Case Studies/InMediaHK
As a citizen media website, InMediaHK wants the articles to reach as many people as possible. Creative Commons helps us to distribute our works. — Oiwan Lam
Overview
"Inmediahk.net is the main citizen media website in Hong Kong, specialising in social issues, current affair commentaries and citizen reportage. It also hosts a number of socially-concerned personal and collective weblogs. Inmediahk.net was launched in the second half of 2004 and has been running as a participatory media in the form the citizen reporting. It adopts media activism in idea and practice, and was actively involved in the counter-mainstream reporting of" a number of important movements.
(Taken from "Info-Rhizome: Report on Independent Media in the Chinese-speaking World", p.58)
License Usage
All six licences are available for contributors to release their works under. This feature is implemented using the tagging feature onsite. They can just select the appropriate licence tags during the submission process and they will be displayed side-by-side with the works. The downside of this approach is that it is not compatible with RDFa and thus not discoverable by CC search engines. InMediaHK probably needs some technical support on this.
The benefit so far is to make people aware that there can be variations even under the current copyright system. And I think more people will attribute to our website rather than taking the content without attribution.
Also some individual contributors do not have enough knowledge about the licence. For example, some of them would choose both the non-derivative and share alike tags for their translation work -- but translation itself is already a kind of derivative work. It seems that although many people hear about the licence, but they don't know the details. Creative Commons Hong Kong probably needs to do more publicizing work.
Motivations
The editors of InMediaHK heard about Creative Commons before they started the website in 2004, but they only took a serious look into the license in 2005 when the Hong Kong government was trying to pass a digital copyright law that criminalises online copyright violation. We then invited Creative Commons experts from mainland China and Taiwan to present their view about digital copyright in relation to creativity.
As a citizen media website, InMediaHK wants the articles to reach as many people as possible. Creative Commons helps us to distribute our works.
