CEO of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig along with VP of Science Commons, John Wilbanks, and myself, Jon Phillips holder of the title of the “human inbox” of Creative Commons [1] will all be participating at the 1st International Creative Commons Korea conference, “Open Culture in CC” on Friday, March 14 in Seoul, Korea. Lessig will go big with his keynote, Wilbanks will be presenting “Information Sharing: A Universal Solvent for Life Sciences” and I will round up the CC pack with my new presentation: Share or Die: Collaborative Media Projects from Art to Business. Yes, that’s right! I will be wearing more of my art hat at this one, but will round it up by discussing how individual practice must be sustainable all the way up the ladder to a large scale web company.

These presentations are the tip of the iceberg as brilliant Korean colleagues will cover many topics as they relate to Korean society in the large global context and Chiaki Hayashi from Loftwork in Japan will discuss running a business where Creative Commons licensing is core to its daily function.

I’m quite eager though to interact with our Korean colleagues on the recently announced Creative Commons licensing integration into Naver. And, I should note that by looking at the web traffic at https://creativecommons.org, there is a massive surge from Korea since the Naver announcement. The CC Korea blog states:

On 26 February, Naver, one of the major portal service providers in Korea, announced that it officially introduces Creative Commons License to its blog and café services and began a grand campaign for promoting CCL with cartoons, videos, etc. As for the largest portal service provider in user size at home, Naver has been struggling with copyright infringements, content and blog posting piracy activities of users. In a hope to find a reliable solution against them, Naver has chosen to introduce the CC license scheme. And it is very welcomed.

Relatively belated, but thanks to their introduction, most of the Korean portal sites take part in CC licensing. With this announcement, Naver becomes the third next to Daum , which has already adopted CCL to its blog service in 2005, and Paran in 2007. These portal sites are known to grab more than 90% of Korea’s portal market.

The key thing to note with Naver’s CC licensing integration and as a service that effectively everyone with a net connection uses, is that Koreans now have CC licensing front-and-center. Many know that Korea takes the crown as the most wired nation with 95% broadband penetration inside the home [2]. Korea, is a hyper-connected homogenous society that now has CC licensing on the most used service in the country. How long will it take for Korea to take the title of the country with the highest level of Creative Commons license adoption per individual?

UPDATE: Michelle already wrote a stellar blog post about the conference btw.

[1] Ok, ok, my long form title is Community and Business Development Manager.
[2] Trust me. From living in Korea, I’ve seen four year olds with cellphones on the Internet! What? And, now that I’m living 50% of my time in Guangzhou, China (the other 50 ‘cent in San Francisco), I’m feeling the burn without that 100 megabit in the home. Try 1 megabit for me…if I’m lucky!