Jurisdiction: Creative Commons Germany

Date submitted: December 2010

Roadmap

Description

The German CC Jurisdiction Project aims at supporting a better way of sharing online. It does so by making the CCPL work under German law and by bridging gaps between the world in which Creative Commons was invented and everyday online reality in Germany, that exist in terms of both history of law as well as discourse of creativity.

The project has two Leads, both located mainly in Berlin. John Weitzmann as Legal Project Lead is supported by the European Academy of Law and Computing (EEAR), Markus Beckedahl as Public Project Lead is supported by newthinking communications.

Priorities for 2011

- Run one or more contests online to let fans do new designs for schwag (both graphics only and with text) and have the best produced also as parts of flyers, brochures and other new CC info material. Of course any new designs will be CC licensed and as such re-usable for others.

- Make progress on the porting and plain language issues in cooperation with the Communia Network and CC Portugal, who have agreed to work on this as a CC Europe task force. The goal is to have a paper ready for the CC meeting in the 3rd quarter.

- Act as cooperation partner for re:publica 2010 and put CC-relevant topics on the agenda of the conference. One way to go forward on this one will be to individually invite possible adopters to learn more about the CCPL and its application at re:publica. Another part of this item is to establish re:publica as a background for regular CC Europe meetings..

- Build the basic structure and introductory texts for the CC Commentary and build a group of volunteers to work on the first set of content. Some positive replies have already been received on the latter, but more needs to be done.

- Boost social media integration and donation functions on our website

Project Composition

Legal Lead

John H. Weitzmann supported by EEAR

Public Lead

Markus Beckedahl supported by newthinking communications

Affiliate Team (all part-time only)

Tim Baumann, Filmmaker (Team Speaker Film/Video)

Ulrike Elteste, Lawyer

Ralph Hecksteden, Jurmatix GbR (Sysadmin)

Professor Dr. Maximilian Herberger, Law Professor, Saarland University

Ronen Kadushin, Designer (Team Speaker Design)

Sarah Leiendecker, Institute for Law and Informatics, Saarland University

Sabine Micka, EEAR (Accounting/Donations)

Hans-Martin Schmidt, Lawyer (Team Speaker Open Data)

Klaas Schmidt, Lawyer

Wolfgang Senges, Media Consultant

Michael Weller, Lawyer, EEAR

Helpers and Interns

From time to time we have additional volunteers (and regular interns at newthinking communications) helping with everyday work or special projects.

Web resources

Jurisdiction website

Our website runs on Wordpress, with a theme modified from one of the previous themes of creativecommons.org. Next items on the agenda for the site are a better integration of our social media channels (identi.ca and twitter), an easy web-based donation scheme (using either PayPal or Sofortüberweisung.de), a remodeling of our FAQ section and integration of a module to aggregate CC news on the site.

CC Category within netzpolitik.org Weblog

Markus Beckedahl is a very sought-after evangelist for freedom of the internet, open government and – as CC Germany Public Lead – also for CC licensing. He runs one of the top ten weblogs in Germany, netzpolitik.org, which contains a separate catergory for CC-related topics with hundreds of articles.

Internal ATeam Wiki

For internal coordination of the Affiliate Team and for material collection and other purposes the EEAR maintains a moinmoin wiki that all team members can access.

Metrics

We see the numbers of CC licenses or CC licensed content as a rather arbitrary factor, because the sheer numbers themselves do in no way reflect quality and relevance of the so lincensed content. They also tend to distort debates about the benefits and downsides of alternative licensing away from the aspect of individual creators making licensing decisions. We see more value in highlighting certain projects, groups or individuals that in our opinion are possible role models for CC licensing.

Competitions

CC DE Schwag Competition

In cooperation with Wikimedia Germany we want to run an online competition to make new designs for CC schwag and merchandising material. This is meant to raise awareness of how diverse the group of CC licensors and re-users is and to also benefit the project in terms of material to promote CC's cause. The winners will be announced at one of the larger gatherings of net-minded people in Berlin (28C3, re:pubica, Linuxtag, …).

Workshops, Presentations and Strategic Talks

People from the CC DE Affiliate Team (ATeam) and the two project leads are frequently invited to talk about CC and alternative licensing and write articles and papers on the topic. There have also been individual consultations and strategic talks on the CCPL and their application with several stake holder institutions, one of the most prominent being the CC-GEMA dialogue, an exchange with the leading German collecting society for musical works. Other such consultantions have been held with public broadcasters, political and philathropic foundations and media companies.

Institutional and Project Cooperations

CC Germany is always open to cooperate with other groups and institutions if this apprears to be beneficial to our common(s) cause. In the past, such cooperations have existed f. e. with … Kinemathek, Jugendleute, … at the moment and in the coming year we will cooperate with Google Germany's policy group and their Co://aboratory and also with the activists of the C3S project that explored the pros and cons of setting up a collecting society for CC content.

Regional Collaboration

Since 2009 there is a regional collaboration on European CC Projects under the name CC Europe. It is not formalized and has developed out of the Communia Project, a EU-funded Thematic Network on the digital public domain to which many European CC Projects are members. CC Germany hat built and runs the CC Europe website at http://europe.creativecommons.org as a central entry point for anyone interested in CC licensing and related topics at the European level. In addition to that we maintain the CC Europe mailinglist and coordinate regional meetings and more.