From rxpgnews.com
Creative Commons readies for India launch
By Frederick Noronha, IANS,
Jan 20, 2007 - 8:31:02 AM
Bangalore, Jan 20 - The Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay is all geared to launch the Indian chapter of Creative Commons, a global body dedicated to knowledge sharing, during its annual technology festival beginning Jan 26.
Creative Commons is a non-profit group working to expand the range of creative work available for others to 'legally build upon and share'. It allows people to issue creative work under a licence that allows more flexibility than the default 'all rights reserved' of
the copyright law.
From its modest cyber home at cc-india.org, the Indian branch of the global movement is spreading the idea that there are options to copyright when it comes to building creativity and sharing knowledge widely.
Creative Commons enables copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others, through a variety of licensing and contract schemes. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.
In a world where digital content rules, sharing of knowledge and creative products has become far easier. Some globally successful volunteer projects like Wikipedia, among the top 20 most visited websites, have scaled up phenomenally by basing themselves on parallel easier-to-share licences.
Creative Commons-India's project head Shishir K. Jha, assistant professor at the IIT's Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, said the project would focus on three specific areas in India.
These are - centres of higher education like the seven IITs, regional technology institutes and management and other institutions.
'These are increasingly taking recourse to creating video and web-based courses such as the National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning - and distance education courses such as C-DEEP and eGURU. And all would benefit from keeping content sharable,' Jha told IANS.
Creative Commons-India also plans to focus on non-profit and non-governmental organisations and corporates keen on adopting easier-to-share licences for the dissemination of their documents.
Jha said that there were many independent creative artistes working with film, documentary, music and text who would like to explore the possibilities of reaching out to a wider audience with the use of Creative Commons licences.
Creative Commons' chairperson Joichi Ito and its global coordinator Catharina Maracke are slated to attend the two-day festival and launch in Mumbai. They will speak on 'Do We Need Remix?' and 'Sharing is Creating'.
Joichi Ito is a Japanese-born, US-educated businessman who runs the World of Warcraft guild of venture capitalists, and is general manager of international operations for prominent web-based ventures like Technorati, chairman of Six Apart Japan, and board member of ICANN Mozilla Foundation and the Open Source Initiative.
The event will see a mini-panel on 'Creative Commons: Is India ready for flexible approach to copyrighting'. This session will focus on how Creative Commons can be used to increase knowledge and information sharing among sectors like higher education, telecommunications, music, films and publishing.
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