Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the song you had written in your mother tongue, Zulu, could be distributed with a license written in the same language? Creative Commons South Africa and Translate.org.za recently announced the availability of licenses in Afrikaans, isiZulu and Sesotho sa Leboa.

Says, Dwayne Bailey of Translate.org.za, “For us this was a natural […]

We are proud to announce the Brazilian winner of the SAfro-Brazil Remix competition. Congratulations goes to LucioK, who produced the winning track for the Brazilian arm of the competition. LucioK will be arriving in SA on Sunday, 15 April and will be performing at the BringnBraai in Cape Town, on Friday 20 April.The competition was […]

“Towards a global digital commons” iCommons, the international organistion which aims to unite global Creative Commons jurisdictions and initiate and collaborate on worldwide projects, is hosting its second summit in Brazil
The 3-day summit will be a highly interactive event around 3 themes: Tools, Policy and Practice.
The organisers of iSummit anticipate around […]

International team members from the UK and Brazil will join ccSA to present the findings to date of an exciting collaborative project, called OpenBusiness, which investigates the feasibility, practicality and financial sustainability of the open-content business models used by creators, entrepreneurs and artists. Join us on Wednesday, 8 February from 17h30-19h00.
Classroom 9, Donald […]

A draft of version 3.0 of the GPL has just been released. According to Tectonic, ‘The draft of GPLv3 tackles new issues including digital rights managment and software patents, relatively new threats to free software, that have grown as challenges to the movement. The new licence also looks to address the global nature of free […]

It was announced on Friday that King Babar a.k.a. Nathan Redpath won the remixing competition with his track, ‘Gassed Up‘. His remix used samples from Zskilz and Askari - all from the ccmixterSA website. The site is really looking great after a bit of a slow start. Almost 20 artists are busy remixing as we […]

Africa Source II will be an eight day hands-on workshop aimed at building the technical skills of those working with and within NGOs on the continent. It will take place in one of the most beautiful parts of the Kalangala Island on Victoria Lake during the beginning of January 2006.
Africa Source II will focus on […]

Kerryn McKay and I are helping to launch the Open Business Model Project at the Tate Britain on Saturday (8 Oct). The Tate is hosting a conference called ‘Open Congress: Creativity and the Public Domain‘ with speakers such as Cory Doctorow speaking about how open source-inspired methods can transform arts and its institutions. The Commons-sense […]

I’m very pleased to announce that Kerryn McKay has joined the team at Creative Commons South Africa. Kerryn is employed as a researcher on the Commons-sense project here at the Wits University Link Centre and now also volunteers for ccSA. Kerryn holds a Bachelor of Journalism from Rhodes University (seeing a pattern here, anyone? […]

Creative Commons South Africa wishes the recently-established Copyright Working Group at the University of Cape Town all the best for what looks to be an exciting future! The Copyright Working Group, of which ccSA is a partner, grew out of a conference on Access to Learning Materials held in January 2005 in Johannesburg. The Group […]

ccSA legal lead, Andrew Rens and I are at the Harvard Law School for the first cc iCommons Summit. It’s incredibly exciting. Over 80 people from around the world debating and finding common solutions to the challenges of an organisation growing at an amazing rate. Ronaldo Lemos, Director of ccBrazil, and I took the opportunity […]

News just in: Creative Commons South Africa licences went live late last night! Congratulations and thanks to Andrew Rens and the Creative Commons HQ for making this happen - its been quite a journey! Now you can replace the US licences with our own jurisdiction specific ones. Just go to ‘publish‘ on the Creative Commons […]

From May 25 to 27, 2005, 150 delegates from 20 African countries, the US, UK, India and Brazil gathered in Johannesburg for the “Commons-sense” conference, hosted by the LINK Centre at Wits University’s Graduate School of Public & Development Management (P&DM).
Funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the full title of the conference was […]

“Using Creative Commons to Licence Publicly-funded Knowledge”
* Are you an NGO/non-profit organisation that produces information or research?
* Do you know how access to information and knowledge is controlling the pace of development in the developing world?
* Do you want to find better ways of disseminating your information to your beneficiaries, to donors, the media and […]

For three days, participants from around Africa and the world will gather to strategise towards the realisation of an African Digital Information Commons.
This international event, carried out with a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), will encourage understanding of how alternative approaches to copyright and content-sharing, enabled by digital technologies and electronic networks, […]

An APC Creative Commons Cape Town Workshop is being held on Tuesday 15 March from 9.30 to 1pm at Bridges.org.
The Creative Commons South Africa Johannesburg workshop was so successful that the APC has decided to conduct a similar workshop in Cape Town.
When? Tuesday, 15 March 2005: 9.30am - 1pm
Where? Bridges.org, 1 Plein Street, Cape Town
Who? […]

The APC, in collaboration with the Link Centre, is running a workshop to talk about the South African cc licence (first draft by Andrew Rens, our legal lead, here), in preparation for our launch at the end of May. It would be great if we could all put our minds together on this one, so […]

Get the first edition of the e-zine, ‘Commons-sense’ by downloading in either PDF or txt. Remember to sign up here to get regular updates.

If you’ve ever had any questions about copyright or Creative Commons, now is your chance to ask them. The APC is running a 2-week forum for southern Africans who want to find out more about Creative Commons and how it applies to them. Join up here and fire away!

The Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa has announced that they will be funding a proposal from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) for awareness-raising in southern Africa until February next year. We’re wanting to build a working group of people in southern African countries for future Creative Commons projects - if you know of […]