4.99 (€2.20) each. Next to two titles by Niccolò Machiavelli (‘The Art of War’ and ‘The Prince’) there is a book about the immensely popular (at least in Brazil) social software application orkut (‘orkut – who do you know’):

This combination does of course a number of questions: who reads books about orkut? And who the fuck gets the urge to read Machiavelli on the subway? And what is the relationship between google and Machiavelli anyway?

How to email the Hezbollah?

01 Jun 2005 | 158 words | lebanon social media politics religion security

Before meeting with a PLO representative who runs a youth center in Shabra. we had to send scans of our passports to Hezbollah so they could run a background check on us before our visit with one of their media representatives on thursday. After having had our passport scanned at an internet cafe in Beirut’s hamra district we were supposed to send them to a given @yahoo.com email adress. But how do yo write an email to hezbullah, how do you start? ‘inshallah’? ‘grüss gott’? in the end we settled for ‘to whom it may concern’ still asking ourselves if it would be wise to send this email via my work smtp server to an Hezbollah email adress that is registered with an US provider. In the end i never send the email as the uplink was way to slow for sending 9 passport scans and a journalist friend offered to send the files from his home instead.

meanwhile... is the personal weblog of Paul Keller. I am currently policy director at Open Future and President of the COMMUNIA Association for the Public Domain. This weblog is largely inactive but contains an archive of posts (mixing both work and personal) going back to 2005.

I also maintain a collection of cards from African mediums (which is the reason for the domain name), a collection of photos on flickr and a website collecting my professional writings and appearances.

Other things that i have made online: