Chris Armstrong has left the LINK Centre and the Commons-sense project for the London School of Economics where he and his wife will be studying for the next two years. Chris has worked as the head researcher on the Commons-sense project and been an incredible support to ccSA in our first year.
Although Chris was […]

Kerryn McKay will be speaking about Creative Commons and education at Hilton College in the KZN Midlands tomorrow morning. Hilton College is hosting the ‘Intel Innovation in Education‘ conference. From the looks of the conference program, this is a great set of practical workshops and inspiring projects to learn from!

There is a great debate going on at the NewMedian blog around why noncommercial licences aren’t good for online media.

Reinhart Buys has written a nice piece in Media Toolbox’s latest newsletter summarising recent technology judgements and what they mean for freedom of expression on the internet in South Africa.

Kerryn and I are in Grahamstown this week for the annual Highway Africa conference. We’ll be presenting tomorrow on our open business model project along with Elan Lohman (News24), Herman Mansen (Media Toolbox), Matthew Buckland (M&G Online) and other major media organisations from around South Africa. Check out the latest news from the event […]

As expected, ‘Telkom has dropped its threatened R5 million lawsuit against Hellkom.co.za with costs and without conditions, allowing the satirical site to continue its basting of the telecommunications giant’ reports ITWeb. The reasons given? ‘Strategic reasons’ according to a Telkom spokesman. More likely the victory by Laugh It Off case in the Constitutional Court […]

ICDL in Africa (International Computer Driving License) has offiically licensed their training material under the Creative Commons license.
The non-profit organisation, which was established in South Africa by the Computer Society of South Africa, has the objective to promote and administer the license in sub-saharan Africa. More than 4 million people worldwide, […]

If you’ve been listening to Yfm this week, this will be only the second time that you’re hearing it. ccMixter, the awesome music sharing software developed by Creative Commons in the US, has just been developed for South African musicians. The site is being launched on the back of a Yfm competition sponsored by the […]

Jarred Cinman has written a great article on the importance of stressing both the local and the open in local technology policy. As Cinman notes, there are major flaws with the South African government not considering the use of a) local, and b) open source software in the ICT Charter and Black Economic Empowerment weighting. […]

Our local linux portal has published a great case study on how free and open source software is liberating independent animation companies like Vanguard to compete directly with the giants in America. The article also notes how award-winning 3D software, Maya, is being developed by a large pool of users developing tools and skills around […]

Obviously the extent of the moral right in South Africa is is affected by freedom of expression, guaranteed by section 16 of the Bill of Rights .
In very rough terms then it seems that under the constitutional dispensation the moral right or right of integrity can properly be invoked when the use of a […]

This weekend (25-6 June) we are at the iCommons Summit in Harvard. One of the most fascinating issues to come up is that of moral rights. Moral rights are non-economic rights and usually include the right of attribution; to be named as the author. IP academics call this the right of paternity, a term […]

by ccSA volunteer, Chris Bester
The South African Constitutional Court handed down its judgment in the LIO matter on Friday 27 May 2005. In a unanimous judgment, the court agreed with LIO’s submission that South African Breweries had not shown that LIO’s parodying of its “Black Label” trademark was likely to have caused economic harm to […]

Probably our most high-profile article yet, this great piece by Alistair Otter about Lawrence Lessig’s visit to South Africa and the HSRC case study has done wonders for ccSA. Ironically, you can’t get the whole story online unless you’ve paid a subscription fee, but you can email me (heather at creativecommons.org) if you want a […]

Razina Munshi has written a great piece for the local Business Day on the recent Commons-sense conference and the launch of Creative Commons South Africa.

Joi Ito has a great post on good reasons to choose free for commercial use, and an elucidation of the difference between the GNU and cc licences. Which reminds me that I should be updating my v1 of “Creative Commons and the GNU GPL: What’s the difference?”
‘When writing my last entry, I remembered a […]

The latest edition of Commons-sense is now available. If you’re interested in the use of Creative Commons in education, or if you want to hear about the world’s largest encyclopedia in the world, or if you just want to know how to port the Creative Commons licences to your own country and how to use […]

Andrew Rens, legal lead of Creative Commons South Africa, has released the latest version of the ccSA licence. Remember to send comments by the end of the week! After that, we’re going to send the final draft to cc HQ for approval in time for the May launch.

One of the most exciting things that came out of the APC’s Tuesday ccSA workshop in Cape Town was a discussion around derivative works. Philipp Schmidt from Bridges.org explained that his organisation used a cc licence that didn’t allow derivatives, but that they still wanted to encourage derivatives like translations and transporting into formats for […]

Friday’s workshop was an enormous success in gathering together leading figures in South Africa’s intellectual property sphere to help draft the local Creative Commons licence.
Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive Director of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) welcomed participants to the event, noting the centrality of intellectual property rights to international ICT policy debates, such as […]