CERSA (Research Center in Administrative Science) will lead the license translation and work to expand global access to French culture.

Palo Alto, USA; Paris, FRANCE; Tokyo, JAPAN — 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 France. CERSA, a French research center dedicated to administrative sciences, will lead the effort.

“We’re very excited to have CERSA lead iCommons in France,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford, from Tokyo, where he is promoting Creative Commons’ international projects this week. “France is the latest country to join our most exciting project — to build an international cultural commons.”

“We are glad to host iCommons and to propose user-friendly, alternative licensing terms to authors. Our research group shares Creative Commons’ vision to associate digital code and legal code,” said Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, project lead of iCommons in France. Jean-Baptiste Soufron, co-project lead of iCommons in France, added: “We are very pleased to introduce the French version of the Creative Commons licenses. It was interesting not only to translate them, but also to adapt the licenses for full compatibility with our legal system.”

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

France joins Brazil, Italy, Ireland, Finland, Japan, 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 CERSA

Founded in 1967, the Research Center in Administrative Science (CERSA) is a joint research institute of the University of Paris 2 and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Dedicated to the study of administrative phenomena at all levels, CERSA is host to researchers in public law, political science, and sociology. The research group in Information Technologies, Law and Linguistics (IDL) works on Information Technologies regulation, governance, normative process and legal modelling. It also develops cognitive interfaces and applications within local and European projects and networks.

For more information about CERSA, please visit http://www.cersa.org/.

Contact

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

Melanie Dulong de Rosnay (Paris)
Project Lead iCommons, CERSA
melanie.ddr@wanadoo.fr

Jean-Baptiste Soufron, (Paris)
Co-Project Lead iCommons, CERSA
soufron@free.fr

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