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

Creative Commons is working with the NEXA Center for Internet & Society at the Politecnico di Torino to create Italy jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses.

CCi Italy List

Project Lead: Juan Carlos De Martin

• License draft.
• English explanation of substantive legal changes (PDF).
• Post a message.
• Subscribe to the discussion.
• Read the discussion archives.

More about the NEXA Center at the Politecnico di Torino

The NEXA Center for Internet and Society of the Politecnico di Torino was founded in 2006 by Juan Carlos De Martin, professor of Information Engineering, together with Marco Ricolfi, law professor at the University of Torino Law School. NEXA is a multidisciplinary research center on the impact of the Internet on society, with a focus on technical, economical and juridical issues. The NEXA research team includes academic researchers as well as law practitioners and technologists; many of them have been working together since 2003, when the Creative Commons Italy project was started.

The Politecnico di Torino (Turin Polytechnic University) has 26,000 students studying on about 120 courses (39 Bachelor’s degree courses; 35 Master of Science courses; 30 Doctorates and 18 specialization courses). The Politecnico di Torino offers excellence in technology from all points of view, from the strictly technical to the economical and juridical.

Acknowledgements

The Department of Law of the University of Turin

The Department of Law of the University of Turin, headed by Prof. Gianmaria Ajani, is aimed to coordinating all the research activity in the area of law of the University of Turin. It deals also with the fund raising for research purposes, the management of all the PhD programs and continuing education in the area of law. It is part of the University of Turin, which was founded in 1404 (it is one of the most antique universities in the world) and which today counts 65.000 students, 1.300 professors and nearly 800 researchers and assistants.

The Department of Law coordinates the research work of more than 130 law professors in the different areas of law. The main research program by now are in the field of:

• EC Private law and harmonization of contract law,
• International Human Rights,
• Criminal Jurisdiction,
• Harmonization of Civil Procedure,
• Intellectual Property law.

For more information about the Department of Law of the University of Turin, visit http://www.dsg.unito.it/.

IEIIT-CNR

IEIIT-CNR: Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell’Informazione e delle Telecomunicazioni del CNR. (English: CNR Institute of Electronics and Information and Telecommunications Engineering).

The Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council of Italy), founded in 1923, is a multidisciplinary public research institution. The IEIIT is a CNR institute founded in 2002 by merging the forces of several preexisting CNR institutes and centers. The IEIIT-CNR headquarters are located in Torino, with territorial sections in Genoa, Milan, Bologna and Pisa; the Institute is directed by prof. Marco Ajmone Marsan. The IEIIT-CNR pursues advanced, multidisciplinary research in the field of information and communications technology (ICT).

For more information about IEIIT-CNR, visit http://www.ieiit.cnr.it/

Affiliate Team Roadmap for 2011

• Timespan of this roadmap: January 2011 - December 2011

Team information

• Jurisdiction: Italy

• Complete list of all members of the Affiliate Team, their roles, and field(s) of expertise
  • Juan Carlos De Martin, Public Lead Creative Commons Italia (associate professor of informatics at the Politecnico di Torino; researcher in the field of on Internet sciences)
  • Legal working group: Marco Ricolfi, Legal lead (full professor of law at the University of Turin), Massimo Travostino (practicing lawyer, specialized in IP law), Deborah De Angelis (practicing lawyer, specialized in IP law), Thomas Margoni (assistant professor, specialized in IP and computer law), Marco Ciurcina (practicing lawyer, specialized in IP law), Nicola Bottero (practicing lawyer, specialized in IP law), Federico Morando (post-doc researcher, specialized in economic analysis of law), Alessandro Cogo (lawyer and currently full time researcher, specialized in IP law), Claudio Artusio (researcher in law)
    • Other legal experts cooperating with CCIT: Simone Aliprandi, Cristiana Sappa, Angelo Maria Rovati, Silvia Bisi
  • Main editors of the website: Claudio Artusio, Federico Morando, Juan Carlos De Martin, Giuseppe Futia (media & communications manager at the NEXA Center)
  • Webmaster: Luca Leschiutta (IT manager at the NEXA Center)

• Date of earliest MOU in jurisdiction: Summer 2003

• Self-Identified Region: Europe
  • CC Italia is well connected with other European jurisdictions. Thanks to the COMMUNIA European Project and personal connections. Moreover, Italy has a typical European continental legal system (civil law), as far as law is concerned (and IP and contract law in particular), so CC Italia faced similar problems as many other European jurisdictions and interacted with them.

