The South African Open Copyright Review Final Report is online

Filed under: Announcements, Featured Content, Legal licences — Tags: , , , , , — Dave @ 7:27 pm

As annouced by Andrew Rens at the Shuttleworth Foundation:

The final Report of the South African Open Copyright Review is online.

The Review closed last year, but its taken us a bit of time to produced a properly formatted downloadable version of the final Report. Now we have and its available for download, under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike South Africa 2.5 licence.

The Report includes recommendations on exceptions and limitations, Orphan Works, strengthening the Public Domain, and parallel import.

The Report comes at an interesting point in the debate about copyright. Although librarians and educators have argued for appropriate exceptions and limitations, ever since the current Copyright Act was passed in 1978 (and possibly before then), the issues of Orphan Works and the Public Domain have been largely neglected, and the prohibition on parallel imports has received far too little attention.

Basic reforms on these issues are overdue.

Change.gov Gets a Creative Commons Licence

Filed under: Featured Content, General — Heather Ford @ 9:16 pm

Change.gov, the website of US president-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, has a new copyright notice that expresses that the bulk of Change.gov is published under the most permissive of Creative Commons copyright licenses, CC BY.

This is great news and a encouraging sign that the new administration has a clear sense of the importance of openness in government and on the web (there’s a bit more on this over at Lessig’s blog). The embrace of Creative Commons licensing on Change.gov is consistent with earlier support by both Obama and McCain for the idea of “open debates.” (It’s also in line with Obama’s decision to publish the pictures in his Flickr Photostream under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license – pretty cool!)

Tim O’Reilly has written a smart post (which has elicited some very thoughtful reader comments) recommending that Change.gov use revision control as a way to further improve transparency and make it possible for the public to review any changes that occur on the site. Of course, licensing is just one component of openness, but getting licensing right is necessary for enabling people to truly take advantage of technologies that facilitate collaboration.

Source: Eric Steuer, Creative Director, CreativeCommons.org

The More You Share…

Filed under: Featured Content — Heather Ford @ 2:59 pm

The More You Share The More You Win

…The More You Win:)

New Lead for Creative Commons South Africa

Filed under: Featured Content, General — Dave @ 4:01 pm

Dave DuarteWe are proud to announce that Dave Duarte will be taking over the role of Project Lead for Creative Commons South Africa.

Dave will be working with Legal Lead Andrew Rens to develop the awareness and use of Creative Commons licenses in South Africa, and nurture the growing CC community here.
A bit about Dave, from his site:

Dave Duarte is founder and programme director of Nomadic Marketing at the UCT Graduate School of Business. He also lectures on the MBA, Executive MBA, as well as Open and Customized programmes for corporates around Africa and in Europe. He also teaches compulsory modules at UCT on undergraduate level. His topics are Social Media, Web Marketing, Attention Economics, Innovation and Globalization.

Dave is a partner in learning technology company, Huddlemind Labs; co-owner of Muti.co.za (a popular South African news-filtering site); Co-Founder of 27dinner (free monthly gatherings for new-media enthusiasts in SA); advisory board member for Ikineo (communications and marketing firm); and is a Fellow of iCommons.

In 2007 he was runner-up in the Young African ICT Innovator of the Year awards.

Dave’s first business was an eventing company, and later a restaurant. We look forward to him applying those hospitality skills to some big CC ZA events during his tenure as Project Lead!

BMW SA uses Creative Commons

Filed under: Featured Content, General — Heather Ford @ 5:42 pm

Over the past few months we’ve seen both good and bad ways of running competitions for user-generated content in the South African Internet world.

Exhibit A: Apple South Africa’s ‘GetPodcasting‘ Competition. In March, some eagle-eyed bloggers caught sight of the draconian terms and conditions on the site which didn’t enable people to use other content (for example, a soundtrack licenced under Creative Commons) and forced entrants to give up all their rights to the sponsor if they won (amongst other terms discussed by new CC South Africa volunteer, Paul Jacobson on chilibean.co.za). To their credit, Apple SA responded with a call for suggestions from Jacobson by saying that they would replace the old terms and conditions with his edited version within 30 minutes of receiving it. But, in the weeks that followed, instead of the terms and conditions being amended, they disappeared altogether from the site.

Today, the site has shut down and the content has disappeared. Because the terms didn’t allow for CC licencing, much of the content can’t be constructively reused or re-purposed.

