The law-and-technology nonprofit Creative Commons offers a tool for authors and publishers to encourage innovation in developing nations while protecting their rights in the developed world.

Geneva, Switzerland, and San Francisco, USA – Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative and educational materials free to share and re-use, unveiled today its Developing Nations copyright license. Creative Commons chairman Lawrence Lessig and Developing Nations license architect Jamie Love announced the new license at the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue’s workshop on “The Future of WIPO,” in Geneva.

Like all of Creative Commons’ legal tools, the Developing Nations license is free of charge and allows authors and artists to invite certain uses of their work, upon certain conditions — to declare “some rights reserved” as opposed to the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright.

Specifically, the Developing Nations license allows copyright holders to invite a wide range of royalty-free uses of their work in developing nations while retaining their full copyright in the developed world.

“The Developing Nations license allows, for the first time, any copyright holder in the world to participate first-hand in reforming global information policy,” said Lessig. “The fact is that most of the world’s population is simply priced out of developed nations’ publishing output. To authors, that means an untapped readership. To economists, it means ‘deadweight loss.’ To human rights advocates and educators, it is a tragedy. The Developing Nations license is designed to address all three concerns.”

The license was designed by Jamie Love, an expert on intellectual property and development, in cooperation with attorneys at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, in Silicon Valley, and other experts on intellectual property and development.

“The new license makes it easier to expand access to knowledge and support development. It is a tool to make the resource-poor information-rich,” said Jamie Love.

About Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation founded in 2001, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works-whether owned or in the public domain-by empowering authors and audiences. It is sustained by the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Omidyar Network Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation.

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

To learn more about the Developing Nations license,
see https://creativecommons.org/license/devnations.

Contact

Glenn Otis Brown (San Francisco)
Executive Director
Creative Commons
glenn@creativecommons.org
1-415-336-1433

Jamie Love (Washington, D.C.)
The Consumer Project on Technology
james.love@cptech.org

Christiane Asschenfeldt (Berlin)
International Commons Director
Creative Commons
christiane@creativecommons.org

Press Kit
https://creativecommons.org/presskit/

Today the Creative Commons launched a new standalone license, dubbed Developing Nations. The deed lays it out simply: it’s an attribution-only license that applies within developing nations. The legal code defines developing nations as “any nation that is not classified as a ‘high-income economy’ by the World Bank.” which according to the World Bank’s site means it does not apply in these countries.

This license can be used in a few ways. It can be combined with something currently licensed under a more restrictive license, so that your photographs could be protected from commercial use in the United States, but if it also carried a Developing Nations license, those same photos could be used commerically in say, Brazil. You might also be a musician or photographer that wants to maintain full copyright in North America and Western Europe, but welcome use by others in the countries of Southeast Asia. More information can be found in today’s press release.

I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona today and tomorrow for the Open Source, Open Standards conference. Unfortunately I couldn’t make Larry Rosen‘s talk this morning, but I hope to catch Bruce Perens‘s this afternoon. I’m speaking tomorrow, but as with Foo Camp, this is the sort of crowd and event where I do a lot more listening than talking.

I’m at O’Reilly Media‘s Foo Camp this week, a weekend tech-folk retreat at O’Reilly’s Sebastopol offices. Lots of old friends from EFF, iBiblio, MusicBrainz, Mozilla, OSAF, BBC and more, plus plenty of new acquaintances. I’m a bit awed by the crowd and just doing a lot of listening and learning.

Colin Mutchler, featured in our second Creative Commons movie “Reticulum Rex“, is giving a live performance of his audio/visual work called “Free Culture” September 15th in Brooklyn, NY.

“Sourced by Larry Lessig and his new book of the same name, Free Culture is multimedia performance by Brooklyn based artist Colin Mutchler that mixes music, image, video and spoken word to speak his personal journey, both physically and digitally, through the last four years. ”

Last October we wrote about Gnomoradio, software that helps people share CC-licensed music.

Gnomoradio has made good progress since then. Check out the new screenshots.

One Gnomoradio screenshot. Click for more.

Now Slashdot has taken notice, with ensuing discussion.

Three Taiwan Golden Melody Award winners, including a famous singer and composer, Yue-hsin Chu, and a group of enthusiastic young Christian musicians have come up with what they call their first native gospel album — JESUS ROCKS.

JESUS ROCKS is the first Asian album using a Creative Commons license (Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike Taiwan).

The cover text reads: “JESUS ROCKS represents the sprit of reciprocal sharing. It also conveys the charity of Jesus Christ in English, Mandarin and dialects of Mandarin. JESUS ROCKS covers diverse styles, such as rock’n’roll, folk, blues and funk. So it is suitable for different generations to listen.”

Our project’s international roll-out continues. Two more countries have now come up with their local licenses.

First, on Saturday, Sep 4, Lawrence Lessig will be speaking in Taipei, where the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, as the Taiwan project lead, has completed the porting process and is now presenting the licenses to the island’s public. Special thanks to Yih-Suan from the Acadamia Sinica, who put most of the finishing touches on the Taiwanese licenses.

Second, in the Alps, the transposed Austrian licenses will be celebrated and discussed during the week-long Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Lawrence Lessig will participate in a symposium on ‘Commons & Communities – Social Life in the Digital Age’ at the Brucknerhaus on Sep 6, 10.30am, while Roland will say a few words on the launch event proper at the Brucknerhaus on Sep 7, 3pm. Much work on the Austrian licenses was done by Julia Kueng and Georg Pleger, our local project leads.

As an important signal for all open source projects and free software initiatives, Creative Commons also won the Golden Nica in the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica’s Net Vision category. Christiane will receive the prize on behalf of CC on Friday, Sep 3, at the Prix Art gala event in Linz.

Anybody interested in attending one of the talks above and thus getting in touch with us is welcome.

We’ve had our own beta search engine for the past six months, but it was mostly a proof of concept, to see if we could build a search engine that recorded the semantics of web page metadata. Like any proof of concept launched to the public, it was slow, frequently returned zero results, and was difficult to keep up to date. A few months back, the guys behind the open source search engine project Nutch contacted us and they helped us develop a new search engine based on Nutch, with support for Creative Commons metadata thrown in.

We flipped the switch last week and have been testing it ever since. Compared to the last version of our search engine, this one is blazingly fast to return results, the results are much more specific to what you’re looking for, and it is constantly keeping up to date on over 1 million pages with Creative Commons license info in them.

Here are some sample searches I came up with while playing with the format and options:

“Show me all photos of Paris that I can make derivative works from and sell afterwards“

“I’d like to find songs about Love that I can remix“

“Find me some CC licensed music videos“

“Has anyone ever written about the Statue of Liberty?“

Overall, a drastic improvement. If you find any bugs or come up with any other specific searches that the search engine performed well, be sure to drop a comment and let us know.

Ever had trouble convincing someone that copyright matters beyond just copyright? That it bumps into questions of censorship, freedom of information, even plain-old civics more every day? If so, here’s a nice anecdote to pull out next time.

From the AP:

The Defense Department spent $70,500 to produce a Humphrey Bogart-themed video called “The People’s Right to Know” to teach employees to respond to citizen requests for information. But when it came to showing the tape to the public, the Pentagon censored some of the footage.

Why? Copyright concerns. Read more.

Thanks, Chris.