[ILUG-BOM] India moves to launch Creative Commons at Mumbai function in coming week

[Frederick Noronha]

India moves to launch Creative Commons at Mumbai function in coming week

FN

Premier technological institute IIT
Bombay is to launch the Indian chapter of Creative Commons
during its annual Technology Festival of India, shortly.

The Creative Commons (CC) is a global non-profit working to
expand the range of creative work available for others
"legally to build upon and share."

It allows people to issue creative works under a license that
allows more flexibility than the default "all rights
reserved" of copyright law.

>From its modest cyberhome at cc-india.org, the Indian branch
of the global movement is spreading the ideas that there are
options to copyright, when it comes to building creativity
and sharing knowledge widely.

Creative Commons enables copyright holders to grant some or
all of their rights to the public, while retaining others,
through a variety of licensing and contract schemes. The
intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws
create for the sharing of information.

In a world where digital-content rules, sharing of knowledge
and creative products has become far easier. Some globally
successful volunteer projects -- like the Wikipedia, among
the top 20 most visited sites -- have scaled up phenomenally
by basing themselves on parallel easier-to-share licenses.

Creative Commons-India project lead Shishir K. Jha, assistant
professor at the IIT's Shailesh J. Mehta School of
Management, said that the project planned to focus on
three specific areas in India.

These are, centres of higher education like the seven IITs,
regional IITs, managements and other institutions. He said:
"These are increasingly taking recourse to creating video and
web-based courses such as the NPTEL (National Programme for
Technology Enhanced Learning) and distance education courses
such as C-DEEP (www.cdeep.iitb.ac.in) and eGURU
(ekalavya.it.iitb.ac.in/eguruHome.do) (and all would benefit
from keeping content sharable)."

Creative Commons-India also plans to focus on non-profit and
non-governmental organizations and corporates keen on
adopting easier-to-share licenses for the dissemination of
their documents.

Lastly, he said, there are many independent creative artists
working with film, documentary, music and text who would like
to explore the possibilities of reaching out to a wider
audience with the use of creative commons licenses.

This festival is being held on January 26-27 and some big
names are visiting India for the Creative Commons launch.

Creative Commons chairman Joichi Ito and its global
coordinator Dr. Catharina Maracke will join in.  Two will be
held on the topics 'Do We Need Remix?' and 'Sharing Is
Creating'.

Joichi Ito is a Japanese-born and American-educated
businessman who runs the World of Warcraft guild of venture
capitalists, and is general manager of international
operations for such prominent web-based ventures like
Technorati, chairman of Six Apart Japan, and board-member of
ICANN Mozilla Foundation, the Open Source Initiative and
others.

This two-day event will see a mini-panel on "Creative
Commons: Is India ready for flexible approach to
copyrighting". In particular, this session will look at how
Creative Commons can be used to increase knowledge and
information sharing among sectors like higher education,
telecommunications, music, films and publishing.

Creative Commons licenses came after the Open Publication
License and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The
GFDL is seen as being responsible for the phenomenal success
of the Free Software movement globally, it is also used by
non-software projects such as influential, citizen-crafted
Wikipedia.
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