On the heels of our recent start of work on licenses in China, Taiwan, and Ireland, today we added Italy to the mix. The discussion has just begun, thanks to volunteers at the Department of Law of the University of Turin and the CNR Institute of Electronics and Information and Telecommunications Engineering.

The Department of Law at the University of Turin will lead the license translation, while the CNR Institute of Electronics and Information and Telecommunications Engineering (IEIIT-CNR) will take the tech lead.

Palo Alto, USA and Turin, Italy — Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, announced today that it would expand its International Commons (iCommons) project to Italy.

“We’re very excited to have Turin’s Department of Law working with us to bring iCommons to Italy,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford, at the CSI-Piemonte convention on ‘Knowledge as Public Common Property.’ “Our cultural commons, needless to say, would not be complete without their participation.”

“In a world where the space for creativity is shrinking dangerously, Creative Commons is acting to keep this area open. There was a dire need for this initiative, and we are proud to participate in the project,” explained Professor Marco Ricolfi, project lead and professor of intellectual property law at the University of Turin.

Professor Marco Ajmone Marsan, Director of IEIIT-CNR said: “We are glad to offer the technical skills of our Institute in the field of Information and Communication Technologies to support the activities of Creative Commons in Italy.”

First announced in March this year, iCommons is Creative Commons’ project to make its machine-readable copyright licenses useful worldwide. As the affiliate institution for iCommons in Italy, Turin’s Department of Law will coordinate public efforts to translate the Creative Commons licenses literally and legally — so that they are accessible in the Italian language and suit the Italian legal system.

In taking up iCommons, Italy joins Brazil, Japan, Finland, Ireland, China, and Taiwan in the international effort.

The Department of Law at the University of Turin will field comments in archived email discussions on the Creative Commons website:

http://www.creativecommons.org/discuss#italy

More about Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works, whether owned or public domain. It is sustained by the generous support of The Center for the Public Domain and 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 the Department of Law at the University of Turin

The Department of Law at the University of Turin, headed by Professor Gianmaria Ajani, coordinates legal research activity at the University of Turin. The Department also deals with fundraising for research purposes, the management of all PhD programs and continuing education in the area of law. It is part of the University of Turin, which, founded in 1404, is one of the oldest universities in the world. Today the University boasts 65,000 students, 1,300 professors, and nearly 800 researchers and assistants.

The Department of Law coordinates the research work of more than 130 law professors in different areas of law.

At present, the main research programs are in the fields of:

• EC Private Law and Harmonization of Contract Law;
• International Human Rights;
• Criminal Jurisdiction;
• Harmonization of Civil Procedure; and
• Intellectual Property Law.

For more information about the Department of Law at the University of Turin, please visit:

http://www.dsg.unito.it/.

More about IEIIT-CNR

The Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council of Italy), founded in 1923, is a multidisciplinary public research institution. The IEIIT is a CNR institute founded in 2002 by merging the forces of several preexisting CNR institutes and centers.

The IEIIT-CNR headquarters are located in Torino, with territorial sections in Genoa, Milan, Bologna and Pisa; the Institute is directed by professor Marco Ajmone Marsan. The IEIIT-CNR pursues advanced, multidisciplinary research in the field of information and communications technology (ICT).

For more information about IEIIT-CNR, please visit:

http://www.ieiit.cnr.it/.

Contacts

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

Prof. Marco Ricolfi (Torino)
iCommons Italy Project Lead, Legal aspects
Department of Law, University of Turin
info@creativecommons.it

Marco Ciurcina (Torino)
iCommons Italy, Legal aspects
Lawyer, University of Turin
ciurcina@studiolegale.it

Antonio Amelia (Milano)
iCommons Italy, Legal aspects
Trainee Lawyer
antonio.amelia@creativecommons.it

Juan Carlos De Martin (Torino)
iCommons Italy, Technical aspects
Principal Research Scientist, IEIIT-CNR
juancarlos.demartin@ieiit.cnr.it

Lorenzo De Tomasi (Sesto Calende, Varese)
iCommons Italy, Communication and creative initiatives
Communication Designer
lorenzo.detomasi@creativecommons.it

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

Thanks to the help of Dr. Darius Whelan and Louise Crowley, at University College Cork, we’re working on porting Creative Commons licenses to Irish law. There is an iCommons Ireland page with links to the discussion and a full press release describing the undertaking.

University College Cork will lead the license translation and work to expand global access to Irish culture.

Palo Alto, USA, and Cork, Ireland — Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, announced today the expansion of its International Commons (iCommons) project to Ireland. University College Cork (UCC) will lead the effort.

“We’re very excited to have University College Cork lead iCommons in Ireland,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford. “Their participation is crucial to our growing effort to promote an international cultural commons.”

“We look forward to cooperating with the Creative Commons project,” said Dr. Darius Whelan, project lead of iCommons in Ireland and Lecturer in Law at University College Cork Law Faculty. “This way we will enable creators of original works to disseminate that work widely through the Internet for the benefit of everyone,” said Louise Crowly co-project lead of iCommons in Ireland and Lecturer in Law at University College Cork Law Faculty.

Announced in March 2003, iCommons is Creative Commons’ project to make its machine-readable copyright licenses useful worldwide. As the lead institution, UCC will coordinate a public effort to adapt the Creative Commons licenses for use in Ireland. UCC will field comments on an archived email discussion at the Creative Commons website http://www.creativecommons.org/discuss#ireland.

