Earlier this week Swedish museum Historiska Museet announced the adoption of CC licenses for their digital catalog (Google translation here). Roughly 63,500 item photographs, 1200 illustrations, and 264,500 scanned catalog cards are now released, depending upon the medium, under our Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license or Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

Project Manager Ulf Bodin notes that while the museum is starting out with a more restrictive license choice they hope to find ways to continue to open their catalog with less restrictions in the future. Like the Brooklyn Museum, Historiska Museet is looking at this as a first step, aiming to provide more openness as they better understand how the public will use these new resources.

To that end, author Nina Simon’s recently release, The Participatory Museum, is of related interest. Released under a CC Attribution-Share Alike license CC Attribution-NonCommercial license, the book explores ways to increase audience participation in cultural institutions to make them “more dynamic, relevant, [and] essential” destinations.

Voci Globali is a new collaboration between Italian newspaper La Stampa and Global Voices Online that aims to expose Italian audiences to citizen media from around the world. GVO will assist in translating select international blogs into Italian, releasing the stories they publish under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Initially twenty-five blogs from all world regions have been selected as the primary sources – including Afghan Women’s Writing Project, Repeating Islands, Registan, Talk Morocco, Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca McKinnon.

CCi Brazil List

Project Lead: Ronaldo Lemos da Silva Júnior

• License draft.
• English explanation of substantive legal changes.
• Post a message.
• Subscribe to the discussion.
• Read the discussion archives.

More about Fundação Getulio Vargas

Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), founded in 1944, is the leading Brazilian academic institution in the fields of Economics, Public and Business Administration. Being a non-profit institution, its mission is to expand the frontiers of knowledge and to contribute to the country’s social and economic development.

Since the 70’s, FGV has been active in the field of legal education, especially in connection with Economics and Business. Recently, FGV created its own law school at Rio de Janeiro (FGV Direito Rio). From its creation, the Law School has been playing an important role as an interlocutor in policy-making, as well as in the transformation of legal studies in Brazil.

One of its most prominent concentration areas is Law & Technology, where the School cooperates closely with the government and with private entities, aiming to foster the development of the Brazilian information society. In 2003, FGV’s Law School organized together with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School the I-Law Program, bringing it for the first time to Latin America.

More information: http://www.fgv.br/

CCi United States List

Project Lead: John Palfrey, Phillip Malone

There are currently no email discussion lists for the US project. The creation of United States jurisdiction-specific Creative Commons licenses is a far simpler project than “porting” or adapting the CC generic licenses to many other countries. This is because the generic licenses, while jurisdiction-agnostic, are based in many respects on the U.S. Copyright Act and other U.S. laws, are already written in American English and were originally drafted by American lawyers.

As a result, only one relatively minor, technical change was made to the generic licenses in order to make them jurisdiction specific to the United States. Paragraph 5 of the licenses, “Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer,” was revised to make clear that the Licensor offers the work only to the extent of any rights that the Licensor holds in it, and to add “marketable title” to the list of implied warranties that the Licensor is disclaiming. Because of some uncertainty in American case law regarding the extent to which various implied warranties actually would attach to Creative Commons licenses, and to which any such warranties can be disclaimed, these changes are meant to provide Licensors with the maximum possible protection from any possible liability in this area.

Since the only current difference between the generic CC licenses and the new, United States jurisdiction-specific ones is this minor, technical improvement, we determined that the typical process porting setting up an email discussion list for public comment and debate on the initial license draft, followed by preparation of a second draft based on comments those would not be useful or necessary in this case.

The Berkman Center

The Berkman Center is a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. We represent a network of faculty, students, fellows, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and virtual architects working to identify and engage with the challenges and opportunities of cyberspace.

We investigate the real and possible boundaries in cyberspace between open and closed systems of code, of commerce, of governance, and of education, and the relationship of law to each. We do this through active rather than passive research, believing that the best way to understand cyberspace is to actually build out into it.

Our faculty, fellows, students, and affiliates engage with a wide spectrum of Net issues, including governance, privacy, intellectual property, antitrust, content control and electronic commerce. Our diverse research interests cohere in a common understanding of the Internet as a social and political space where constraints upon inhabitants are determined not only through the traditional application of law, but, more subtly, through technical architecture (“code”).

The Berkman Center’s Clinical Program in Cyberlaw provides high-quality, pro-bono legal services to appropriate individuals, small start-ups, non-profit groups and government entities regarding cutting-edge issues of the Internet, new technology and intellectual property.