By Alari Alare Kenneth

JOHANNESBURG-- More than 120 people from all over the world are participating in a three-day conference at Wits University in Johannesburg, aimed at launching and promoting an African Digital Information Commons.
Creative Commons Chairperson Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University in the US, opened the conference last night with the launch of Creative Commons South Africa (ccSA).
The launch is a major development for South Africa and the African continent at large since Creative Commons, a new system built within current copyright law, will allow people to share their creations with others using music, movies, images, and text online that's been marked with a Creative Commons license.
The license affords authors and publishers an intermediate degree of protection over their photos, music, text, films, and educational materials under a “some rights reserved” copyright, in contrast to the traditional “all rights reserved.”
Creative Commons is already able to offer free legal tools in at least fifteen country-specific versions. It provides copyright licenses specific to Austrian, Belgian, Brazilian, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, USA, Taiwanese, Canadian and Spanish law, thanks to a global network of artists, lawyers and technologists.
Founded in 2001, Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation set up to promote the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain, by empowering authors and audiences.
Fellows and students at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School helped get the project off the ground. Creative Commons is now based at and receives generous support from Stanford Law School, where they share space, staff, and inspiration with the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.
Creative Commons is founded on a notion that people may not want to exercise all of the intellectual property rights the law affords them. There is still an unmet demand for an easy, yet reliable way to tell the world "Some rights reserved" or even "No rights reserved." Many people have long since concluded that all-out copyright does not help them gain the exposure and widespread distribution they want.
Many entrepreneurs and artists have come to prefer relying on innovative business models rather than fully-fledged copyright to secure a return on their creative investment. Still others get fulfilment from contributing to and participating in an intellectual commons.
For whatever reasons, it is clear that many citizens of the internet want to share their work -- and the power to reuse, modify, and distribute their work -- with others on generous terms.