Vision

• Why is Creative Commons important for the jurisdiction?
  • Connecting creators
    • In Italy, CC is important for the usual reasons, very well described, for instance, by Lawrence Lessig in his books. In fact, CC is probably more useful in Italy than in other countries, for instance because of the combination of these factors:
      • in Italy, there is a relatively high number of "creators" (for instance, according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/ in Italy there are 12.9 websites per 1,000 people, despite an Internet penetration of 51.7%; as a comparison, in Finland and France there are respectively 13.3 and 10.5 websites per 1,000 people, with a penetration rate of 85.3% and 68.9%);
      • however, in Italy there is a relatively low number of associations and cultural institutions, including public libraries, chronically lack funding and are not always very used/usable: creators lack networking tools;
      • all this implies that several creators risk working on their own and this suggests that the virtuous cycle of use and re-use generated by Creative Commons licenses is especially valuable in Italy.
    • More generally, Italy has a limited number of open and free culture related projects and surely needs more open models and tools. A Creative Commons affiliate institutions is definitely needed (and this is testified by the number of emails and phone calls that the NEXA Center receives from people asking for information and help about Creative Commons).

• What do you think makes a successful jurisdiction project?

1. Up-to-date licensing tools. A clear and user friendly website. A working mailing list to ask for an offer help.
2. Once this is in place, one could think about increasing awareness: in the general public (testified by the number of adoptions, for instance), in public institutions, private associations and foundations. Also firms and media (e.g. Wired Italia and La Stampa, in Italy) are becoming increasingly sensible and responsive to awareness and dissemination activities related to open licensing, so they should also be targeted.
3. Once a sufficient degree of awareness has been reached, the "quality" of the adopted licenses should be improved: in particular, at least in Italy, new adopters tend to favor relatively closed licenses (es. CC BY-NC-ND or CC BY-NC-SA), but most of the time they are willing to move to relatively more open licenses, as soon as some key doubts and fears have been addressed.

Self evaluating ourselves, we find that the first point still needs more work. In a way, we compensated with significant results on point 2 (see CC Italy report for 2010).

• How do you see the jurisdiction project contributing to the CC Affiliate Network?
  • The contribution of Creative Commons Italia and of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society to the CC Affiliate Network could be especially valuable in terms of:
    • legal expertise (civil law tradition);
    • networking with European players (members of the European Networks COMMUNIA and LAPSI, the European Commission, European Universities) and international institutions (WIPO, in particular, but also OECD);
    • policy support experience, thanks to several policy support projects at the European and Italian level.

Community

• Describe the communities that are currently active in the project:
  • CC Italia has an active community of experts: lawyers, consultants, open content/culture activists, which is admittedly the core of our community;
  • it also has some active creators in its community;
    • on top of individual creators, we have some preliminary contacts with associations supporting creators (e.g. Italian Association of Web Radios)

During 2011 the idea of approaching creators through some of their associations is worth experimenting (despite the fact that, as mentioned, cultural associations are not always very widespread and successful in Italy)

• Describe the communities (existing or new) that you plan to focus on during the time-frame covered by this road-map?
  • On top of the traditional communities of users, we will focus on:
    • public institutions and
    • cultural institutions and associations.
  • How do you plan to engage with these communities?
    • Thanks to the network of the NEXA Center and to the leading pilot project dati.piemonte.it, it's relatively easy to engage with other public institutions in Italy and some promising contacts are already in place.
    • To engage cultural institutions and associations, we will use both direct contacts and the support of third party initiatives, such as the ShareYourKnowledge project of lettera27.

Priority Goals

• What are the three most important focus areas on which the Affiliate Team will work during this time period? Please consider community building and adoption goals among your priorities.

1. Focus-area: Porting (and/or translation) of the legal tools

• Completing the porting of the 3.0 license suite; translate CC0 and the PD Mark
  • Why is it important?
    • Apart from the obvious reasons, the availability of up-to-date licensing tools in Italian is Crucial for the adoption by public bodies, since they frequently release databases of public sector information (and the latest licensing tools deal much better with databases than the current 2.5 suite available in Italy).
  • Which communities will benefit?
    • All Italian users will, of course, benefit from this porting and translation effort thanks to the availability in Italy and according to Italian law of the most up-to-date legal tools offered by Creative Commons. However, there is another particular benefit for public sector bodies (see also below), which may face obstacles in formally adopting licenses (or other legal documents) which do not have an official Italian translation.

