University College Cork will lead the license translation and work to expand global access to Irish culture.

Palo Alto, USA, and Cork, Ireland — Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, announced today the expansion of its International Commons (iCommons) project to Ireland. University College Cork (UCC) will lead the effort.

“We’re very excited to have University College Cork lead iCommons in Ireland,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford. “Their participation is crucial to our growing effort to promote an international cultural commons.”

“We look forward to cooperating with the Creative Commons project,” said Dr. Darius Whelan, project lead of iCommons in Ireland and Lecturer in Law at University College Cork Law Faculty. “This way we will enable creators of original works to disseminate that work widely through the Internet for the benefit of everyone,” said Louise Crowly co-project lead of iCommons in Ireland and Lecturer in Law at University College Cork Law Faculty.

Announced in March 2003, iCommons is Creative Commons’ project to make its machine-readable copyright licenses useful worldwide. As the lead institution, UCC will coordinate a public effort to adapt the Creative Commons licenses for use in Ireland. UCC will field comments on an archived email discussion at the Creative Commons website http://www.creativecommons.org/discuss#ireland.

Ireland joins Brazil, Japan, Finland, China, and Taiwan in the iCommons effort.

More about Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works, whether owned or 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 https://creativecommons.org.

For more information about iCommons, see https://creativecommons.org/projects/international/.

More about University College Cork

University College Cork (UCC) was founded in 1845 and is one of the constituent universities of the National University of Ireland. It was recently named Irish University of the Year 2003 by The Sunday Times.

UCC Law Faculty has an active research record in all areas of law and offers two specialized LL.M. programs — one in e-Law and Commercial Law and one in Criminal Justice. UCC Law Faculty is also actively involved in making laws available online, hosting the Irish office of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (www.bailii.org), and operating the Irish Legal Information Initiative site (www.irlii.org) and Irish Law Site (www.irishlaw.org).

For more information about UCC Law Faculty, please visit http://www.ucc.ie/law/.