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. -- FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please) http://fn.goa-india.org http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com