Creative Commons’ Assistant Director, Neeru Paharia will be on a panel titled Music in the Digital Era this Thursday at the UC Davis School of Law. The panel, cosponsored by the Entertainment and Sports Law Society and California Lawyers for the Arts, will focus on the effects of digital mediums and internet downloading on the music industry.

Creative Commons and GLOCOM release official Japanese copyright licenses for iCommons Japan, the first country-specific adaptation of the open content system.

Palo Alto, USA, and Tokyo, Japan – Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, and GLOCOM, its Japanese affiliate, today announced the official roll out of their iCommons Japan licenses.

“The launch of the Japanese iCommons licenses is a major milestone for both Creative Commons and the global free culture movement, generally,” said Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons’ chairman and professor of law at Stanford University. “We would like to give special recognition to GLOCOM, and to Yuko Noguchi and Emi Wakatsuki, the lawyers whose dedication helped make this possible.” Lessig also acknowledged the contributions and comments of Machina, http://homepage3.nifty.com/machina/, a technology commentator and Japan-based blogger.

“We are pleased to be among the first international Commons (iCommons) participants,” said Motohiro Tsuchiya, project lead iCommons Japan and assistant professor and senior research fellow at GLOCOM, International University of Japan. “This launch is a joint effort of many ‘commoners’ here in Japan. It has always been part of our age-old culture to share creative works such as drawings, poetry, music and more. iCommons Japan is a natural extension of this practice.”

The licenses, translated into the Japanese language and adapted to Japanese law, allow copyright holders easily to inform others that their works are free for copying and other uses, under specific conditions – to declare “some rights reserved.” These self-help tools, which are free of charge, offer new ways to distribute creative works on generous terms along the rich spectrum between full copyright and public domain. Authors and artists in Japan can now express a preference for sharing their work on their own terms.

Japanese-speaking visitors to the Creative Commons Web site now automatically view a full Japanese translation of the license choice process as the site detects the users’ web browser settings.

See https://creativecommons.org/license/?lang=ja for the license selection page in Japanese, and https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/jp/ for an example of a Japan-specific license.

Japan is the first country to launch iCommons licenses.

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 Glocom

GLOCOM was established in 1991 as a social science research institute specializing in the study of information society as well as Japanese society. From the outset it was thought that the collection and dissemination of information through the utilization of computer networks was important, and this goal was realized in 1993 when the center established an Internet connection. Ever since, by utilizing the most up-to-date information and communication technologies, GLOCOM has been able to engage in various research activities, including generation of policy proposals and involvement in education-related projects. GLOCOM has set out to be a modern information “intelprise,” an institution promoting the distribution and sharing of “wisdom.”

For more information about GLOCOM, visit http://www.glocom.ac.jp/.

Contact

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

Motohiro Tsuchiya, (Tokyo)
Project Lead, iCommons Japan
Assistant Professor, Senior Research Fellow, GLOCOM
taiyo@glocom.ac.jp

Glenn Otis Brown (Palo Alto)
Executive Director, Creative Commons
glenn@creativecommons.org

I am very happy to announce that our Japanese-law and -language licenses are now available for use from our site. Just select “Jurisdiction: Japan” when choosing a license, and the site will point you to the right document. For those with browsers set to English, the Commons Deed will appear in English. For those with broswers set to Japanese, in Japanese. And the underlying legal code is in Japanese.

This is a major milestone for Creative Commons, and I’d like to extend a special thank you to GLOCOM for driving iCommons Japan, to Yuko Noguchi and Emi Wakatsuki for their extraordinary efforts, and to Machina for her keen insights at various points in the drafting process.

Ben Adida, one of our tech advisors, will attend the Semantic Web portion of the World Wide Web Consortium Plenary Session this Thursday and Friday in Cannes, France. RDF, the technology we chose 18 months ago to build our machine-readable licenses, recently became a finalized W3C recommendation.

Today we announce a search engine prototype exclusively for finding Creative Commons licensed and public domain works on the web.

Indexing only pages with valid Creative Commons metadata allows the search engine to display a visual indicator of the conditions under which works may be used as well as offer the option to limit results to works available licenses allowing for derivatives or commercial use.

This prototype partially addresses one of our tech challenges. It still needs lots of work. If you’re an interested developer you can obtain the code and submit bugs via the cctools project at SourceForge. The code is GNU GPL licensed and builds in part upon Nathan Yergler’s ccRdf library.

We also have an outstanding challenge to commercial search engines to build support for Creative Commons-enhanced searches.

We’re happy to announce the winners in our GET CREATIVE!: Moving Images Contest. Last fall, we asked aspiring filmmakers and flash artists to create a short film that explained the mission of the Creative Commons. Our panel of judges has selected the top three entries and they’re all terrific. We want to thank everyone that entered, everyone that helped spread the word, our judges for taking time to help us with the contest, and most of all thanks and congratulations to Justin Cone, Sheryl Seibert, and Kuba & Alek Tarkowski.

The New York Times today reports on a surreal U.S. Treasury Department Policy:

Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace “inappropriate words,” according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months.

Adding illustrations is prohibited, too. To the baffled dismay of publishers, editors and translators who have been briefed about the policy, only publication of “camera-ready copies of manuscripts” is allowed.

The article does not make clear whether the policy rationale stems from concern for the moral rights of authors in rogue nations.

“Copyright Enters a Grey Area,” by Noah Shachtman.

“Grey Album Fans Protest Clamdown,” by Katie Dean.

“Some Rights Reserved,” by Annalee Newitz.