Hblog

It's going to rock!

Click on the image for invitation details to the upcoming ccSalon 'Bring 'n Braai' happening at the Armchair Theatre in Cape Town next Friday (20 April). Fathers Larry Lessig (Creative Commons) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) will be down South on stage with bands Cabins in the Forest, Closet Snare as well as our very own DJ Whispa and Lucio K from Brazil.

And if you would like to sponsor the event, please let me know.

Dave Duarte and I will be MCing (I told him that we have to colour-coordinate ;) and the coolest people from Cape Town and Joburg will be there. Join up on Facebook, the wiki or just pitch up on the night.

It's going to rock!

Bring 'n Braai

Things are hotting up in the run-up to the SA Free Culture Tour when Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia Founder and Lawrence Lessig, CC CEO (both on the board of iCommons) come to Cape Town for a bunch of events from the 17th to the 21st of April. The iCommons office is organising an awesome bash at the Armchair Theatre on the 20th with some cool local bands as well as winners from our ccmixter Safro-Brazil competition in attendence. We really need your support, so please copy this button and link to icommons.org/bringnbraai. We're also looking for people who want to donate content to the commons to make a pledge and we'll publicize. Lastly, if anyone is interested in funding the event, please let me know. We're counting on some local company support for this one! And COME on the 20th - it's going to rock :)

sxsw

I'm at South by South West (sxsw) this week with the Creative Commons team. Have listened to some really great insights from the field about how and why cc licenses are good for filmmakers, musicians and producers. More to follow.

Winner of the Creative Commons contest

Check out the winner of the Creative Commons contest. And write to me if you have any ideas for a similar competition in SA to produce something that really speaks to the African local creative context.

Sample, rip, mix and make new

I'm participating in an online reading list at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University on the History of Intellectual Property in the US. I found this, our first assignment extremely interesting. Hesse describes debates in the 18th century about whether ideas, formally thought of as "divine intervention", should become individual property and how society could balance this with the goal of spreading knowledge in the public interest.

Most interesting was the fact that later in the nineteenth century, when the US had been ignoring intellectual property rights internationally on the basis of it being a "developing nation", a native culture movement grew up, lobbying government to protect local authors from the proliferation of cheap, foreign works by adopting international agreements such as the Berne Convention that had been signed by other countries previously. Apparantly these groups were ignored until the growing publishing houses in the US saw the benefit of adopting international agreements in order to grow their markets abroad.

This debate has strong parallels to South Africa and the local content quota movement that is trying to persuade the SA government to adopt more stringent local content quotas. One example is the South African Music Quota Coalition.

Sometimes I worry that more free content from the US and the West won't do much for the local culture industries, which really need to be developed at this stage in our history. On the other hand, if the content (music, video, literary works specifically) is made available so that we can rip, mix and burn it to suit our own tastes and cultural ideals, the equation becomes more favorable to local development. The interactive, dialogical context in which the work is presented is essential to its sustainable uptake in the local economy.

In other words, give it to me as something that I can shape into my own, or don't give it to me at all. Creative Commons' sampling license is a brilliant example - the idea came perfectly from Brazil.

cc dreamin'

I dreamed about Creative Commons South Africa last night. I was back in SA trying to persuade friends to become members. They would pay a small yearly fee and get all sorts of cool free SA culture in return. This is really becoming an obsession :)

CC for Dummies

In the 49th point of '101 Ways to Save the Internet', Paul Boutin from Wired said, 'Publish Creative Commons for Dummies The open copyright licensing system is pure genius. But you need to be a genius to use it.' Since I'm always the last to understand, I'm pretty good at designing things for dummies, so I've been thinking what cc for dummies would look like. And I don't know if the problem is that there is too much information to navigate that you end up giving up early, or that the information itself is complex. Since Creative Commons is targeting itself at a wide range of different users, it is probably more a problem of the former than the latter. So does that mean that people need to build different portals to accommodate different users eg cc for musicians, cc for artists, cc for educators?

Is Creative Commons relevant in Africa?

I presented to the DV fellows today - spoke about plans for Creative Commons Africa and more immediate plans to build an iCommons tool and the curriculum portal. They are a tough crowd.

They had some interesting things to say. One was that I was probably focussing on the wrong people. 'Shouldn't I be focussing on the disempowered communities who have their stories taken away from them by foreigners for no return?' And my answer was yes, that communities need to be empowered, but that empowerment can only really come through a committed group of individuals who are becoming educated about the copyright system and how to use that system to their best advantage. Sure, you could try and change the system and attempt to get communities to register as corporations and then aportion benefits to administrators of those communities, but much more realistic, I think, is to make individuals aware of how important it is to understand how the value chain in the copyright system works, and how there are really good, effective examples of alternatives to copyright if they choose to use them.

Isn't it a good enough job to help young African musicians, artists and authors to enter a global network where people around the world are gaining skills and knowledge, and learning from one another? The alternative is to address the traditional community and attempt to gain rights and revenue from community assets by forming corporations or legal entities.

I think that traditional songs would be preserved much better if young people were able to enter a global network and recognise the need produce works that stand out as unique and to share their heritage with the world. Preservation and creation are two different things - and the more I think about it, the more I start thinking of what came first - the chicken or the egg?

Announcing Creative Commons Africa

Creative Commons Africa is on its way! The plans for the new project were announced at the Idlelo first conference on the African digital commons and we are currently working on the draft South African licenses.

Some of the issues that were raised at Idlelo that I'd like to try and solve include:

1. Archival: What happens when the standards that you employ in digitising content are surpassed? What happens to the content when there isn't the economic incentive to change the platform?

I was just speaking to Glenn Otis Brown (Executive Director of Creative Commons) about this - he said that it is a major problem, especially when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids archivists to alter the technology of older content in order to preserve and view it. The Internet Archive is at least dealing with the problem of backing up content - a great deal of which is discarded when websites are updated. We're hoping that they will mirror content - especially archives such as the South African History Archive (SAHA) when they make their material available online - hopefully under a Creative Commons license.

2. Community rights: How do you apportion value for information and knowledge that people hold as a collective group, rather than as individuals?

This is also a difficult one because the whole global system that we've built around 'intellectual property rights' is about individual rather than communal rights. The only way that I can think is for the community to be made aware of how to take advantage of the copyright system as well as alternative mechanisms to generate value and then decide itself how they apportion that value within the community.

3. Translation license: This came up in one of the discussions around TRIPS where an educator was arguing the inflexibility of the current copyright system when he had asked a publisher if he could translate an article into local South African languages for his students and he was denied. A great new license would be for authors to dedicate their works for translation among local language.

Anyway, comments are most welcome on these issues as we map out the strategy of the new Creative Commons Africa organisation.