Visit the jurisdiction's website. The Creative Commons Poland license suite is available in the following version. License your work under these licenses, or choose the international licenses. More info.

Many thanks to all who contributed to the localization of the license suite.

Creative Commons is working with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at Warsaw University (ICM UW) and the Grynhoff, Woźny and Maliński Law Firm to create Poland jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses.

CC Poland List

Public Project Leads: Alek Tarkowski and Justyna Hofmokl from ICM UW

Legal Project Lead: Krzysztof Siewicz from Grynhoff, Woźny and Maliński Law Firm

• License draft (PDF).
• English explanation of substantive legal changes. (PDF)
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More About Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling

Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, Warsaw University is a research centre in computational sciences, with a strongly interdisciplinary profile and a centre of computational and information sciences serving the whole scientific community of Poland. It is the leading scientific supercomputing centre in Poland, with experience in provision of large scale Internet information and data services, as well as in Internet content replication techniques.

ICM is also a research centre undertaking scientific challenges that cross interfaces separating traditional disciplines in multi-disciplinary effort, with main roots of complex systems and processes in life sciences, physics and chemistry, atmospheric and environmental sciences and decision sciences.

ICM facilitates conducting advanced scientific computational projects by Polish and international research groups and serves as an an educational centre in computational science and modeling.

Since 1995 ICM is running a multi-terabyte national virtual library programme (with over 10,000 full text articles being downloaded daily) serving hundreds of scientific and research institutions in Poland. Furthermore, through the Digital Internet Repository of Science (DIR) project, ICM is creating a management system and public archive for digital scientific materials. Finally, ICM is experienced in large scale text acquisition and processing and is one of the partners in European Digital Repository Infrastructure program (project “DRIVER”). With the Creative Commons Poland project, ICM UW has extended its interest in digital repositories into the field of open access to scientific materials.

More About the Law Firm Grynhoff Woźny Maliński

Grynhoff Woźny Maliński is one of the biggest Polish law firms, established in 1996. It is a team of 80 lawyers, most of whom are licensed attorneys, legal advisors, and tax advisors.

Grynhoff Woźny Maliński specializes in servicing entrepreneurs active in regulated sectors of the economy, in particular telecommunications, media, energy and TSL (transport-shipping-logistics)

In the area of so-called “intellectual property”, the lawyers of Grynhoff, Woźny i Wspólnicy have also been active in various bigger initiatives, apart from servicing individual clients. They currently participate in projects such as “Friendly Copyrights” and “Free Textbooks”.

In 2007 the Law Firm started founding “ITele(c)t”, an “intellectual property and new technologies law” competition for Polish law students. The competition is organized in cooperation with ELSA Poland.

The main office of the Law Firm is located in Warsaw, and it operates branch offices in Poznań and Wrocław.

Acknowledgments

CC Poland would like to acknowledge and thank Prof. Elzbieta Traple and Piotr Wasilewski from the Institute of Civil Law at the Jagiellonian University for her involvement and support for the project.

Affiliate Team Roadmap

• Date submitted: December 2010
• Timespan of this roadmap: January 2011-December 2011

Team information

• Jurisdiction: Creative Commons Poland

• Complete list of all members of the Affiliate Team, their roles, and field(s) of expertise:

Justyna Hofmokl (Public Lead), Krzysztof Siewicz (Legal Lead), Alek Tarkowski (Public Lead), Klaudia Grabowska (part-time), Kamil Śliwowski (volunteer)

• Date of earliest MOU in jurisdiction: 2005

• Self-Identified Region(s): Europe

Vision

• Why is Creative Commons important for the jurisdiction?

Poland is a fast developing country with steadily growing economy that survived recent economic crisis without major turbulences. It is a fairly young population with a growing number of internet users. At the same time, the level of understanding of digital technologies and their potential advantages is relatively low. Similarly, public debate on intellectual property is dominated by a conservative discourse of “closure”. Creative Commons offers an important tool and set of ideas that allow us to present a different point of view in the public debate, and to offer models for content production and distribution that tap into the potential of digital technologies. We treat CC licenses as a legal tool that opens a wide range of social, cultural and economic changes.

• What do you think makes a successful jurisdiction project?

