Sylvia Carr, Creative Commons comes to the UK, Silicon.com, March 17, 2005. Excerpt: 'The Creative Commons has completed the UK versions of its innovative content licences, one step towards the organisation's goal of reinventing copyright and intellectual property law across the world. The licences for England and Wales, presently undergoing a final community review, will be available on the Creative Commons UK website in a few days while the Scottish versions will be available within a few weeks....Damian Tambini, UK project lead for Creative Commons, told silicon.com the UK licences will be quite similar to the US versions: "In porting the licences, we don't change the spirit of the licence... What we've done for the licences is to make entirely sure that spirit will be recognised in a UK court." One difference, for instance, is that the UK licences - there are six versions in all - do not allow the content creator to waive their moral right, which is allowed in the US....Creative Commons has seen interest in the UK primarily from galleries, museums, educational institutions and the public sector - organisations not interested in making money from selling their works. Perhaps the greatest ally has been the BBC, which developed a licence very similar to the Creative Commons for its Creative Archive, a repository of BBC content it will make available to the public for non-commercial use. The two licences are so close, explained Tambini, that people will be able to merge Creative Archive content with Creative Commons content. Another big vote of support has come from communications regulator Ofcom, which has recommended to the UK government that the Creative Commons licence be used for a potential 'public service publisher' which would commission public service content....While the licences are a significant accomplishment, it's clear Creative Commons has loftier goals when it comes to affecting copyright and intellectual property law across the world. "There's an opportunity for a new form of licensing to help to educate the public about intellectual property and make transparent to people who want to use material [that] it's legal," Tambini said. "There's a chance that we could develop a much more responsible culture about use and reuse of content," he continued. Christian Ahlert, internet projects officer at the Oxford Internet Institute and a member of the Creative Commons UK team, said the licences are "about getting people to think different" about intellectual property and "about keeping access to information and knowledge open".'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/18/2005 12:01:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