Ireland joins Brazil, Japan, Finland, China, and Taiwan in the iCommons effort.

More about Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works, whether owned or 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 College Cork

University College Cork (UCC) was founded in 1845 and is one of the constituent universities of the National University of Ireland. It was recently named Irish University of the Year 2003 by The Sunday Times.

UCC Law Faculty has an active research record in all areas of law and offers two specialized LL.M. programs — one in e-Law and Commercial Law and one in Criminal Justice. UCC Law Faculty is also actively involved in making laws available online, hosting the Irish office of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (www.bailii.org), and operating the Irish Legal Information Initiative site (www.irlii.org) and Irish Law Site (www.irishlaw.org).

For more information about UCC Law Faculty, please visit http://www.ucc.ie/law/.

Wired News has a nice profile of our good friends and long-time Creative Commons supporters iBiblio, of the University of North Carolina.

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At a conference focused on video games and the law presented jointly by the law schools of NYU and Yale, the legal grey area of intellectual property and ownership of in-game items by participants has been examined by numerous presenters. The sale of credits and items between players in virtual worlds is fairly common, though standard property law doesn’t quite cover virtual property and companies running these games may also have rights to the contents inside their games.

Given those thorny issues, we were happy to hear the founder and CEO of Linden Lab, Philip Rosedale, announce that their multi-player online game Second Life has changed its Terms of Service (TOS) to transfer all copyright and intellectual property rights to users for any content they create within the game. Linden Lab also specifically allows for game content to be licensed by users under Creative Commons, so those items can be freely shared among players.

Here’s a good summary of the legal changes to Second Life’s TOS and our press release announcing this milestone event for gaming.

Linden Lab Preserves Real World Intellectual Property Rights of Users of its Second Life Online Service

NEW YORK CITY: Linden Lab, creator of online world Second Life, today announced a significant breakthrough in digital property rights for its customers and for users of online worlds. Changes to Second Life’s Terms of Service now recognize the ownership of in-world content by the subscribers who make it. The revised TOS allows subscribers to retain full intellectual property protection for the digital content they create, including characters, clothing, scripts, textures, objects and designs.

In addition, Second Life has committed to exploring technologies to make it easy for creators to license their content under Creative Commons licenses.

Speaking to an audience of digital rights specialists and virtual world enthusiasts at the NYLS “State of Play” conference, Founder and CEO Philip Rosedale described the new policy as a major breakthrough for users of online worlds.

“Until now, any content created by users for persistent state worlds, such as EverQuest or Star Wars Galaxies, has essentially become the property of the company developing and hosting the world,” said Rosedale. “We believe our new policy recognizes the fact that persistent world users are making significant contributions to building these worlds and should be able to both own the content they create and share in the value that is created. The preservation of users’ property rights is a necessary step toward the emergence of genuinely real online worlds.”

Unlike traditional online game environments where anything created in-world is owned by the service provider, Second Life has responded to its residents’ desire to own their work just as they would any other original creations. Under these terms they can create, and sell derivative works based on content they’ve made, or license the work to others.

Second Life residents began creating their world in October, 2002 as beta testers, and continued through commercial launch of the service in June 2003. In just over a year, more than 10,000 users have created a richly diverse world, filled with more than 200,000 objects, complex characters, a range of living situations from whimsical hobbit-style homes to urban apartments, to sprawling mansions, and special recreational areas including a 40-ride amusement park and an island retreat. Everything in the world, from the antique carousel to the hot race cars to the resident-abducting alien spaceship was designed and built by the residents.

The economy supporting this activity includes over 12,000 objects for sale. Each month, nearly 100,000 user-to-user transactions for goods and services take place, with more than Linden$19million in in-world currency changing hands.

“Linden Lab has taken an important step toward recognizing the rights of content generators in Second Life,” said Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University Professor of Law, and Founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. “As history has continually proven, when people share in the value they create, greater value is derived for all. Linden Lab is poised for significant growth as a result of this decision.”

About Linden Lab

Based in San Francisco, Linden Lab was founded in 1999 by Philip Rosedale to create a revolutionary new form of shared 3D entertainment. The former CTO of RealNetworks, Rosedale pioneered the development of many of today’s streaming media technologies, including RealVideo. In April 2003, noted software pioneer Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, was named Chairman.

Second Life launched in June 2003 after being named a Time Magazine “Coolest Invention of 2002” during its beta test. Currently available to all PC users via a download at www.SecondLife.com, the world of Second Life, which grows with the size of the community, is now close to 1000 virtual acres and by the end of 2004 should be as large as Manhattan. A Macintosh version is expected early in 2004.

About Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works, whether owned or public domain. It is sustained by the generous support of The Center for the Public Domain, the Hewlett Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur 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.

Remember that this is Eyebeam week at Creative Commons. Eyebeam is the cutting-edge New York gallery hosting the Distributed Creativity email forum on intellectual property and art this month and next. Creative Commons is moderating the discussion this week. Join up if you haven’t already and spill your thoughts.

A nice article on the Berklee Shares project we profiled earlier this week.

This week’s featured content is Andrew “bunnie” Huang’s controversial book “Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering.” The book is available for order from his site, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, and the text is Creative Commons licensed. The book has a colored history involving Microsoft, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), and potential lawsuits that forced him to self-publish it before finding a suitable publisher. The book site features sample sections from pages throughout the book.