"Creative Commons offers a highly usable and intelligible way to preserve cultural heritage. Access to culture enhances the human experience, and Creative Commons is a vital part of generating a space where culture flows irrespective of origin." —Andres Guadamuz/CC Scotland
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Help Practitioners From Around the World Free Your Culture
iCommons Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 23-25 June 2006
"Towards a global digital commons"
The past few years has seen the burgeoning of a number of initiatives aimed at opening the fields of creativity, science and knowledge in communities around the world. Practitioners from these movements currently identify themselves as falling within a particular community — 'free and open source software', 'open access', 'open content' and 'open science', amongst others — but they share key processes and values whose common elements are yet to be fully realized. The summit aims to bring together participants from around the world, in a creative, stimulating and cooperative environment, to inspire and learn from one another and establish closer working relationships around a set of incubator projects. Help us bring these international project leads and community developers—many from developing nations—together to expand and cultivate the digital commons of the future. Your support is greatly appreciated and necessary to support the iCommons Summit–Towards a global Digital Commons. More information about iCommons.
Why support the summit?
Read about these members of the community and how the Creative Commons licenses have benefited their cultural heritage and why the iSummit is important.
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Andres Guadamuz is a Co-Director at the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law in Edinburgh, and he has been working on the Creative Commons Scotland project.
"It would be fair to say that Scotland's cultural heritage is one of richest in the British Isles, and perhaps even in Western Europe. This heritage is present in countless museums across the country. Creative Commons offers an opportunity to digitize and offer this content online for the benefit of the public. CC Scotland is in conversations with cultural service providers around the country to encourage them to release some of the vast cultural heritage under a CC license, such as Discover Prestongrage Museum."
"The summit is a great gathering where people can exchange local experiences and meet other enthusiastic individuals involved in the free culture movement. The networking opportunity cannot be underestimated. The meeting allowed me to catch up with several Latin American representatives and has prompted me to try to get Creative Commons Costa Rica [my home country] off the ground…"
CC-BY Kato Ki
From South African project lead Heather Ford:
Creative Commons offers the opportunity for South Africans to put into practice our philosophy of 'ubuntu' - an ancient term roughly translated as 'humanity to others' - by enabling the sharing and communal exchange of culture, science and knowledge. By both protecting and strengthening the contributions of authors, scientists and artists, Creative Commons provides a solid legal framework that stimulates global recognition of the incredible intellectual and creative wealth on the African continent.
The workshop on Creative Commons and collecting societies gave me the knowledge and foresight to deal with collecting societies in my own country when we ran a remixing competition on ccmixter.co.za. Sharing experiences around common challenges that we all face gave me fresh insight into the strategies that work best for different situations. The Summit also saw the beginnings of a new project entitled Open Business which has now grown into a fully-fledged international project.
CC-Spain project lead Ignasi Labastida i Juan speaks about the cultural benefits of CC licenses:
"For minority cultures like the Catalan, Basque or Galicean, Creative Commons is a way to spread our culture all over the world through the new distribution tool—the internet. The access to culture is fundamental right now, and CC offers a good system to balance access and respect to authors. For us it is really important to build this legal system to help our culture survive among the big ones. In terms of Spanish culture, CC helps to join all the Spanish cultural heritage in a common project."
Balazs Bodo of the CC Hungary project team said about Creative Commons:
"In the global market of cultural goods, Creative Commons and the free culture approach are essential tools to maintain the cultural heritage for such small and marginal cultures as the Hungarian. With it Hungarian cultural goods are not only technically available but legally accessible as well."
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