Poland’s Version 3.0 Licenses Now Online

Michelle Thorne, July 23rd, 2009

Internationalization is an essential aspect and major strength of Creative Commons. Our global efforts focus not only on establishing new jurisdiction projects, but also on working closely with long-standing national projects to upgrade localized licenses and to strengthen the commons worldwide. CC Poland, one of the earliest jurisdictions to found a national Creative Commons project, releases today its set of Poland-specific CC licenses at Version 3.0, Creative Commons’ most current license version.

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.

Open Education and Open Science in Poland

Jane Park, May 14th, 2009

Two very important conferences were held in Warsaw earlier this month (and late last month): “Open Educational Resources in Poland” (23 April) and “Open Science in Poland” (5 May). Alek Tarkowski, Public Lead of Creative Commons Poland, elaborates on the open education workshops held at each conference, one of which was led by ccLearn’s Ahrash Bissell:

“Two practical workshops on open education were organized by the Coalition for Open Education (KOED) in coincidence with two conferences taking place in Warsaw in April and May 2009: the conference on open education on 23rd of April 2009 and the conference on open science on 6th of May 2009. The first workshop, conducted by Susan d’Antoni from UNESCO and Richard Baraniuk from the Connexions project at Rice University, provided an overview of practical issues tied to open education, such as community building, IT tools and development strategies. The second workshop, led by Ahrash Bissell from ccLearn, focused on open licensing issues.

The two workshops were attended by a dozen representatives of NGOs active in the field of education and culture, as well as representatives from the Ministry of Education. Most important, they provided an opportunity for people working with open educational projects or considering starting such a project to meet and network.

As a result of the project, the Coalition for Open Education hopes to increase its number of member institutions, as well as enable the growth of open educational projects in Poland.”

For information on the conferences themselves, check out Alek’s detailed reports for both.

Read More…

Files seeded for Valkaama, “open source movie”

Michelle Thorne, January 16th, 2009

The source files have been seeded for Valkaama, a fresh collaborative “open source movie”, filmed in Krakow, Poland.  Director Tim Baumann intends to complete the post-production of the full feature movie publicly, with the help of volunteers both amateur and professional:

Here all available media sources are published in order to give you the chance to build upon them. If you want to participate in this project, by helping finishing the movie, creating remixes, making a new trailer or if you want to publish anything else here which is related to Valkaama, please get in touch with us.

Valkaama (trailer) is a drama set in Sweden and Finland and produced by drama school students and amateurs in and around Krakow. It tells the story of two disparate young men, each seeking his fortune, thrown together by fate to travel to “Valkaama”. As their paths cross, they do not realize how much of their journey has already been determined by their pasts.

Open Source and Open Content movies are still a rarity. Valkaama is one of the first movies not only to be distributed freely, but also to guarantee free access to all source data used and created during the production process. The project uses CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses to guarantee very flexible use and reuse of the produced material. Almost every text, picture and video, as well as all downloadable media, is tagged with a respective license. In some cases the licenses are included in the media files themselves.

Happy remixing!

Public Domain Works Celebrated in Poland

Michelle Thorne, January 9th, 2009

It’s after Three Kings Day, and after battling inboxes, CCi is back online and blogging. From our colleagues in CC Poland, some more exciting Public Domain Day news to ring in the New Year:

Poland’s Coalition for Open Education (KOED – Koalicja Otwartej Edukacji) has celebrated the Public Domain Day 2009 with a range of web-based actions and a press conference.

The Polish National Library, with the support of its director, dr. Tomasz Makowski, hosted talks about the public domain and related Polish projects at a press conference on Dec. 30. Bożena Michalska from the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library presented a list of over 500 authors whose works entered the public domain in Poland on 1st January 2009, based on the National Union Catalog NUKAT. Afterwards, Marek Siudym, a renowned Polish actor, recited a poem by Brunon Jasieński – a Polish futurist, who died in 1938 and who’s work is now in the public domain.

As a result of the well-attended conference, news of the Public Domain Day 2009 was published in a range of major media, including Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita dailies, Polish Public Radio, and the online portal Onet.

To coincide with the Public Domain Day 2009, Polish libraries have made available over a dozen works in their digital collections that are, as of January 1st 2009, in the public domain in Poland. A list of Polish works now in the public domain is maintained on the Coalition’s webpage.

The newly forged partnership, KOED, is striving to build and promote open educational resources in Poland. Bringing together common supporters of the Capetown Declaration principles, the Coalition is formed by one of CC Poland’s affiliate institutions, the Interdisciplinary Center for Modelling at University of Warsaw, and colleagues Wikimedia Polska Association, Foundation Modern Poland, and the Polish Librarians Association.