Exhibit B: This week, BMW SA launched a competition on zoopy.com calling for submissions of video using the Creative Commons South Africa Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 licence. A couple of weeks ago, they invited me to chat to them about Creative Commons licencing and more recently, invited Paul Jacobson and Andrew Rens to help draft the wording for the terms and conditions, ensuring that entrants to the competition would all retain copyright and would licence their works to the public for non-commercial sharing according to the terms of the licence.

We think that this is an example of great ethical online business practice. Not only has BMW thoughtfully developed intellectual property rules with a ‘take only what you need’ approach, but its partnership with Zoopy shows us how the company is thinking of itself in terms of a local ecosystem of Internet players, rather than believing that it can build everything from scratch and retain all rights just ‘because it can’.

Now, because BMW has partnered with Zoopy and enabled entrants to use the CC licence that will permit down-the-line sharing, content that is developed from this competition will be available on other sites that showcase the video or develop non-commercial remixes out of it long after BMW has moved onto other promotions.

These two examples display the essence, not only of best practice in terms of intellectual property management of Web 2.0 projects, but of new relationships between the company and its public. We hope that this will act as a model for companies engaging and experimenting with the Web and its opportunities in South Africa in the future.

Thanks to Scott Gray for being a great pioneer in this space. We know that it’s not easy.

Bring a girl child to Creative Commons!

Filed under: Featured Content — kerryn @ 3:31 pm

We are Mpumi, Sibulele, and Zimi. We are visiting the iCommons offices for a day. We are here for the Cell C bring a girl child to work, which parents are allowed to bring their daughters to work for a day so they can see and learn about the work their parents do. (note from iCommons:  Uhuru, little girl in striped shirt, is Wendy’s – admin assistant at iCommons – daughter. Left is Sibulele, middle, Zimi and right, Mpumi).
iCommons is an organisation that brings projects together that use CC licences which state ‘some rights reserved’ rather than all rights reserved. CC licences are licences that grant permission for other people all around the world to be able to use in different ways books, songs, and poems without having to ask permission from the writers.

We have learnt about websites and the internet. We also learnt about blogger. Blogger enables you to have your own website where you can publish articles, your stories and many more. The exciting thing about blogger is you get to chat to people all around the world and you get to express yourself.

The Cell C bring a girl to work is a great initiative that empowers girls and educate them to be women who lead by example and, women that will be able to empower themselves someday.

We had a great time and we wouldn’t mind doing it again. Thank you to the staff members of iCommons for making this possible and fun including the “treats”.

A beguiling African voice

Filed under: Featured Content, General — kerryn @ 1:50 pm

Makh's book cover Makhago Peter is a young Ugandan who writes in his spare time and has published through lulu.com. It is possible to hear Peter’s enchantingly simple voice and others like his through the initiative artmarketonline (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence) which was started by the Open Cafe in Potchefstroom.
Artmarketonline is a cyber-market-place where creators can come to find resources that will enable them to share and market their creative wares, from crafts to poems. The site assists artists in setting up blogs and creating awareness around their material. The site promotes open source and encourages creators to ‘open up’ their content to others, by providing info and links to the Creative Commons licences.
Creators such as Makhogo, known as Makh, are overcoming north/south borders by harnessing the power of the internet to spread their work. It is high time that some of these beautiful African voices are given a platform from which to speak to the world.

Makh says, “I read anything that crosses my eyes. Then, my legs don’t like me to do it a lot but walking is still a good part time job for me. You see, when the legs become hot, the head cools immensely. Finally, dreaming. I can’t get enough of this one. Whether it is with closed or open eyes I don’t mind.”

SA Free Culture Tour – take part!

Filed under: Featured Content — kerryn @ 1:33 pm

Free your culture … come to the braai, Friday 20 April 2007

WHERE: The Armchair Theatre, Obsevatory, Cape Town
WHEN: 8pm, Friday, 20 April 2007
BRING: cds or dvds to braai, R40 door charge,
R100 to buy a cool SA Free Culture tee shirt.

Rip, Mix, Burn – South African style … on Friday, 20 April 2007
The SA Free Culture Tour, an initiative of iCommons, is inviting all artists, musician, bleeding-edge bloggers, technofreaks, culture jammers, free culture kids, and webheads to join us in creating a digital archive of content.

