2008 Nordic Creative Commons Summit

The summit brings together scholars and practitioners from legal and culture field to discuss best policies of implementing legal open content sharing in Nordic countries.

Background

Creative Commons [Later referred CC] is a global nonprofit organization that is based in US. It provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved." All the tools and licenses created are free. Creative Commons licenses have been used for over 200 million works. It can be said that the licenses help to fuel the legal free culture movement that is happening online.

CC provides generic licenses which are jurisdiction-agnostic: they do not mention any particular jurisdiction's laws or statutes or contain any sort of choice-of-law provision. The licenses are, however, based on the U.S. Copyright Act in many respects. This means that it is at least conceivable that some aspects of the licenses will not align perfectly to a particular jurisdiction's laws. Creative Commons International (CCi) works to "port" the core Creative Commons Licenses to different copyright legislations around the world. The porting work involves both linguistically translating the licenses and legally adapting them to particular jurisdictions.

The translation and localization work is done by volunteer teams in each jurisdiction who are committed to introducing CC to their country and who consult extensively with members of the public and key stakeholders as part of the porting process. Denmark’s, Finland’s and Sweden’s volunteer country teams have adapted the previous version of the licenses and have web pages for instructing the rights owners for how to use the licenses. Norway is in the process of localizing the licenses.

Creative Commons is based to copyright licenses that are translated and localized to each countries local legal system. This ensures that the licenses are easily understood and enforceable in each country The Nordic legal systems has a common heritage when it comes to copyright law. Nordic co-operation can thus help to produce common licensing structure and provide insights for the translation process. Having a face to face meeting helps the networking of the voluntary members of the movement.

Project description

The project will bring together Nordic Creative Commons licensing researchers and activists for a weekend workshop to Stockholm in May 23.-25.5.2008. The workshop will provide networking for Nordic researchers and co-ordinate and discuss the license localizations and free culture promotion. The event will be co-hosted by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and VINNOVA Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Communications. Expected attendance is 100 people. The program consists of keynote presentations, workshops and panels. Invited papers are selected and printed in a special "open content, culture and law" publication in a joint publication of Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and VINNOVA Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Communications. The publication will be made available in electronic form for free. The printed material will be made available for academic and cultural institutions. Information of the summit will be distributed through the international Creative Commons network and using Nordic networks own channels like participating institutions web pages and mailing lists. The event is organized by the Nordic CC network.

Summit themes

The summit themes and program will be divided to four parts. 1) Technology How can technology be used to aid distribution of cultural objects legally? The call for participation is aimed for case studies, demos and posters of new technologies that enable legal remixing and sharing. 2) Law How copyright and other laws affect free culture movement? What are the special Nordic circumstances that we have to take into account? The call for papers is for legal analysis of open content licensing and related issues. 3) Business How can you do business while giving away your products for free? The call for papers is for case studies of innovative business and production models that are enabled by open content licensing. 4) Art What kind of new possibilities open content enables for artists? The call for papers is for art projects showcases.

Budget

The project budget is 24.000 Euros.