Juan Carlos De Martin writes in with a report on last month’s Creative Commons Italy launch:

The Italian CC Licenses were launched in Turin on December 16th, with a
conference at the
Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli. Over 100
people crowded the attractive conference room of the
Fondazione, with several journalists in attendance to cover the event.

The first part of the program prepared by the iCommons Italy Affiliate
Institutions (University of Turin
Law School and IEIIT-CNR)
coordinated by the Italian project lead, prof. Marco Ricolfi, consisted
of
presentations by Lawrence Lessig, who eloquently explained the
conceptual foundations of CC,
and by Christiane Asschenfeldt, who reported on the state of the art of
the iCommons project.

Marco Ricolfi then spoke about the process that produced
the Italian CC licenses, highlighting among the other things that like
elsewhere in Europe there is a need
for some adjustments to the role of collecting societies to second the
growing desire of authors to
distribute their works more freely. Juan Carlos De Martin, a computer
engineering researcher with IEIIT-CNR,
provided an overview of the CC technical challenges and stressed the
role of technology in
enabling the ‘Some Rights Reserved’ vision in cyberspace.

Talks that followed the lively discussion session were a selection
of the many proposals
submitted in response to a call made by the organizers back in October
2004.

The presentations touched a wide range of topics, including the
relationship between free software
and CC licenses (Alessandro Rubini), Radiodrome – a student web radio
experiment at the Politecnico di Torino
(Puria Nafisi and Jovi Berton), and a report on work in progress on CC
in a country next door to Italy,
Slovenia (Maja Bogataj Jançiç). The conference ended with
the words of an artist from another
neighboring country, France: Dominique, lead singer of the free rock
group Godon, explained
why Godon chose CC licenses to release their music on their web site.
For a complete list of all the talks, see the site of the event,
where most presentations (in English) will be available shortly.

The event was webcast live by IEIIT-CNR, using its free streaming
software,
the Open Media Streaming project,
which supports handling of CCPL licensing metadata.

After the conference, attendees were invited to move to the near-by
Imbarco Perosino,
an attractive venue right on the backs of the Po river, for a
celebratory “aperitivo”,
followed by a “Creative Christmas” party that lasted into the night.