We want your artefacts – be it a sample, a song, a photo, a piece of art, a poster or some writing. As long as you’re happy share it and let other people remix, build upon and generally mix it up, we’re happy to host it. Think of it as a digital bring ‘n braai – we all bring something, slap it on the flames, stand around drinking some beers, and wait to see what comes out.

All you need to do is get your content, licence it under the appropriate Creative Commons licence, go to the ‘upload‘ tab on this site, and load it up! Idiot proof, really.

Selected content that’s been loaded will be put onto a Freedom Toaster that will be at the Independent Armchair Theatre on the night of the 20th of April, the night of the cc Salon. You’ll be able to bring along a disc, a drive or a USB stick, pop it into the Toaster, and download all the content you want. Pretty cool, huh?

The SA Free Culture Tour includes:

Wednesday, 18 April
Internet Society of South Africa meeting

Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig will speak to the members of the Internet Society of South Africa to raise awareness about issues of copyright and patents – an important topic in the context of South Africa’s need for access to, and education around, internet technologies.

Thursday, 19 April
The Digital Freedom Exposition

The Digital Freedom Exposition, hosted by the University of the Western Cape, will examine the notion of ‘freedom’ in the digital world.

The Exposition will include exhibits, guest speakers and round table discussions. Speakers include Lawrence Lessig, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons and Rishab Gosh, Open Source Initiative board member and FLOSS expert, amongst others.

For more information check out the Digital Freedom Expo site.


It’s a brown bag … and you’re invited!

Filed under: Featured Content — kerryn @ 4:09 pm

Schwag in a Bag, by Chris Campbell, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, non-commercialiCommons would like to invite you to our first ‘brown bag’ session on Friday 16 February at 12:30pm.

‘Brown bags’ are informal gatherings, focused on a stimulating discussion and debate. Our guest speaker for the event is Jason van Niekerk, who will be talking about the philosophy of ‘Ubuntu’ and the commons.

Jason teaches philosophy in the part-time studies programme at Wits University. He completed his Master’s degree at Rhodes University, and has started reading towards his PHD at Wits University; the title of his dissertation is “Ubuntu and moral value”. He was recently published in the Mail and Guardian, read his article here.

Join us at the iCommons office – on the first floor of the offices at The Grace Hotel, 54 Bath Avenue, Rosebank.

A light lunch will be served. Please RSVP to Wendy at wendy@icommons.org by Thursday 15 February, 12:00pm for catering purposes.

Jo’s toolkit: A student journalist’s recipe for success

Filed under: Featured Content — kerryn @ 1:51 pm

Jo's Toolkit logoBring together student journalists, media studies lecturers, editors of major South African magazines and online newspapers. Add their collective, yet varied experiences from practising in the field of media. Mix in a touch of good advice and helpful hints. Stir in a pinch of passion for the profession. Attach a Creative Commons (CC) licence – and viola – you have Jo’s Toolkit, a recently launched website which provides resources and tools for journalism students and grassroots/media practitioners in the fields of writing, editing, design, photography, television, radio and new media.

“Jo’s Toolkit came about in the hope of educating other journalists. We have access to lecturers, students and professionals with a wealth of experience and media knowledge and we wanted to pool these resources and make them available to others,” says Jo’s Toolkit founders and editors, Rhodes University journalism students Carly Ritz and Gregor Rohrig.

And access these resources, they certainly did. The site hosts articles from South African Mail and Guardian Online editor Matthew Buckland, Student Life managing editor, James Simpson and Seventeen magazine editor Justine Stafford and more.

This excellence has already won them acclaim – barely four months since the website’s launch, Jo’s Toolkit won the Highway Africa Award for Innovative Use of New Media in Africa.

“Before leaving this institution we wanted to create an environment which could empower student media, and general student practitioners,” the editors said, “There has been a lack of communication between student or grassroot media practitioners and academics and professionals. The idea was to bridge this gap and allow for free and effective dialogue.”

As a result, lecturers from Rhodes University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies have made their lecture notes available on this site – all under Creative Commons license.

“All our contributors are made aware of the CC licence. They see the potential of this project and are very enthusiastic and motivated to aid the cause we are trying to achieve and thus have not declined having their work licensed uncer CC,” they said.

Gregor and Carly chose the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 South Africa licence for the site because “we thought this was the fairest and most effective licence for a project like this one.”

Written by Daniela Faris, for the icommons.org website, http://www.icommons.org

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