2. Focus-area: Adoption by institutions

• Facilitate the adoption by public bodies, foundations and associations
  • Why is it important?
    • Public sector data and content represent a "raw material" or "building block" for several intellectual, scientific and, in general, creative endeavors.
    • Moreover, public sector body adopting the licenses normally offer a significant boost in terms of visibility and credibility.
  • Which communities will benefit ?
    • See above: not only public bodies and their citizens will benefit, but also creators in general, who will be able to use PSI as a building block for their original content.

3. Focus-area: Adoption by creators: increase quality!

• Make more creators aware of the opportunities offered by the most open CC licenses
  • in general, improve the FAQs and the website (in cooperation with the SeLiLi free licenses clinic)
    • specifically, highlight the benefits of CC BY and CC BY-SA in terms of freedom, openness, compatibility with existing projects and various approaches to the creation of new, original content
    • moreover, focus on the special needs of some categories of users:
      • prosumers and high profile amateurs;
        • including singers, musicians, etc.;
      • software developers which offer platform for online interaction, social networking and user generated content;
  • Why is it important?
    • According to the CC Monitor project, with more than 5.5 millions of licenses, Italy scores very high in terms of CC adoptions (ranking 3rd out of 52 countries). Even if these are always relevant goals, this suggests that awareness and adoption in general should not be the top priority for Creative Commons Italia. However, Italy has a much poorer rank in terms of adoption of the most "free and open" licenses" (i.e. CC BY and CC BY-SA): in fact, its Freedom Rank is 38 out of 52. This is why it's important to encourage the use of the most open CC licenses in Italy (in particular, of the ones "Approved for Free Cultural Works").
  • Which communities will benefit?
    • All creators will benefit, because using more open licenses you make creation easier "downstream"

Project Outputs

• Detail tangible project outputs (e.g., events, papers, blog posts, video/films, etc.) for each focus area including an expected date of completion.

The outputs we plan to complete are as follows:

1. Focus-area: Porting & translation
   1. Project Output:
      • the legal tools (see below);
      • related press releases and blog post on CreativeCommons.it
   2. Expected start date - Expected date of completion (+ final approval from CC International)
      • CCPL 3.0 : ongoing - February 2011
      • CC0: March 2011 - May 2011
      • PD Mark: May 2011 - July 2011
   3. Team Member(s) Responsible
      • porting & translation: see legal working group;
        • communication: Giuseppe Futia, Federico Morando, Claudio Artusio
2. Focus-area: Adoption by public bodies
   1. Project Output
      • adoption of the CC licenses by more public bodies in Italy
        • for their institutional websites and content
        • for their public datasets (possibly CC0 or, at most, CC BY)
          • there are ongoing contacts with various public bodies; ongoing public projects involve the Region of Piedmont and the Comune di Torino and we expect to have much more available datasets in 2011
      • guidelines for the use of CC licenses by public bodies
   2. Start/Completion dates: ongoing - open ended
   3. Team Member(s) Responsible: Federico Morando, Juan Carlos De Martin
3. Focus-area: Adoption by creators
   1. Project Output
      • informative content:
        • pages on creativecommons.it about the pros and cons of various licenses
        • news about best practices
          • ongoing effort: goal: one post per week on the creativecommons.it website
      • SIAE (Italian collecting society) pilot mandate: Deborah De Angelis
        • actually completed since July 2009: awaiting for feedback from the collecting society, but we will have to keep this monitored carefully
   2. Team Member(s) Responsible
      • whole CC Italy team

Metrics

Please consider using trackable statistics (such as web traffic or number of license adoptions) when applicable, but only if meaningful.

• How will you measure and evaluate your impact on focus-area 1 ("porting")?
  • availability of the tools;
    • related press releases and blogposts;
    • visits to the (Italian) pages of each legal tool;
    • metrics on the adoption of the new tools (using CC Monitor, if possible, or other estimates)
• How will you measure and evaluate your impact on focus-area 2 ("public adopters")?
  • adoptions by public institutions (quite trackable), associations and foundations (relatively less trackable, but anecdotal evidence will be available)
    • number and relevance of new public bodies adopting CC licenses;
    • number and relevance of the contents (and data) made available by current adopters, such as the Region of Piedmont and the City of Torino;
• How will you measure and evaluate your impact on focus-area 3 ("quality adoption")?
  • visits to the FAQs webpage of CreativeCommons.it;
  • visits to the | SeLiLi (free licenses clinic) website;
  • proportion of the various licensing tools according to available metrics (variations with respect to the previous year), for instance, as measured by the variation in the "Freedom score" of CC Monitor;
  • number of posts on the website of Creative Commons Italia (www.creativecommons.it), as a proxy of the coverage of success stories, etc.

