University of Barcelona is spearheading the effort to translate Creative Commons licenses into Spanish and Catalan.

Palo Alto, USA and Barcelona, Spain – Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, announced today that formal work has begun for expanding its International Commons (iCommons) project to the Iberian peninsula, with both Spanish and Catalan translations in the works.

The University of Barcelona will lead the effort.

“We are thrilled to be working with the University of Barcelona,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford. “With its rich heritage and linguistic reach, Spain can serve as a model for many countries in expanding the global cultural commons. And we’re excited to begin work on Catalan versions of the licenses in parallel.”

“We think that Creative Commons’ project is very interesting and therefore we have decided to promote it from a public institution as the University of Barcelona,” said Ignasi Labastida i Juan, project lead of the iCommons efforts in Spain and Catalonia. Ignasi Labastida i Juan added, “Since the project of the licenses appeared, we thought that we needed adaptations for our own laws and in our languages. The idea to create iCommons Catalonia was very important to us since we are not well known but we speak the seventh language in the EU in terms of number of speakers – more than ten million.”

First announced in March 2003, iCommons is Creative Commons’ project to make its machine-readable copyright licenses useful worldwide. As the lead institution, University of Barcelona will coordinate a public effort literally and legally to translate the Creative Commons licenses. University of Barcelona will field comments on an archived email discussion at the Creative Commons website:

http://www.creativecommons.org/discuss#spain
http://www.creativecommons.org/discuss#catalonia.

Spain and Catalonia join Brazil, Croatia, Italy, Ireland, Finland, Japan, China, Taiwan, France, and the UK in the iCommons effort. Several other iCommons jurisdictions and languages will soon follow.

More about Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works, whether owned or in the public domain. It is sustained by the generous support of The Center for the Public Domain, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. Creative Commons is based at Stanford Law School, where it shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school’s Center for Internet and Society.

For general information, visit https://creativecommons.org/.

For more information about iCommons, see https://creativecommons.org/projects/international/.

More about University of Barcelona

The University of Barcelona, founded in 1450, is the oldest and largest of the six universities in Barcelona, and of the ten in Catalonia. It has 76,000 students – more than half of the total student population of Catalonia – and is the second largest in terms of students number in Spain. The University of Barcelona has four campuses, in different parts of the city. The University is the main Spanish university research centre, and one of the leaders in Europe, in terms of projects and the quality achieved in this field. One of the aims of the University is to create, transmit and expand the cultural, scientific, and technical knowledge and to contribute to society’s development.

The university is particularly interested in fostering international relations, and for many years has been the leader among European universities in numbers of student exchanges organized as part of the Erasmus program. Since 1995, the UB has implemented a quality program aiming fundamentally to design mid and long term strategies in order to evaluate and improve teaching and research in public higher education.

For more information about University of Barcelona, visit http://www.ub.edu/.

Contact

Christiane Asschenfeldt (Berlin)
iCommons Coordinator, Creative Commons
christiane@creativecommons.org

Ignasi Labastida i Juan (Barcelona)
Project Lead, iCommons Spain
University of Barcelona
ilabastida@ub.edu

Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director (Palo Alto)
1.650.723.7572 (tel)
1.415.336.1433 (cell)
glenn@creativecommons.org

https://creativecommons.org