Creative Commons and Open Content Licensing

In June Professor Brian Fitzgerald was invited to present at the inaugural ARC Graeme Clark Outcomes Forum at Parliament House in Canberra.

He outlined the outcomes the Creative Commons Project within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation has had in the creative, public and education sectors.

CCI and the The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project of Queensland University of Technology are pleased to present a free seminar with leading international and national experts. What is "Open Education" and what does it mean for the future of learning? What role can Australia play? Featuring guest speaker Melissa Hagemann (pictured right) from the Open Society Institute and Soros Foundations Network.

Rock group Nine Inch Nails caused a sensation in the music world recently - and it wasn’t for their front man’s antics. Every day, artists and consumers are finding new ways to engage with each other in a virtual world: traditional copyright rules are out; new business models are in. NIN’s online release of their current album under a Creative Commons (CC) licence which lets others share, burn and even remix their songs is just the latest example of artists allowing their fans to access and use creative product outside the powerful grip major corporations have traditionally held over distribution.

A new book, edited by Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Professor Fuping Gao, Mr Damien O’Brien and Mr Sampsung Xiaoxiang Shi, focuses geographically on the Asia-Pacific, and particularly on China and Australia, but addresses universal themes about the law of copyright and its adaptation to the Internet in the 21st century said the Hon Justice Douglas at the launch in Brisbane yesterday.

CCI researchers Amy Barker and Elliott Bledsoe have been funded by Story of the Future - an initiative supported by the Australia Council for the Arts in partnership with the Australian Film Television and Radio School - for their project "Remix My Lit".

Creative Commons au is pleased to announce that details for its 2008 national conference, Building an Australasian Creative Commons, have now been finalised. Building an Australasian Commons will be held on 24 June 2008 at the State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. The event provides an opportunity for those interested in the free internet to come together to exchange ideas, information and inspiration. The event is free but registration is required.

Professor Fitzgerald’s article on ‘Copyright 2010: The Future of Copyright’ has been accepted for publication in 2008 as an Opinion Piece in the prestigious international academic journal European Intellectual Property Review.

The OCL research project partnered with the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) to run its 2007 emerging technology labs Still/Open. The aim of this partnership was to establish closer contacts with artists and creative practitioners, and so gain clearer insights into their needs. The labs consisted of a series of two-day workshops and a public forum held in three cities: Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane.

During 2007 the team worked closely with Ms Delia Browne of the Ministerial Council on Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA), assisting her to attend the iCommons iSummit and working with her on information materials for the education sector. As a direct result of her attendance, Ms Browne has become a central figure in the development of the Creative Commons’ new ccLearn project, and was one of the developers and signatories of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/).

The OCL project also aims to examine how CC licensing can be used to open up government content in order to sponsor further reuse and innovation. This research is being undertaken in consultation with government partners at both whole-of-government (Qld Treasury and Australian Bureau of Statistics) and organisation-specific levels (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

In conjunction with the Creative Commons Clinic, the OCL project has continued its work on identifying and mapping leading CC case studies, both to examine key legal issues and to provide industry and other interested parties with a reference tool or resource on the business and legal models being utilised in practice, especially in Australia.

In November 2007, after extensive research, we produced a prototype for new versions of the CC Australian licences which will act both to upgrade the licence to v3.0 and to introduce new ‘readable’ licence language. We have begun a consultation process with industry and key stakeholders to assess the suitability of this new language. It is hoped that the new licence will provide best-practice ‘readable’ licence language for the international CC community.

One of the key achievements of the ccClinic during 2007 was the introduction of its QUT undergraduate unit (LWB499). Designed as a specialist research unit open only to high-achieving students, the 13-week unit provided eight students from the Faculty of Law with the opportunity to work closely with industry experts and Clinic staff on in-depth research into a topic of relevance to the Creative Commons.