I’ve just returned to Windhoek from an incredible trip to Walvis Bay with Schoolnet Namibia. Executive Director, Joris Komen and three technicians, Helena, Pelinawa and Alexis were demonstrating the model that has won them awards around the world - especially for the great free and open source software policies that they have spearheaded in Namibia.
I […]

Nancy Willard from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use has done some research into the harrowing intellectual property ‘lessons’ that have been including in the ‘I-Safe curriculum’ in the United States. I-Safe has apparently received $8.5 million dollars from the US Congress to produce an Internet safety curriculum for K-12
schools. They are […]

I’m in Namibia this week talking to interested organisations about porting the Creative Commons license to the Namibian jurisdiction. If you know of anyone who I should speak to, let me know.

Thanks to the awesome fellas from the Go Open television program for coming around yesterday to interview me about Creative Commons in SA. The interview will be featured in the ‘intellectual property rights’ program being broadcast a few weeks after the show starts in late November. Some pretty incredible people are being interviewed by the […]

We will be launching a largely online magazine related to Creative Commons and copyright issues in southern Africa next month. Please comment on this post with your vote for one of the titles below - or suggestion something new. We’ll draw a random post and send that person one of the cool Creative Commons Tshirts […]

Entitled, ‘Steal this CD’, the article is an awesome read - not because I wrote it, but because of the amazing things that Rebecca Kahn and Natalie Dixon did with it. From the first para:
‘The recording and publishing industry has been crying wolf for years, telling us that the internet is killing music - […]

Wow! Check out the Creative Commons site redesign - very, very cool. I especially like the prominence of icommons, and the ccSA page.

I’ve just been to a very interesting seminar organised by the Perinatal HIV Research Unit (PHRU) and the South African History Archive (SAHA) to discuss the potential structure of an AIDS Museum and multi-media project in South Africa.
I suggested that using Creative Commons licenses for the archive’s content would be a good idea if […]

The latest on the Laugh It Off case is that the company has filed papers with the Constitutional Court. My question to ccSA’s resident legal guru, Christiaan Bester, is this: ‘Since LIO lost their case on the basis that they were using their commentary for financial gain, could they release the designs under a Creative […]

What a wonderful project! I just heard from Alberto Escudero who is working on a Swahili IT glossary in Tanzania licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The content is great, but the methodology is even better, engaging a wide range of Kiswahili experts, computer scientists and now, volunteers in developing tech terms for […]

This was the subject of some very interesting messages that I received over the weekend in response to BoingBoing’s coverage of our animation. Sadly (or not, depending on which way you look at it), Thandi Mathobane and the ‘Soweto Times’ are not ‘real’. I wrote the script before Creative Commons had started in earnest in […]

Isn’t it weird how some days can be so good for an idea - I’d say it was the moon, but then the moon isn’t the same on the opposite end of the world, is it?
All in a week, BoingBoing and Creative Commons HQ linked to our animation, WIPO accepted a new direction and we […]

The pic to the left is of master SA blogger, Bradley Whittington, from the online gallery of his favorite pics.
You’ll see that I mixed them up a bit to do this collage, and could do so because Brad uses the Creative Commons ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.0‘ license for his site.
Brad told me that he uses the cc […]

Andrew Rens, volunteer extroadenaire for Creative Commons South Africa, has completed the first draft of the Creative Commons license for public review. We’ll be starting discussions on the license tomorrow, so to all you lawyers and interested parties out there, download it here, and join the discussion group here.

Creative Commons in San Francisco has a great blog about the work that we’re doing in South Africa. Check it out here.

A great friend of Creative Commons South Africa, Derek Keats, has just published the first magazine article in South Africa released under a Creative Commons license. He published it in NetPlus Magazine but tectonic.co.za managed to distribute it online because of the license. It’s called ‘Free as in freedom: the benefits of FOSS in Africa’ […]

A sad but good thing is that more people learned about those historical treasures by reading the news of the fire than probably would have ever known in their lifetime if the building hadn’t burned down. This, a list from a Sunday Times article that wouldn’t have seen the light of day:
‘A 1915 framed, handwritten […]

WIPO has adopted the ‘development agenda’ proposed by Argentina and Brazil, and has agreed to involve NGOs and civil society more intimately in looking at free and open source software and initiatives like Creative Commons as possible solutions to challenges of intellectual property rights and development in the future. Find more here and previous posts […]

The latest news from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), is that Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Sierra Leone, Iran, Tanzania, South Africa and Venezuela are pushing forward with plans to establish a ‘development agenda’ for WIPO that could mean access to cheaper drugs, textbooks and technology for the developing world.
The critical […]