Creative Commons German Licenses Now Available

Matt Haughey, June 11th, 2004

Creative Commons, a non-profit organization seeking to promote the
sharing of high-quality content, today introduced its highly innovative
licensing system for copyrighted material to Germany.

Palo Alto, USA, and Berlin, GERMANY. Creative Commons, a non-profit
organization seeking to promote the sharing of high-quality content,
today introduced its highly innovative licensing system for copyrighted
digital material to Germany. The Creative Commons licenses, which are
already widely used in the United States, Brazil, Japan, and Finland by
authors, composers and other artists to share their work with others,
were transposed into German law by a team of professional lawyers and
legal academics. Creative Commons staff of the organization’s two offices
in Palo Alto and Berlin collaborated with the ifrOSS institute and
Professor Dreier from the University of Karlsruhe (TH) on the project.

“The launch of the German licenses is a momentous step towards creating a
new and truly global layer of reasonable copyright law,” points out
Lawrence Lessig, chairman of Creative Commons and professor at Stanford
University Law School, who is currently delivering a series of lectures
on intellectual property rights at the WOS 3 Conference in Berlin, the
Wissenschaftskolleg, Grunewald, and the European Commission in Brussels.

After launches in Japan and Brazil earlier this year, Germany and Finland
are the first jurisdictions in the European Union (EU) in which the
Creative Commons licensing-system (proclaiming “some rights reserved”
instead of “all rights reserved”) is available in local language
versions.

By adding Germany and Finland to the available range of jurisdictions
Creative Commons’s international expansion progresses at an accelerated
pace. “We look forward to being able to offer local language licenses to
all European users in the near future,” says Christiane Asschenfeldt, the
iCommons Coordinator, based in Berlin. “Our project leads around the
world — almost all volunteers — display a great sense of enthusiasm and
devotion to our dream of recreating a healthy public domain.”

About Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative reuse of
intellectual works — whether owned or in the public domain. It is
sustained by the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain,
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Hewlett
Foundation. Creative Commons is based at Stanford Law School, where it
shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school’s Center for
Internet and Society.

For general information, visit http://creativecommons.org/.

For our press kit, visit http://creativecommons.org/presskit/.

To learn more about Creative Commons’ international efforts, visit
http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/.

Contact

Christiane Asschenfeldt (Berlin)
iCommons Coordinator, Creative Commons
christiane at creativecommons.org

Glenn Otis Brown (Palo Alto)
Executive Director, Creative Commons
glenn at creativecommons.org