We welcome all those who are interested to view the Venezuela BY-NC-SA draft and contribute their comments this month. The next step for the Venezuela team will be to incorporate changes from the public discussion and to prepare the remaining five licenses for a complete Venezuela 3.0 license suite.

A huge thank you to CC’s Venezuelan Affiliate, Centro Nacional de Tecnologías de Información (CNTI) and to the CC Venezuela Team led by John Piñango for all their hard work!

A reminder to all that Creative Commons is wrapping up the 3.0 porting process. There will be a few more public discussion announcements as the last remaining ports enter this stage. The 4.0 development process is well underway. Contributions can be made at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0.

One of these is the Uganda 3.0 license suite, which we are pleased to announce is now open for public discussion. This is particularly noteworthy, as the Ugandan license suite is only the second tailored suite from the Sub-Saharan Africa region to reach the public discussion stage (after South Africa). These new licenses will be useful to many Anglophone African countries that share similar copyright laws and legal histories.

We welcome all those who are interested to view the Uganda BY-NC-SA draft and contribute their comments this month. The next step for the Ugandan team will be to incorporate changes from the public discussion and to prepare the remaining five licenses for a complete Uganda 3.0 license suite.

A huge thank you to CC’s Ugandan Affiliate, the National Book Trust of Uganda (NABOTU) and the Centre for Health, Human Rights and Development (CEHURD), and the large CC Uganda Team led by Moses Mulumba for all their hard work!

To contribute a review or question regarding the license draft adapted to Costa Rican law, please visit the BY-NC-SA 3.0 license draft page and click on the wiki’s discussion page to share your thoughts. You are also welcome to join and write to the CC Costa Rican mailing list, which will run in parallel to the wiki.

The public discussion is an open forum where everyone – from lawyers to active license users, from linguists to translators — is invited to contribute and improve the license texts. Comments should be submitted as soon as possible to allow enough time for review, so we encourage you to post to the list before the end of August 2010, when the discussion is scheduled to close.

Thanks to the ongoing efforts of Project Leads Rolando Coto, Carlos E. Saborío Romero, and Denis Campos with the support of the University of Costa Rica, and to Andrés Guadamuz for producing the draft and soliciting feedback from the Costa Rican public. We look forward to the discussion and to testing this new process!

The Australian licenses already have their first significant adopter, the Australian Parliament. The Parliament’s central web portal http://www.aph.gov.au houses the most important documents of the Australian Federal Government including all bills, committee reports and, most importantly, the Hansard transcript of Parliamentary Sittings, and the portal will be published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Version 3.0 Australian license.

Thanks so much to the CC Australia team, headed by Professor Brian Fitzgerald and Tom Cochrane and coordinated by Jessica Coates and Elliott Bledsoe at Queensland University of Technology, for their diligence and input. Congratulations!

From CC Australia:

The Australian v3.0 licences…have been developed over the last few years via a public consultation process. We thank all of those who provided feedback on the licences, particularly our colleagues at CC Aoteoroa New Zealand and within the Australian government and non-profit sectors.

Our main aims during the Australian v3.0 drafting process were to ensure that the new licences:

• complied with Australian legal requirements and conventions;
• aligned with the rights and restrictions of the Unported (ie non-country specific) licences provided by Creative Commons; and
• were clear and easy for creators and users alike to read and understand.

Based on these aims, we made the following changes to the licences:

• adapting the Unported formatting and language to bring them more in line with Australian law and drafting conventions – mainly by using localised definitions and introducing lists and headings;
• simplifying some of the language, where this would not affect the legal interpretation of the licence – many of these simplifications were adopted from the recent version put together by our friends in New Zealand;
• a few minor additions to clarify the operation of the licences in the Australian context, in response to feedback from our consultation process – these included clarifying how the licences operate with respect to sublicensing and adding language to ensure that the licences comply with the requirements of Australian consumer protection law.

We are happy to release these licences, which we believe provide clear, reasonable and legally sound options for creators and users alike and represent a new best practice standard for the CC licences in Australia. If you would like any more information about the licences please feel free to contact us at info@creativecommons.org.au. For more information on the versioning process contact the Creative Commons head office.

The launch will take place at the Creative Commons workshop on May 7 at 1:00pm during the Open CourseWare Consortium’s (OCWC) fifth annual conference in Melia Hotel. The three-day OCWC event brings together educators, administrators, policy makers, and other interested participants to examine the capacity of Open CourseWare to effect large-scale educational improvement worldwide. Many Open CourseWare and Open Educational Resources (OER) use Creative Commons licenses to grant copyright permission to easily access, adapt, and discover the materials.

