Yep – another slow day for the CCi Affiliate Scholarship Campaign. I had high hopes for the state of the campaign yesterday as I walked into work and I refuse to let them whither. As you all now assuredly know we believe that it’s truly important to fund the CCi Affiliates participation in the iCommons iSummit by providing them with scholarships to attend. Yesterday I highlighted one of CC Chile’s cool stories and today I’m crossing the Atlantic and to summarize all the interesting things going on at CC France. According to Melanie Dulong de Rosnay CC France has been extremely active this year.

Unlike 2003, 2004, and 2005 we did not have enough resources to organize a broad CC France conference and party. We did organize a workshop related to Science Commons at CERSA in February 07 – an activity we will continue to focus on in the future.

Our main task this year has been to participate in the meetings “Open Works” that are hosted by the Ministry of Culture Copyright Consultative Council. The main tasks resulting from these meetings are:

• To evaluate the legal and economic aspects of the free and open licenses for content and software.
• To discuss with main copyright stakeholders including Collecting Societies, the goal of coming to a mutual understanding and compatibility of NonCommercial licensing with some Collecting Society statutes.
• To help two professors chairing the commission to draft a report and recommendations which will be released to the next Minister of Culture to be appointed after the elections.

The most interesting “Open Works” meeting was when Jamendo, Musique-libre.org, and Magnatune presented their business models. John Buckman of Magnatune and the CC Board of Directors explained (in perfect French btw) that it is indeed possible to make money after CC licensing one’s content.

Musique-libre.org is a non-proft org. that runs two platfoms: Dogmazik and Pragmazic.

Domazik hosts free music form 1295 bands mostly under CC licenses but also FAL & open music licenses. Pragmazik is a new libre music store that sells CC music (wav, mp3, flac, and some CDs). Pragmazik revenues are shared between the platform (17.5%) and the rightsholders (65%). This innovative philosophy is a private mutualisation: the remaining 17.5% is dedicated to a support fund for the development of open licensed music.

Under French law, 25% of the remuneration for private copy (and all the compulsory levies collected for reprography, cable, music performance neighbouring rights, and private copy which could not be allocated to relevant rightholders by the collecting societies in charge) must be dedicated to funds supporting creation, live events & festivals as well as performers training. However, artists who cannot become members of collecting societies (because they choose to release some or all of their works under a CC license) are mostly excluded from these grants managed by collecting societies.

As you can see these are issues that are critical and convoluted. They need to be attended to by people that are emmersed in the field. Help facilitate these important discussions and debates by giving to the scholarship fund today.