The Creative Commons international scholarship campaign ended successfully today. We cannot thank you enough for all your help and support. Over the past two weeks we have profiled Creative Commons international jurisdiction projects to highlight the importance to the movement.

Although the campaign has ended, we still have some great stories remaining, which we’ll post over the next few days.

CC India marches ahead
CC India was recently and very successfully launched at IIT Bombay on January 26 [Republic Day of India], 2007. Joichi Ito and Catharina Maracke represented Creative Commons. We also had presentations from Nandu Pradhan, President and Managing Director of Red Hat India, film director Anurag Kashyap, Professor Deepak Phatak of IIT Bombay, legal lead Lawrence Liang and project lead Shishir Jha. For more info check out the press release and Joi Ito’s blog post. There were two workshops organized for the event.

CC India is planning to focus on three specific areas: Educational institutions and organizations, non-governmental organizations and younger artists in the media and entertainment industry. We have already succeeded in persuading a large educational initiative set up by the government: National Programme on Technologically Enhanced Learning [NPTEL] to actively consider using Creative Commons as an option for releasing content. The main objective of NPTEL is to enhance the quality of engineering education in India by developing curriculum based video and web courses. This program is being carried out by IITs (Seven), IISc Bangalore and other premier institutions as a collaborative project. Over 500 courses are finally expected to be developed under this program. Several other organizations are actively thinking of using CC licenses for their documentation.

We are also developing case studies to examine how CC licenses can be productively used for building robust models for the publishing, telecommunications, music and movie industry. We hope to keep the CC-India flag flying high. Lawrence Liang of Alternative Law Forum and a member of the iCommons board is the Legal Lead and Shishir Jha, Faculty at IIT Bombay is the project lead for CC-India.

It is imperative that as CC India and the other CC jurisdictions grow and become more influential that they have access to each other and their contemporaries so that they can discuss and debate issues that they encounter within their own jurisdiction and the larger world. Thank you for your support in making this happen.