A successful jurisdiction project needs to achieve several things at once: 1) Build a solid local framework for using open licensing (localized licenses, knowledge base, support for users, etc.) 2); Build broad awareness of issues related to CC licensing; 3) Build a community of advanced users, early adopters and supporters of CC licensing; 4) Work with key stakeholders, through which CC licensing becomes popular and visible. At the same time, a successful project needs to become sustainable, in particular in financial terms.

• How do you see the jurisdiction project contributing to the CC Affiliate Network?
  • CC Poland is one of the oldest European CC projects (we started in 2005). Throughout the years we have gained significant experience and knowledge on various aspects of license implementation and promotion.
  • Our leads are relatively active at the level of the international Affiliate Network.
  • In the last year, we have conducted a project dealing with opening scientific books (Otwórz książkę - Open the book), which in our opinion was both innovative and successful, and could serve as an example for similar projects abroad. It’s a good example of specific know-how that we have and could share
  • Having said this, we believe that in order to contribute better an institutional framework for international collaboration is needed as part of the Affiliate Network. Sharing with others is time- and resource-intensive and we lack resources to devote time and energy to outreach and collaboration abroad.

Community

Creative Commons Poland is a fairly small project, with 3 persons actively involved on a daily basis. There is no real community involved in our activities on a day-to-day basis, but we are co-working with various organizations focused on reaching similar goals. CC Poland is a founding member of Polish Coalition for Open Education (an agreement of non-governmental organizations and institutions working in the field of education, science and culture). The Coalition promotes open educational resources and open licensing models. There is also a broad community of organizations, people and projects upon which we draw from time to time, for particular tasks or projects.

In the year 2011 we plan to focus on three target groups / communities:

• Supporters of openness in the scientific and educational sphere: this is a community we have been focusing upon in the last two years; it seems worthwhile to continue this co-operation
• Government and public institutions: due to a large grant on open government we plan to work on advocacy of CC and open licensing among public institutions
• Grant-givers: We focus upon this particular group due to strategic importance of convincing grant-givers to use CC licensing: a successful implementation of CC licensing in a grant program helps to spread the model fast.

Priority Goals

1. Focus-area: Advocacy and cooperation with grant-giving institutions

Our goal is to promote Creative Commons licensing among grant-giving institutions, as an important best practice for grant programs. Successful cooperation with both public and private grant-givers requires:

- basic advocacy among a broad range of grant-giving institutions;

- creating and in-depth toolkit for open licensing in grant programs, to be distributed among interested institutions;

- providing insititutions (both grant-givers and grant-takers) with ongoing support on each level of the process (introducing open licensing to the grant scheme, training the grant-giver, conducting the grant competition with open licensing, providing support to grant-takers);

Currently, with our help, open licensing has been introduced by the Orange Fundation (charitable arm of the Orange telecom) and the development aid program of the Polish Ministry of External Affairs. In 2011, we plan to work with a range of other organizations, among them the Trust for Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe.

Possibly, as part of this focus area we will work on a broader project that introduces open models (among the CC licensing) into a regional public cultural institution, the Małopolska voivodeship cultural institute. We might also work on the implementation of CC-licensing as part of the Polish government’s content licensing scheme.

• Why is it important?

Working with grant-givers and public institutions is very important for wider promotion of CC licenses as well as for changing the perceived counter-culture image of, CC licenses. CC is frequently perceived in Poland as a tool used by copyright fighters not suitable for wider public. Establishing CC licenses as a standard licensing scheme for grant-givers will have a huge impact on the future uptake of licenses in Poland.

• Which communities will benefit?

Promoting CC licenses among grant-givers will be beneficial for different groups such us: institutions themselves, ngo’s (frequent beneficiaries of the grants), public.

• Output:

Toolkit for grant-giving institutions (September 2011).

2. Focus-area: Further development and legal analysis of CC licenses in Poland

In the year 2011 we would like to: - analyze and then implement into the Polish legal systems (pending upon their applicability) the CC0 and Public Domain Mark tools;

- prepare a publication with a detailed legal analysis of the functioning of CC licenses in the Polish legal system, focusing on clarifying any potential or perceived conflicts or problems.

• Why is it important?

CC0 and Public Domain Mark are for us important, as a lot of discussion among advocates of openness in Poland focuses not only on open licensing, but also upon the Public Domain - we would like to provide tools that can be useful in this context.

