CC License Your Tweets

If you want to licence you Tweets with a CC licence, now there’s an easy way to do so.

TweetCC is a newly launched service that allows you to licence all your tweets under a Creative Commons Licence of your choosing.

This has a number of advantages, not least of which is that you may pick up new followers or extend the reach of your tweets by allowing people to easily pick-up, re-use and remix your licesnes on the terms that you stipulate. The site also allows users to search for other people who have licensed their Twitter streams under CC.

Users with CC licensed tweets

Users with CC licensed tweets

This is an interim solution until we have a way to integrate CC into Twitter streams directly and to display the licenses in the side-bar. Until that happens though, don’t forget about the open-licensed micro-blogging service that also sends your updates to Twitter: Identi.ca

Digital History

Creative Commons South Africa is working together with the Visual History Archive to understand and develop response to issues of copyright and privacy which when analogue film or photographs are digitised by curators such as archives and museums.

A fascinating mix of issues faces non profit curators who are seeking to preserve South Africa’s visual history by digitising photographs and film. Both film and photograph stock decay, with the result that irreplaceable images are lost. But its not always clear whether the photograph or film is under copyright, raising legal issues for curators seeking to save South Africa’s heritage. Evolving standards of privacy raise new questions for curators.

There is an opportunity for a volunteer to work with Creative Commons South Africa, itself a volunteer project, on these issues. This would suit a post graduate student who would like to write on issues ranging from privacy, copyright, history, identity and memory arising from digitisation processes. Preference will be given to applicants based at the University of Cape Town, or at least in the Western Cape.
You don’t have to be a lawyer or curator, just have a strong interest in one or more aspects of the project.

Interested? Contact us

P2PU needs your help

Peer to Peer University (p2pu.org) is a project run by friends and allies of Creative Commons South Africa.
p2pu is conducting an enquiry into which copyright licence it should use for content hosted on its web-sites (www.p2pu.org and blogs.p2pu.org). P2PU needs someone to assist in running the enquiry.

If you volunteer for the job then you will:

-> draft the invitational email with help from P2PU leaders;

-> send the invitational email out to selected experts and allies, including some very interesting and colourful characters in the open education movement;

-> correspond with respondents;

-> collect the responses;

-> collate the responses in a well formated pdf document;

-> load the responses on to the p2pu website.

Respondents will be asked to draft a single page on the question; what is the best copyright licence for p2pu to use on its websites? Respondents will be asked to focus on the single licence which they consider best and on the single argument for using that licence which they consider most pertinent and powerful.

You will be

-> energetic,

-> keen to learn,

-> interested in open licences and open education materials,

-> based at the University of Cape Town, or at least in Cape Town,

-> unpaid.

Time Scale: September to early November 2009, most of the work will be in September and October 2009.

Interested? Send email to thepeople@p2pu.org, with subject line, The Licensing Discussion.

P.S. p2pu is also looking for tech support volunteers.

The South African Open Copyright Review Final Report is online

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.

New CC ZA legal lead and hosting institution

Creative Commons South Africa (CC Za) is now hosted at the Intellectual Property Law Research Unit (IPLRU) at the Department of Private Law at the University of Cape Town. Tobias Schonwetter, a post doctoral fellow at the IPLRU, has taken over as legal lead from Andrew Rens. Tobias will join public lead Dave Duarte, in steering the project.
Andrew Rens will, however, continue his involvement in CC South Africa. For several years, Andrew has dedicated his time and expertise to porting the CC licenses and promoting the project in South Africa. We are truly grateful for his longstanding efforts and continued support.
Thank you to Alison Gilwald and Luci Abrahams for hosting the project at the LINK Centre during its birth.

Change.gov Gets a Creative Commons Licence

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…

The More You Share The More You Win

…The More You Win:)

New Lead for Creative Commons South Africa

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!

Making local lekker – promoting your content in South African languages

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.

(more…)

BMW SA uses Creative Commons

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.

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