The past 13 days have been unbelievable. The support that you have shown CC and the CCi volunteer affiliates has been phenomenal. Tomorrow marks the end of the campaign so we’re making one final push to help us reach our goal. As always there are several ways to help us reach this goal: shop at our online store, make a donation directly, or just help spread the word by telling people that you think would be interested in helping us reach our goal.

Over the past 13 days we’ve heard stories from around the world. Today’s story however comes from our second home base – CC Germany. Creative Commons International, the international arm of CC, is based in Berlin – so it’s fitting that the final push to meet our $50,000 goal is highlighted by CC Germany’s story.

CC Germany

One of the first jurisdictions to port the CC core licenses was Germany. Germany strongly emphasizes moral rights and is rather regulated, in most cases to the benefit of creators, compared to what is common in other countries.

With a very active open source community and the ever growing network of bloggers, podcasters, netlabels and young artists it is not surprising that there is strong awareness for alternative licensing in Germany. The latest examples for this was the hugely successful re:publica conference in Berlin, where Creative Commons was a hot topic.

CC licenses in action could also be seen at the Open Music Contest of Marburg University’s Student Union. This was their third year of hosting it and this year’s contest was officially supported by Lawrence Lessig (who is presently on sabbatical in Germany). The contest facilitated such good work that they needed to produce a double sampler to make sure that all the winning bands were featured.

The Mobile film festival is where CC-licensed cellphone clips can be submitted and voted on through a website. Other CC related projects include OMDB.org, a user generated open media database which was recently launched and is growing by the hour, as well as the award winning IP law website irights.info and also various regional user groups that are forming throughout the country.

CC Germany itself is presently building up an affiliate team from all academic fields as well as a network of supporters. At Saarland University law students can now choose a seminar on Creative Commons within their curriculum. Next month Creative Commons will be featured in the german open source / TYPO3 magazine named T3N. We have also begun versioning the german CC licenses to 3.0, including a re-translation of the entire texts.

The growth and success of CC is partly due to the internationalization of our licenses and the education and dissemination of the importance of “free culture” by these affiliates. Please contribute to the campaign.