Danièle Bourcier, Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay
This book is the result of the International Creative Commons panel at Wizard of OS conference, gathering in Berlin in June 2004. The panel chaired by Christiane Asschenfeldt, director of International Creative Commons gathered several projects leads (1) in charge of the national porting of Creative Commons licenses . We have taken the opportunity of this meeting to propose a book gathering contributions from project leads. This book was to be published for the launch of the Creative Commons licenses France in Fall 2004, at the House of Parliament. Lawrence Lessig immediately agreed to propose a foreword.
Creative Commons (2) (CC) is a non-profit organization which offers an alternative to full copyright proposed by the law to help authors to share and use creative works.
The book analyses the first questions raised by the introduction of Creative Commons licenses in different legal systems and constitutes an observatory of the accounting of « cultural diversity » through Internet actors self-regulation. Different themes are discussed, such as the adaptation to national specificities and legal systems, the influence of Creative Commons licenses on the creation process, the relation of this instrument with traditional copyright management, the originality of using metadata in rights expressions for information retrieval. Creative Commons licenses translated and adapted to various national legislations are new, but more than 2 billions of works are already available under the generic licenses worldwide.
The contributions are divided into three parts. The first part presents the porting and adaptation process in Dutch law (Nynke Hendricks), in Australian law (Brian Fitzgerald, Ian Oi, Tom Cochrane, Cher Bartlett, Vicki Tzimas) and in Taiwanese law (Shun-Ling Chen, Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Ching-Yuan Huang, Yi-Hsuan Lin). Mikael Pawlo (Sweden) is interested in the meaning of the « Non Commercial » notion, a CC option, through the usages of bloggers, early adopters of these licenses.
The second part is related to e-governance and new regulation instruments on the Internet. Creative Commons initiative is characteristic of the Web civil society. Danièle Bourcier and Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay (France) describe how the idea of Commons (which is not new in political science) renews the study of public domain and property rights exclusivity. Herkko Hietanen and Ville Oksanen (Finland) observed particularly the concept of metadata and open content communication modes. Finally Marcus Bornfreund (Canada) studies the legal and legistic aspects of open source.
The third part of the book provides two use cases for Creative Commons licenses in the cultural field. Björn Hartmann (Textone Netlabel) describes a concrete experience in the music domain, Ellen Euler and Thomas Dreier (Germany) in the archiving domain.
The porting of the licences in French happened in several steps. Jacques Chevallier, director of Research Center for Administrative Science (CERSA) and Professor at University Paris II, accepted in 2003 the affiliation to iCommons (International Creative Commons) of the Center, a joint research institute in law and political science of the University of Paris 2 and the National Center for Scientific Research.
A forum animated by Mélanie, as well as a legal experts panel, gathered in 2003-2004 several colleagues and users who participated to the project on the discussion list or at CERSA.
This applied research on copyright law evolution in the digital environment is registered as a theme of an interdisciplinary network program on Law and Information Systems , supported since 2002 by Information and Communication Technologies Science department, an important sector of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
This book is the result of a collective work. Many thanks are adressed to Lawrence Lessig and to the authors of this book contributions: they accepted the editorial project constraints to combine these licenses technical, political, legal and scientific aspects in a condensed format. The contributors will certainly participate to more developed publications as the project is getting larger and richer, while this has the privilege to be the first collective and international book on Creative Commons.
Thanks also to Diemo Schwarz for the articles layout,
To Alain Martinet (Romillat) interested in Creative commons project as an independent publisher,
To all who trusted and supported this initiative, in a domain where it is sometimes difficult but so rewarding to debate upon new legal concepts
Danièle Bourcier
Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay
Paris, October 2004
This article is available under a Creative Commons license
Notes :
1. All national porting project leads (in October 2004, nine projects were already finalized and more than twenty projects are in progress) could unfortunately not contribute during the allocated time period.
2. http://creativecommons.org/