The past year witnessed some major achievements for Creative Commons in the Arab world. Highlights included Al Jazeera’s adoption of CC BY for the world’s first broadcast-quality online repository and CC Jordan’s substantial efforts on the first Arabic license port.

2010 promises more exciting developments for the rapidly-growing CC community in the Arab world. Today the legal team from CC Egypt, headed by Hala Essalmawi, produced the first BY-NC-SA license draft adapted to Egyptian law (.pdf).

Thanks to the ongoing efforts of Hala and her team, supported by CC Jordan’s Rami Olwan and Ziad Maraqa, the Egyptian draft is now ready for public discussion.

The public discussion is an open forum where everyone —  from lawyers to active license users, from linguists to translators — is invited to contribute. If you have comments about different aspects of the licenses, whether in regards to legal, linguistic or usability issues, please feel welcome to join the CC Egypt mailing list and share your thoughts. Comments should be submitted as soon as possible to allow enough time for review, so we encourage you to post to the list before the end of March.

The Arabic and English versions of the Egyptian BY-NC-SA license are available, as is a summary of the substantial changes proposed by the legal team to port the licenses to Egyptian copyright law.

As efforts across the Arab world continue to expand and gather peer support, we hope that the Egyptian public discussion will foster more cross-border collaborations. This inter-jurisdictional support is a model that is particularly strong in the region, and hopefully it can become a viable approach for future projects.

Congratulations to CC Egypt, and we all look forward to comments from you, the public!