A detailed legal analysis will build upon our ongoing work in this area conducted in the previous years: a conference on legal aspects of free culture organized in 2008, a research paper on the implementation of CC0 into Polish law prepared in 2010, and a range of documents on issues and challenges related to porting the 3.0 licenses (ending with a paper by Krzysztof Siewicz published in 2010 in a volume on copyright law). Such an analysis is necessary to provide a solid reference that clarifies issues related to the use of CC licenses in Poland, seen from a legal perspective.

• Which communities will benefit?

This legal work will be beneficial to any person or institution interested in CC licensing or using CC licenses.

• Output:

Analysis and potential implementation of CC0 and Public Domain Mark tools, adapted to the Polish legal system (June 2011). Detailed legal analysis of the functioning of CC licenses in the Polish legal system (September 2011).

3. Focus-area: Analysis and research of CC license use in Poland

As part of this focus area we plan to: - conduct an evaluation of the use of open licensing in a cultural education grant program of the Orange Foundation - in order to obtain knowledge about the adoption of CC licensing by institutions (in this case, cultural NGOs and public institutions)

- conduct a survey of CC-licensed content made available online, based on a web crawl of the Polish internet

- create case studies of CC license use (and more broadly open licensing) in Poland, by different types of creators and institutions, and for different types of content

• Why is it important?

This research will provide us with a better understanding of the state of adoption of CC licenses in Poland. Furthermore, it will provide useful knowledge for other actors using CC licenses.

• Which communities will benefit?

This research work will be beneficial to any person or institution interested in CC licensing or using CC licenses.

• Output: Evaluation of open licensing in the Orange Foundation grant program (March 2011). Results of the crawler study (June 2011). Case study project (September 2011).

Other planned activities:

• upgrade of the CC Poland webpage
• update of the FAQ section on our webpage
• increased online communication through the webpage and social media
• regular community meetings as part of the NetWtorek meetings - monthly
• gatherings of IT and NGO communities interested, among other things, in open models

Metrics

• How will you measure and evaluate your impact on focus-area 1?

Number of grant-giving institutions using CC licensing. Value of grant programs. Number of grant-takers. Amount and type of content made openly available.

• How will you measure and evaluate your impact on focus-area 2?

Delivery of planned outputs. Reaction to prepared documents in the legal community.

• How will you measure and evaluate your impact on focus-area 3?

Delivery of planned outputs. Responses to presented research results by key stakeholders, partners, media and public opinion.

Resources Required

In order to further grow, we need to obtain dedicated funding for CC activities in Poland. Currently, our leads are only partially funded to conduct CC activities, and we lack project funding. Some of the funding we have is due to the fact that we include CC licensing as part of a different project. Our goal for this year is to obtain such funding, which in particular will allow us to hire additional employees. We do not require any technological or material resources, we have a sufficient technological base and office space at the Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska, our CC affiliate institution.

Sustainability and Scalability

• How will you ensure your goals will be completed if unforeseen circumstances interrupt the project, such as changes in the leadership of the project or outputs taking longer to complete than anticipated?

Due to the current financing model, and our reliance on third-parties or volunteers in some areas, it is difficult for us to plan against or avoid delays. CC Poland is also currently largely dependent on the individual work of current leads and it is difficult to plan for the event of a potential change in leadership.

• How will you communicate the project's on-going progress and setbacks within the jurisdiction and the CC Affiliate Network? (e.g. email list updates, meetings, press releases)

We will publish updates on email lists and press releases. We would enjoy having the opportunity to discuss ongoing work through occassional conference calls.

• How will you document the project so that others may replicate or learn from your efforts?

We are working on employing in our work more intensively a wiki as a documentation mechanism. Also, through the case studies project we want to provide know-how on implementing CC-licensing in Poland.

Regional

We're part of the CC-Europe network. In the future we would like to increase collaboration in the scope of Central and Eastern Europe, which we see as a region with a particular and share cultural identity and history.

Translation

• In what language(s) will you promote CC in the jurisdiction and why? Polish
  • In which of these languages are licenses already available? CC0? Licenses are available in Polish, CC0 has not been localized.
  • Into which of the remaining languages do you intend to translate the licenses? CC0? We do not plan further translations. We involve the local language community on the occasional basis, when translation work is required. Last time we’ve obtained community help when we localized the 3.0 version.