The University of Barcelona hosted a great conference last Friday in their beautiful Aula Magna to celebrate the launch of the Spanish CC licenses – also available in a Catalan version.

Spanish project lead Ignasi Labastida i Juan had arranged for authorities from the regional government as well as from academia to present their take on the CC project. There was a wonderful presentation – Carta a Hipatia – given by Mr Carlos Sanchez Almeida, a Spanish abogado, asking whether we are truly ready to rebuild the ancient library of Alessandria by digital means. He included a great quotation from Cervantes, pointing out that in the 17th century Cervantes’s writings were circulated widely in Europe because they were effectively pirated! We’ll blog his talk as soon as it is available in English (the Spanish team is currently translating it).

Furthermore, there was a panel in the afternoon, featuring speakers from publishing, research and the arts, outlining their thoughts on intellectual property law and open access policies. During the break, we had a lively discussion – sparked by CC friend Javier de la Cueva, abogado – about whether in Russia (because of their terms of acceding to the Berne Convention) all works created before the year 1973 are actually in the public domain; clearly this is an issue which needs to be explored by us.

In the evening, we all got together again at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona. Barcelonas Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) is one of the best, newest venues for the arts in Barcelona. The CCCB normally hosts activities such as exhibitions, music, dance, courses, debates, lectures, and more. On this occasion, the Spanish CC team had organized a rather cool event – our CC video clip was shown, superbly translated into Spanish, followed by a short presentation on how to use the licences (the audience being mainly artists), and concluded by remarks from the panel and a rather lively questions and answers session in Castellano, Catalan and English.

The Spanish CC team, the panelists, some fifteen people from the audience and the iCommons representative then headed off to tame Barcelona’s night life and to celebrate the creativity of this ancient capital of Catalunya. Many thanks to all involved – check this blog for photographs and the above mentioned article soon.