Creative Commons South Africa is a volunteer powered co-operative effort to make Creative Commons licences work for South Africa.
Host institution and project leads
Creative Commons South Africa (CC ZA) is hosted at the Intellectual Property Law Research Unit at the Department of Private Law at the University of Cape Town Law School.
The CC ZA project is lead by
Dave Duarte (public lead) and
Tobias Schonwetter (legal lead).
Creative Commons South Africa was founded by Heather Ford (public lead), and Andrew Rens (legal lead). The project was initially based at the Wits University’s LINK Centre.
More details and a retrospective on CC South Africa can be found on Andrew Rens’ blog.
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit that offers flexible copyright management tools for creative work. Creative Commons offers a range of licences that creators can use to manage their copyright in the online environment, each offering it’s own specific protections and freedoms. Creative Commons has built upon the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright to create a voluntary “some rights reserved” system. Creative Commons is a nonprofit. All Creative Commons tools are free. Please visit the Creative Commons website for more information.
Projects
The Commons-sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons project was run out of the Creative Commons South Africa office at the Link Centre, Wits University from 2005-6. The ‘Commons-sense’ project developed tools for African organisations and individuals to make copyright work in the service of economic development, public heritage and a shared history for all. Funded by the IDRC, it consists of a) a set of training materials on developing a copyright policy for your organisation, b) a researched wiki on the projects, concepts and issues surrounding alternative intellectual property rights in Africa and c) a competition to build the awareness of the creative potential of Creative Commons in Africa. As part of the project, the Link Centre hosted an international conference on the African Digital Information Commons in May, 2005. Go to www.commons-sense.org to find out more!
Partners
translate.org led a project to translate the human-readable code of the CC South Africa licences into Afrikaans, Sesotho sa Leboa and isiZulu.
The Association for Progressive Communications (APC), funded by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (Osisa), ran a 6-month awareness-raising project in the region to inform potential partners about the role of Creative Commons as an alternative to traditional intellectual property rights management. This initial phase of activity in southern Africa started to identify key organisations and individuals in SADC that may be interested in developing Creative Commons projects in their countries, and providing them with the necessary information to initiate such activities.
Another critical element of the project was to support the Creative Commons South Africa web portal in showcasing regional initiatives that make use of the Creative Commons licences, as well as to conduct two workshops on Creative Commons licencing in Africa.
The first workshop was held at the Kofi Annan Center of Excellence in ICT during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) African preparatory meeting in Accra, Ghana during January, 2005. This workshop was aimed at initiating a discussion amongst West Africans about the relevance and viability of Creative Commons in their region.
The second workshop was held at the LINK Centre in Johannesburg with the aim of eliciting public comment on the Creative Commons South Africa licence, as well as enabling some SADC legal professionals to learn from the process of developing a local licence.
Origins
This website was started as a result of the generous support of the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University and Benetech.
South Africa’s Role
South Africa is, in many respects, well prepared for the revolution in the field of “intellectual property rights”. Although new to the western world, the idea that collective knowledge should form the starting point of a fluid, continuously-evolving creation process is not new to South Africans. Living by the philosophy of ‘ubuntu’, South Africans have always created in collaborative groups. ‘Ubuntu’ is most effectively encapsulated in the phrase: ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, which can be roughly translated as: “a person is a person through other people” or “I am what I am because of you”. This philosophy engenders itself in song, dance and music, where all individuals in the community participate in the creation process.
The philosophy of Ubuntu is perfectly linked to the philosophies of open source and open content development – embracing a process where creation is acknowledged as evolving out of the community, and recognising that at least some of the value coming out of that creation process needs to be given back to the community in order to strengthen future contributions.
Vision
The vision of Creative Commons South Africa is of a thriving African internet community using Creative Commons licenses to educate our people, grow our markets, share our knowledge and celebrate Africa ’s culture and heritage with people around the world.
