CERSA (Research Center in Administrative Science) will lead the license translation and work to expand global access to French culture.

Palo Alto, USA; Paris, FRANCE; Tokyo, JAPAN — 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 France. CERSA, a French research center dedicated to administrative sciences, will lead the effort.

“We’re very excited to have CERSA lead iCommons in France,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford, from Tokyo, where he is promoting Creative Commons’ international projects this week. “France is the latest country to join our most exciting project — to build an international cultural commons.”

“We are glad to host iCommons and to propose user-friendly, alternative licensing terms to authors. Our research group shares Creative Commons’ vision to associate digital code and legal code,” said Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, project lead of iCommons in France. Jean-Baptiste Soufron, co-project lead of iCommons in France, added: “We are very pleased to introduce the French version of the Creative Commons licenses. It was interesting not only to translate them, but also to adapt the licenses for full compatibility with our legal system.”

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

France joins Brazil, Italy, Ireland, Finland, Japan, 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 CERSA

Founded in 1967, the Research Center in Administrative Science (CERSA) is a joint research institute of the University of Paris 2 and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Dedicated to the study of administrative phenomena at all levels, CERSA is host to researchers in public law, political science, and sociology. The research group in Information Technologies, Law and Linguistics (IDL) works on Information Technologies regulation, governance, normative process and legal modelling. It also develops cognitive interfaces and applications within local and European projects and networks.

For more information about CERSA, please visit http://www.cersa.org/.

Contact

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

Melanie Dulong de Rosnay (Paris)
Project Lead iCommons, CERSA
melanie.ddr@wanadoo.fr

Jean-Baptiste Soufron, (Paris)
Co-Project Lead iCommons, CERSA
soufron@free.fr

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

This week’s featured content is MobileWhack. It’s a new site dedicated to tweaks, hacks, and hints on how to extend the phone, PDA, music player, and/or any other gadget you might carry around in a pocket. The content is released under a Creative Commons license and if you’re a gadget freak, I can assure you there is at least one new piece of software or tip you can use if you check MobileWhack out.

October 23 we posted about Nathan Yergler’s ccValidator web app, developed in response to our list of tech challenges.

Challenged developers have been hard at work since:

• Nathan Yergler has created mozCC, an extension for Mozilla-based browsers that reads and displays CC metadata as you browse.
• In addition to creating mozCC and fixing ccValidator bugs, the amazing Nathan Yergler is working on ccRdf, a Python library for CC metadata.
• Steve Griffin has created a C# library for CC metadata.
• Lucas Gonze has created a spec for embedding CC metadata in SMIL.

Congratulations and thanks to Nathan, Steve, and Lucas! There are more challenges to take on, including many we don’t yet know about. Post about your work and ideas here or on the cc-metadata mailing list

Today’s a big day for annoucements at Creative Commons. Earlier today in Tokyo, Japan, the launch date of iCommons Japan was finalized and we have turned on automatic Japanese translation for our current license system. Starting next month, we will be offering optional licenses that apply to laws within the Japanese jurisdiction

Even bigger news is that the Brazilian government has commited to releasing code created with public funding as free software using the new CC-GPL, or Creative Commons Gnu General Public License. The CC-GPL will improve upon the existing GPL by adding in our interface of Commons Deeds and embedded metadata. The CC-GPL page is now offered from our license page, in Brazilian Portugese only for now, but soon will also be available in English.

Date is set for release of official Japanese licenses; Creative Commons’ website now offers Japanese translation of license selection process

Tokyo, JAPAN — The Creative Commons Japan licenses will roll out on January 15, 2004, announced GLOCOM, the Japanese research institute leading the Silicon Valley nonprofit’s efforts here. Creative Commons also unveiled a Japanese translation of its licensing process, available now on its website for use with the general Creative Commons licenses.

“Building an international commons is our most important mission,” said Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons’ chairman and professor of law at Stanford University, in Tokyo this week to promote Creative Commons’ various international projects. “GLOCOM has been the key to our launching the iCommons in Japan, and Japan is critical to our strategy internationally.”

“We are very happy to be among the first iCommons participants,” said Motohiro Tsuchiya, member of Creative Commons Japan and associate professor at GLOCOM, International University of Japan. “This is a collective work of many ‘commoners’ here in Japan, who have a unique culture of sharing creative works such as comics, animations, haikus, and more. It makes it easier for us to understand the spirit of Creative Commons.”

