Concluding our series on the Creative Commons international jurisdiction projects comes news from CC Israel (CC-IL) concerning their various projects and initiatives. Again, we can’t thank you all enough for your support during our CCi Scholarship campaign – it was a truly overwhelming response and promises to make iSummit 2007 an event for the ages.

CC-IL was established in 2004, when Ohad Mayblum, then an Israeli LLM student at Stanford University, worked as a research assistant to Professor Lawrence Lessig. At Stanford, Mayblum learned about Creative Commons and suggested that an Israeli branch should be established at the Haifa Center of Law & Technology (HCLT) – HCLT Directors, Professor Niva Elkin–Koren and Dr. Michael D. Birnhack, agreed. The first CC-IL project leaders were Mayblum and Elad Wieder and as of November 2006, Nethaniel Davidi and Lital Leichtag have taken over, while Mayblum is responsible for legal assistance.

In January of 2007, CC-IL completed localizing the CC 2.5 licenses. Although some of the license adopters (about 23,000 works use CC-IL) have yet to upgrade their old CC licenses to the latest version, CC-IL are in the process of locating those users and are encouraging them to both adopt the new licenses and take an active part in their local community.

Similarly, since last January, CC-IL have been vigorously updating their website in an attempt to make it more attractive, dynamic and up to date. CC-IL use their website to chart their progress, their projects with other organizations and, mainly, to post about local events. CC-IL has also begun featuring Israeli websites that use CC licenses on a monthly basis, creating a better connection between the authors and the community while giving the authors a sense of satisfaction.

The main goal for CC-IL in 2007 is to increase awareness of CC licensing options among Israeli authors, artists, and creative minds. By the end of the year, CC-IL intend to launch an Israeli version of ccMixter, complete in Hebrew and supported by a generous grant received from the Israeli Information Society (ISOC-IL). ISOC-IL joins the “Hamakor” (English) association (“The Source” in Hebrew) in supporting CC-IL’s goal for localizing CC applications (ccPublisher and ccHost) so that Israelis can easily use the applications with ease.

In order to promote CC’s mission, CC-IL are in the process of producing a few short films in order to increase awareness of the importance of CC licenses. CC-IL also plan on having a small conference in the coming weeks, at which CC-IL will discuss the Israeli licenses and their different uses, presented by interesting guests that have been able to use them in different ways. CC-IL are also hoping to throw the first CC Israel party, coinciding with the launch of the new ccMixter Israel website.

Most of CC-IL’s activities and projects are covered by the media, especially in dominant Israeli news websites like ynet.com, themarker.com, walla.co.il, nana.co.il and more. In addition, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has adopted a CC-IL license for the contents of his blog. Netanyahu’s use of CC comes at the time that the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) is discussing a new Copyright Act, and is a powerful statement from such a high profile politician.