“At a time when Vietnam Is taking great efforts to improve education and strengthen its creative industries, I see the Creative Commons launch providing a firm foundation on which to build Vietnam’s education and creative sector in the digital age,” says Dr. Lynne McNamara, Executive Director of the Vietnam Education Foundation. “We greatly appreciate the support of the OCWC as well for making this event possible.”

“CC Vietnam led a masterful consultation with the Vietnamese public and incorporated that feedback into the licenses. The team continues to connect diverse expertise and passions for the betterment of the local community. Creative Commons looks forward to the many promising developments in this dynamic and dedicated region,” notes Diane Peters, General Counsel of Creative Commons.

The next phase of CC Vietnam will focus on building multi-stakeholder groups to promote legal sharing in a variety of fields, such as photography, education, and music. Institutions and individuals in Vietnam are welcome to contribute to developing a roadmap for the national project and to join the launch’s proceedings on May 7.

Gracias al apoyo del Vicerrectorado de Informática y Comunicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo y la Academia de la Llingua Asturiana disponemos a partir de hoy de la versión en asturiano de las seis licencias de Creative Commons adaptadas a la legislación española sobre propiedad intelectual. El asturiano se convierte así en la quinta lengua de las licencias. El siguiente paso es traducir aquellos apartados del sitio de Creative Commons para que también se puedan ofrecer en esta lengua. Una herramienta más para compartir y disfrutar la cultura asturiana.

Thanks to the support of the Vice Rector of Information Technology and Communication at the University of Oviedo and the Asturian Language Academy, the Asturian translations of Spain’s six ported Creative Commons licenses are now available. Asturian is the fifth language in which the ported Spanish licenses are offered. The next step is to translate other parts of the Creative Commons website into the language. This is a great tool to share and enjoy Asturian culture.

2010 promises more exciting developments for the rapidly-growing CC community in the Arab world. Today the legal team from CC Egypt, headed by Hala Essalmawi, produced the first BY-NC-SA license draft adapted to Egyptian law (.pdf).

Thanks to the ongoing efforts of Hala and her team, supported by CC Jordan’s Rami Olwan and Ziad Maraqa, the Egyptian draft is now ready for public discussion.

The public discussion is an open forum where everyone –  from lawyers to active license users, from linguists to translators — is invited to contribute. If you have comments about different aspects of the licenses, whether in regards to legal, linguistic or usability issues, please feel welcome to join the CC Egypt mailing list and share your thoughts. Comments should be submitted as soon as possible to allow enough time for review, so we encourage you to post to the list before the end of March.

The Arabic and English versions of the Egyptian BY-NC-SA license are available, as is a summary of the substantial changes proposed by the legal team to port the licenses to Egyptian copyright law.

As efforts across the Arab world continue to expand and gather peer support, we hope that the Egyptian public discussion will foster more cross-border collaborations. This inter-jurisdictional support is a model that is particularly strong in the region, and hopefully it can become a viable approach for future projects.

Congratulations to CC Egypt, and we all look forward to comments from you, the public!

Photo via yopob.com, All Rights Reserved

Yoko Ono wants you to remix her track “The Sun Is Down!” whose stems are released under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license. You can download the sample pack which includes the track’s vocal effects, loops of bass, drums, sound effects, and Tenorion files.

But Yoko’s also running a contest to find the 10 best remixes. Here are the details:

Create your own remix of “The Sun Is Down!” by Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band, using as many or few of the samples from the pack and any original audio you wish to add.

When you have finished your mix, make an MP3 copy that’s as high quality as possible, but still under 10MB in size.

Email the MP3 of your mix, along with its name and your name, address, email and phone number to remix@YOPOB.com before 12 December 2009.

The Top Ten mixes will be decided by Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band.

The winners will receive special signed Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band prizes and will be featured on this site over the Xmas and New Year period.

Head over to Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band for the full contest details and to download the sample pack.

Internationalization

The upgrade is significant for several reasons, one being that Version 3.0 encompasses our long-held vision of establishing a compatibility structure to allow interoperability between different flexible content copyright licenses. This structure has opened doors for important adopters, such as the Wikipedia community and Wikimedia Foundation, who recently approved the adoption the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-SA) license as the main content license for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites.

The Polish upgrade to Version 3.0 was led by Alek Tarkowski, Justyna Hofmokl, and Krzysztof Siewicz and hosted at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at Warsaw University (ICM UW) and the Grynhoff, Woźny and Maliński Law Firm. Through these efforts and more, CC Poland continues to build the local Creative Commons community and promote free culture.

An enormous thank you to CC Poland, to Alek, Justyna, and Krzysztof, for their invaluable efforts to support Polish creators and to improve Creative Commons’ ever-growing international pool of free legal tools.