Grants/Study of the Cypriot Legal Framework for Copyright law from the scope of openness requirements in the academic environment of Cyprus leveraging on legal-tech means such as the Creative Commons licensing.
Describe the project you are proposing as clearly as possible in just five sentences.
The proposed study examines means for the free availability of literature and works of authorship, audiovisual works etc in the academic environment of Cyprus (public and private Universities and Libraries) through the public Internet by delving into the Cypriot Copyright Law and in consideration of means such as the Creative Commons licensing, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself.
Detail the tangible project output (e.g., paper, blog post, written materials, video/film, etc.; this would be in addition to the final written report that successful grant recipients will be expected to deliver to CC at the conclusion of the project).
The tangible project output will be a Whitepaper and a video/film including some interviews of local people if necessary. Promotion of the tangible project output could be enhanced with a conference in Cyprus with international participations co-organized by the aforementioned team-members, the Cyprus Association of Librarians – Information Scientists (CALIS) and by the University of Cyprus.
Describe the community you are targeting. How would the project benefit the community?
The study targets on the Cypriot legal framework for Copyright law. Cyprus has yet to import Creative Commons licenses in its territory, though there has been sincere interest in the creation of the Cypriot version of said licenses in consideration of local Copyright law. Academic institutions and libraries in Cyprus could benefit from the production of said study which is seen by many as a first step in the implementation of Openness in the Cypriot academic environment.br />
Professor Tatiana Synodinou is an attorney-at-Law and a member of the Faculty of Law and teaches Copyright Law in the biggest and most reputable academic institution in Cyprus, i.e. the University of Cyprus. She has participated as a copyright expert to various EU projects in the field of copyright law. She has conducted the study about the evaluation of the implementation of Directive 2001/29/EC (Information Society Directive) in the EU Member States for Greece, Cyprus and Malta. She holds a close relationship with the library of the University of Cyprus, which is one of the leading academic libraries in Cyprus.
Marinos Papadopoulos J.D., M.Sc, is an attorney-at-Law and the Legal Lead of Creative Commons Greece; his collaboration with EDET s.a. and a few colleagues resulted in the import and operation of Creative Commons licenses in Greece. Greece has been among the first countries worldwide which imported version 3.0 of Creative Commons licenses. In addition, his work on Creative Commons Greece has already been endorsed by prime Public Administration services in Greece (Office of the Prime Minister, Ministries etc.)
Dr Philippe Jougleux is an attorney-at-Law and an experienced legal consultant and researcher in Intellectual property law. His PhD deals with the subject of digital copyright law and has successfully participated to EU projects dealing with intellectual property law. He is also a self-taught computer programmer and deeply involved in the Internet culture.
How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact - on your main participants? Other contributors? On the larger community?
The impact of the proposed study could result into initiating the process for the import of Creative Commons licenses in Cyprus as well as in the processes of local academic institutions with the aim to adopt Openness as a default status within the academic environment. The interest for said development has already been publicly stated in a recent conference in Nicosia in which Tatiana Synodinou and Marinos Papadopoulos were keynote speakers.
The impact will also be crucial for libraries, research centres and potentially for public institutions in Cyprus, since there is a great interest to adopt openness, but relevant studies do not exist and copyright law regime is not very well known. It will also function as a means of publicity and of public awareness for the benefits of openness.
The study will also be of great interest for Cypriot law students and lawyers, who will be aware of the specialities of Cypriot copyright law which are specifically related to openness and be able to promote openness by consulting their clients.
How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement?
The proposed study will be conducted and composed by the aforementioned three attorneys-at-law, i.e. Professor Tatiana Synodinou, Marinos Papadopoulos, and Philippe Jougleux.
Describe how your project will benefit Creative Commons' mission to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons".
The impact of the proposed study could result into initiating the process for the import of Creative Commons licenses in Cyprus. Currently Cypriot authors make use of other countries’ imported licenses such as the U.K. and the Greek licenses. Especially, there is a great demand in the academic field in Cyprus for more openness and for exploring all the benefits of the Creative Commons licenses.
Describe what technologies and tools your project will use. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs?
There are no any noteworthy technical needs. There is only the need to know and analyze in detail the technicalities and specialities of Cypriot Copyright Law which is an interesting amalgam of common law and continental copyright norms as well as any related technicality to Creative Commons licensing or other openness means.
What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them?
The big challenge will be to examine in depth the Cypriot copyright regime, which presents a lot of particularities, such as the scarcity of case law and of legal doctrine in copyright issues. Since Cypriot copyright law was modelled to the UK Copyright Act of 1956, it has been mainly influenced by the common law copyright tradition. Nonetheless, due to the implementation of EU copyright Directives a rapprochement with continental copyright principles has been effectuated. The study will proceed to an overall analysis of the Cypriot Copyright Act and of the few case law by referring if necessary to the common law copyright principles and continental copyright principles and to case law of the European Court of Justice on the basis of the relevant question (scope of protection, exceptions etc).
How do you plan to sustain your project after the Creative Commons funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future?
There is an option to ask for funding from the University of Cyprus and from research centres in Cyprus, such as the Cypriot Research Promotion Foundation (RPF). This option may become reality since some local institutions tend to support projects that have been met with international support and generous funding.
How can this project be scalable, or have a scalable impact?
The scalable impact of the proposed study could be the turn of academic institutions in Cyprus into default academic policy that favours Openness in the Cypriot academic environment. It could also be the creation of the local version of Creative Commons licenses in Cyprus, and said local version of CC licenses be used as a means in order to achieve Openness.
What resources and support do you expect Creative Commons to provide to your project to ensure its success (if any)?
1. Sufficient funding for the proposed study. 2. Publicity for the proposed study once it’s composed and delivered accordingly through all CC-publicity means. 3. Collaboration with all the aforementioned team-members with the aim start the process for importing CC licenses in Cyprus.
Describe how your organization currently communicates with its community members and network partners. (100 words)
The communication of the members of the aforementioned team aiming at undertaking the proposed study is shared to the local community via inter- and intra- Cypriot universities’ organizations such as the Cyprus Association of Librarian—Information Scientists as well as the many pro-Openness members of both the Cypriot and Greek academic communities.
Legal
Yes
