Continuing our series highlighting the excellent work being done by Creative Commons international jurisdiction projects, today we present Creative Commons Italy.

Since the launch of version 2.0 of the Creative Commons Licenses at the end of 2004, the Creative Commons Italia Working Group, based at the Politecnico of Torino and composed of people from a number of different backgrounds – computer engineers, lawyers, social scientists – has been disseminating information on CC both on-line, through the CC Italy website (up to 600.000 hits/month), and off-line, by organizing two national conferences (Torino, 2005 and 2006) and speaking at many events, in Italy and abroad, including the Shareconference on E-Learning, the ICT Law International Conference, the Home Made Festival and the Milano Film Festival.

Creative Commons Italia members have been involved, either formally or informally, in many projects aimed at making creative content and culture more easily shareable.

Among these projects – some still ongoing – it is worth mentioning that La Stampa, one of the largest national Italian newspapers, has opened the archives of its prestigious supplements – TuttoLibri, TuttoScienze, TuttoSoldi – and put the content under a Creative Commons license: 1, 2, 3.

Last, not least, the fact that Creative Commons Italia is hosted by the Politecnico di Torino means that the interaction between law and technology is not only a theoretical concept; the Internet Media Group of the Department of Automatic and Computer Engineering, co-directed by Juan Carlos De Martin (who is also the Italian public lead of Creative Commons) has developed and is still working on on the first server for streaming audio/video content on the Internet that is able to understand Creative Commons metadata and clearly inform the user on the freedoms that s/he can enjoy when listening to a web radio or looking at a video-on-demand movie.

Finally, Juan Carlos De Martin and Marco Ricolfi have recently founded at the Politecnico di Torino the NEXA Center for Internet and Society, the first Italian academic think-tank for the advancement of technological, juridical and economic understanding of the Internet.