Cultural content and licensing

MANILA -- Prepared by c2o/Toy Satellite for the IPR Working Group, Asia Communication Rights Workshop, August 2004. Workshop participants were encouraged to stimulate awareness of Creative Commons licensing in their respective countries, work environments, organisations and projects.

New content as will as the rich cultural materials available to both regional and global communities can be protected with new, more collective and responsible means of licensing. Creative Commons have established a licensing scheme that stimulates cultural knowledge as well as its evolution in local, regional and global communities.

Creative Commons states "Offering your work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any taker, and only on certain conditions."

A major licensing project of Creative Commons is the International Commons. The International Commons is "dedicated to the drafting and eventual adoption of jurisdiction-specific licenses". At present the only Asian countries to have developed local licenses are Japan (Project Lead: Motohiro Tsuchiya, Glocom) and Korea (IPLEFT).

To stimulate and protect creative and cultural projects and products in the region, it is recommended that participants identify organisations in their countries that would become member jurisdictions. This would see the establishment of Creative Commons licenses specific to each country, within each countries legal framework with Civil Society involvement in the region.

For more information:
http://www.creativecommons.org/

A Creative Commons primer prepared by Sonia Randhawa, Center for Independent Journalism, Malaysia:
http://www.cijmalaysia.org/CreativeCommons.htm

For more information about the International Commons Project process refer to:
http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/overview

If you wish to translate Creative Commons introductory movies refer to:
http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/translating

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