The Creative Commons Japan team today made its latest drafts of the Japanese licenses available for public review from the Creative Commons website, (see https://creativecommons.org/projects/international/jp/), and Creative Commons released its first content-negotiated translation of its licensing process.

Japanese-speaking visitors to the Creative Commons site now automatically view a full translation of the license choice process as the site detects the users’ web browser settings. More translations will follow shortly, said Creative Commons. (For the translated text, see: https://creativecommons.org/license/?lang=ja.)

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.”

More at http://www.glocom.ac.jp/.

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/.

Contact

Motohiro Tsuchiya
iCommons Japan Project Lead, GLOCOM
taiyo@glocom.ac.jp

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

Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director, Creative Commons
1.650.725.2565 (tel)
glenn@creativecommons.org

The Brazilian Committee for the Implementation of Free Software will release code under the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License, with Creative Commons providing new human- and machine-readable packaging

Rio de Janeiro, BRAZIL, and Tokyo, JAPAN — The government of Brazil today announced its adoption of the CC-GPL, an innovation on the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) General Public License, for the release of publicly funded software. Brazil is the first adopter of the new CC-GPL, which combines the proven utility and popularity of the GPL with Creative Commons’ innovative user interface.

“Brazil’s adoption of the CC-GPL is extremely significant,” said Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons’ chairman and professor of law at Stanford University, from Tokyo, where Creative Commons is presenting its projects in Japan this week. “Brazil has recognized that code produced and funded by the people should be made available to the people, and it has pioneered a tool that provides the best of both the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons.”

“Brazilian government adoption of the GPL is an enormous step forward in the cause of software freedom,” said Professor Eben Moglen of Columbia Law School and General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. “We welcome the chance to work together with Creative Commons to make the GNU GPL even more attractive to governments, which are recognizing that the principle of ‘share and share alike’ is the most efficient, most equitable, and most pro-development licensing strategy for software the public pays to create or to acquire.”

The first piece of software Brazil will release under the CC-GPL is TerraCrime 1.0, which analyzes and creates statistical reports on criminal activity in a particular geographic area, cross-referencing the data with other variables such as population, time of the incident, etc. The software was developed by the Laboratorio de Estatistica Espacial (LESTE — Spacial Statistics Laboratory) of the the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and by the Divisao de Processamento de Imagens (DPI — Image Processing Division) of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE — National Institute of Space Research).

With the CC-GPL, Creative Commons has applied its three-layer user interface to the FSF’s classic software license. First is the Commons Deed, a plain-language summary of the GPL’s key terms. Next is the Legal Code, the full license in all its detail — in this case, the General Public License, provided in both English and a Portuguese translation by the Brazilian government. Third is Creative Commons’ metadata, a machine-readable expression of the license, so that users can search for and sort CC-GPL-licensed code by terms of use.

Lessig said Creative Commons and the FSF will begin offering the CC-GPL to the general public shortly.

About the Brazilian Committee for the Implementation of Free Source Software

The Information Technology Institute (ITI – Instituto de Tecnologia da Informacao) is an administrative entity connected directly with the Presidency of the Republic in Brazil. It has appointed a Committee for the Implementation of Free Software, and it is responsible for steering the free software policy in Brazil.

About the Free Software Foundation (FSF)

FSF is the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Project, an effort launched in 1984 to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software: the GNU system. (GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix”; it is pronounced “guh-noo.”) Variants of the GNU operating system which use the kernel Linux are now widely deployed; though these systems are often referred to as “Linux,” they are more accurately called GNU/Linux systems. The Foundation also develops, publishes, and secures compliance with the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL), which are the world’s most widely used free software licenses.

For more, see http://gnu.org/.

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/.

Oyez, the supreme court audio archive previously featured on this site, has recently released all the audio from the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case. Recorded last Fall, the audio of this case is available under a Creative Commons license.

Also featured on that page are SMIL versions of the audio, which display images of the speakers and show the running transcript as it plays, and a recent videotaped lecture from Lawrence Lessig on the subject of copyrights.

This week’s featured content is the photoblog Photo Pix Today, done by Christoph Föckeler from Germany. The site features a great variety photos of life in Munich, and all licensed under Creative Commons.

Today’s Wired News features an article profiling our featured content from a couple weeks ago, Loca Records.

GET CREATIVE!

Enter the Creative Commons Moving Image Contest.

Make a 2-minute moving image that describes Creative Commons’ mission.

Win a computer, a digital video camera, or an iPod.

An amazing panel of judges will select winners.

Please read the official rules.

Deadline for entries is December 31st, 2003