Team description

The Project team consists of four Nordic Creative Commons teams and Royal Institute of Technology’s VINNOVA Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Communications. The team members have set up a mailing list and have had previous communications at open content related events.

Finland

Creative Commons Finland is hosted together by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and The University of Art and Design Helsinki.

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), founded in 1999, is a joint research institute of the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki University of Technology. HIIT represents high expertise both in computer science and law. In addition it has close institutional bonds with academic legal science, law-courts and The Finnish Bar Association.

HIIT conducts internationally high-level strategic research in information technology, especially in areas where Finnish IT industry has or may reach a significant global role. HIIT works in close co-operation with universities and industry, aiming to improve the contents, visibility, and impact of Finnish IT research to benefit the competitiveness of Finnish IT industry and the development of the Finnish information society. The University of Art and Design Helsinki's Media Lab provides education and research frameworks for studying digital media contents and technologies, their design, development and the effect they have on society. Media Lab’s work is characterized by the collaboration of people from a wide variety of disciplines and cultures.

Key personnel: Herkko Hietanen has been the CC-Finland leader since 2004. He has worked with Creative Commons team in San Francisco and as a visiting scholar in UC Berkley School of Information. Currently Hietanen teaches law and technology in Lappeenranta University of Technology and conducts p2p research at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. His publications include several academic papers and he has co-authored a book "Community Created Content, law business and policy" that has received excellent reviews from the open content community. Herkko is writing his PhD thesis on open content licensing which he hopes to finish early 2008. Herkko is also a partner in Turre Legal law firm and has extensively worked with user created and open content projects. Herkko has counseled several media companies and productions in open content licensing recently helped to design the open content licensing and distribution strategy for the Star Wreck motion picture. Herkko will be the project leader of the Summit and responsible for organizing the event.