Journalists, bloggers, and CC supporters gathered last week in Bucharest to celebrate the launch of the localized Romanian Creative Commons licenses. CC Romania Project Lead Bogdan Manolea reports on the event’s success and how popular Romanian artists such as HI-Q have embraced Creative Commons’ flexible and free licensing system.

The public was interested in details about the practical implementation of CC licences starting with the way attribution works and ending with the practical advantages of choosing CC licences for an artist.

Florin Grozea from the popular band HI-Q pointed out that the licences are a valid solution for some of the problems that artists face, as the licences provide a set of rules more flexible than the traditional copyright. He also presented a practical case with their older, very well-known song “Gasca mea (My Mob)”, for which they received a lot of requests from teenagers to use the song to make non-commercial videos to share online (example). Since the purpose of the song was to share the fun spirit of the HI-Q band, the artists decided that such a request should be granted directly. With a CC licence, the conditions for using a creative work are very simple and easy to understand.

On this occasion, the HI-Q band announced that the vocal tracks from the band’s next single will be released under the Romanian CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. Fans will be invited to create remixes of the tracks and upload them to music-sharing websites. The best covers may also be included in the band’s next album.

Regarding other speakers at the launch:

The band Travka was the first group in Romania to release an entire album under a CC licence. Band member Razvan Rusu explained that they looked for “a kind of an open source licence” that could be used for their music, which is how they found and agreed to use the CC licences.

Ioana Avadani, from the Center for Independent Journalism, emphasized the fact that today, attribution might be more important than all the other author’s rights. She also pointed out that small TV and radio stations are forced to close down because of the demand to pay several copyright royalties. Creative Commons could offer a viable alternative.

The national television station TVR featured the launch of CC Romania, as did a number of blogs (Drept & Internet, Transindex, and Nicu). The event was organized by EDRi-member Association for Technology and Internet (APTI Romania) with help from the Center for Independent Journalism.

Update: The national television station TVR Cultural featured the launch of CC Romania, as did a number of online news portals Hotnews (Romanian) and Transindex (Hungarian), and several blogs (e.g. Drept & Internet, Nicu, Hoinar pe web and Webservator).

“George Gadei @ Travka” by LevyNagy, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-Share Alike license. Photo from a prior concert.