Resources Required

People

• What human resources or expertise must the team seek out or add to your existing resources, if any, in order to achieve your priority goals?
  • We do not expect to significantly modify the core team of CCIT, however we will work to involve:
    • a few selected new experts in the core legal team;
    • some new experts in parts of Italy that do not have a sufficient coverage at the moment (forcing the group of CCIT to miss some interesting opportunities, both in terms of potential adoptions and awareness and dissemination).
  • How will you involve these people?
    • Mainly through word of mouth and/or deepening existing contacts for the core legal team;
      • plus awareness and dissemination activities targeting people already possessing some key skills (e.g. young lawyers at the university of Turin);
    • Possibly with a call on the mailing lists of CCIT for experts in other parts of Italy.

Technology

• Since the CC Italia affiliate institution is the NEXA Center for Internet & Society at the Politecnico di Torino, CC Italy has a good endowment in terms of technology resources and/or skills.
  • No action point required.
  • The usual maintenance activity will be performed by the webmaster, Luca Leschiutta (e.g. updating the software behind www.creativecommons.it).

Materials

• During 2011 we expect to be able to fund the project with existing or potentially available material resources. Synergies with other activities of the NEXA Center will provide additional resources.
  • A more structured approach to the funding of the Creative Commons Italia project may be appropriate and it could be considered during 2011.

Other

• Time (of existing human resources) is definitely the scarcest resource.
  • Mainly, this should be addressed in terms of finding additional people willing to contribute (and forming them).
  • On top of that, we will improve our contacts with existing associations and organizations which share the philosophy and the goals of CC and of the NEXA Center.
    • The aforementioned cooperation with lettera27 in the context of the ShareYourKnowledge project is an example of this kind of contact.

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?
  • We will not be able to ensure anything, since this is volunteer work. However the NEXA Center offers a certain degree of stability.

• 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)
  • When feasible, we will use email list updates, we will make all reasonable efforts to take part in CC meetings (at the International level and in Europe), and we will issues press releases on our website, plus English press releases in case of major news.

• How will you document the project so that others may replicate or learn from your efforts?
  • We do not plan to systematically document the project, due to lack of resources.

Collaboration

• We will analyze the roadmaps of other jurisdictions as they become available.
  • Would you be interested in mentoring new jurisdiction teams?
    • At the moment, we would prefer to focus our limited resource on our jurisdiction, working in order to enlarge the CC network within Italy, more than abroad. However, we are highly involved in the founding of the COMMUNIA Association, which will likely be in synergy with Creative Commons Europe and, also in this context, we may informally support new jurisdiction teams.
  • Conversely, would you be interested in having a mentor from a more experienced jurisdiction team?
    • We are always interested in exchanging view, contacts and best practices, but at the moment we do not feel the need of specific mentoring. On a case-by-case basis, we may get in touch with some of the fellows from other jurisdictions, in order to learn from specific projects or best practices.

Regional

• Suggest three possible projects on which you can collaborate with other teams on a regional level:
  • COMMUNIA Association
    • work in progress amongst the CC Europe teams: an update about this will be available soon
  • PSI related projects, such as LAPSI and SharePSI
  • European cultural heritage projects, such as Europeana

• • How do you plan to contribute to these projects?
    • COMMUNIA Association: we're going to contribute as one of the founding members and supporting the formal creation of the organization;
    • PSI related projects: we're deeply involved in these projects (also coordinating the LAPSI network) and we're constantly involving members of other CC affiliate institutions in the various activities that we perform;
    • European cultural heritage projects: we're studying various issues related to cultural heritage and IP law, the public domain and open licensing, focusing on Italy, but with a European perspective. We would be happy to be kept updated about possible synergies with other jurisdictions in this (and other) fields.

Translation

• In what language(s) will you promote CC in the jurisdiction and why?
  • Italian, since this is the language spoken by the vast majority of Italians.
  • In which of these languages are licenses already available? CC0?
    • The standard suite is available in Italian (version 2.5; 3.0 coming very soon). CC0 is not yet available, but a draft translation is ongoing.
  • Into which of the remaining languages do you intend to translate the licenses? CC0?
    • None. Some other linguistic communities exist (both in terms of dialects and complex languages, such as ladino or sardo;see also http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingue_parlate_in_Italia), however we do not plan to translate the licenses for these linguistic groups, given an apparent lack of demand.
• How will you involve the local language(s) community?
  • Even if we have no plan to translate the licenses in other languages, we're open to different suggestions (in particular if coupled with proposals to cooperate with respect to the translation).