By Thrishni Subramoney

JOHANNESBURG-- If copyright laws are the heavy-duty locks shackling Africa's art and information instead of letting them bask in the attention of a global audience … well, Heather Ford has the key to freeing the continent's creativity.Sitting in her small office at Mwalimu House at Wits University, Johannesburg - Ford, an energetic Rhodes graduate is on a mission to change the way Africans view intellectual property and the rights that come with it.Ford is the director of Creative Commons South Africa – a project (started in the United States) that has developed unique copyright licenses with only "some rights reserved". Instead of declaring the copying, sharing and altering of original work illegal, Creative Commons licences enable creators to share their work on the Internet under a set of conditions of their choosing. "Our vision is to enable musicians, artists and creators to have a real voice on the internet, because right now they don't have a real voice in this medium at all."Ford says tight legislation regulating how artistic works are appreciated are strangling creativity. She says people on the continent need to cease thinking of art as something that must be protected and instead see the benefits in sharing and inspiring new creations."It benefits new artists in that they get free exposure," Ford said. "There are also sites like Magnatune.com that allow users access to artists' work, while putting the CD on sale – and the artist is paid 50% of all profits. You don't see artists getting such a big share of the profits in the music industry anymore."However, Ford says while the project is purely "experimental" in the commercial sense at this stage, the new licencing option was something that all academics needed to seriously consider."Academics and people in education should ethically make their work available in order to build on knowledge," Ford stressed. A number of educational institutions, including the Shuttleworth Foundation and the national education department have agreed to use one of four Creative Commons licences in the course of their business.A number of artists have also given the initiative a firm thumbs up. In November last year Creative Commons released The Wired CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share. – featuring top artists like the Beastie Boys and David Byrne. The contents of the CD are designed to be freely copied online as well as sampled or remixed by others for use in their own recordings.The conference runs from the 25-27 May at the Graduate School of Public & Development Management, Wits University, Johannesburg.

By Wairagala Wakabi

JOHANNESBURG-- Creative Commons (cc), the growing global movement that aims to relax restrictions on the fair use of intellectual property, launched its South African chapter at a festive inaugural event in Johannesburg last night.
Professor Larry Lessig, widely regarded as the 'father' of the movement, inspired delegates with an innovative presentation explaining the practical value of cc. He described the origins of cc, saying it recognised the need for sharing creative works; and cited several moving examples of how cc was being used to develop new artistic products. He said Creative Commons turned thousands of consumers into creators of knowledge in world dominated by the consumer culture.
Last night's launch marked the start of the “Towards an African Digital Information Commons” conference convened by Wits University’s LINK Centre, with funding from the Canadian International Development Research Centre. It drew participants from across the globe, among them scholars, development workers, mercantile lawyers and journalists. Free music CDs and magazines were given away to participants to highlight the spirit of Creative Commons.
Creative Commons South Africa (ccSA) is the culmination of a series of events which began with a chance meeting between Prof Lessig and Heather Ford at Oxford University two years ago. After that meeting, Ford was hooked on Creative Commons telling everyone she knew about the benefits of the new system. Initially she only met with polite, but absolute skepticism. A combination of persistence and enthusiasm evenually saw her become Project Manager of the “Commons-sense Project” at the LINK Centre.
Today, many groups in South Africa have signed on, recent converts include the Department of Education that is now placing all its curriculum-related materials under the cc docket. The Shuttleworth Foundation, a driving force for the implementation of open source software in the country, is coming on board too. It is believed that the Foundation could require all work that it supports to go the cc way.
At the launch, while cc souvenirs and literature were handed out to participants at the registration table, organisers had to continually drag in more chairs to accommodate the much larger than anticipated audience. Ultimately, perhaps double the number of expected guests were present at the launch of ccSA, all thrilled to witness the launch of a movement that is certain to catch on fast across the African continent.
A core belief of the cc movement is that while creators of intellectual content need to be recognised, and their work protected, traditional copyright laws are often too complex and restrictive to allow for further intellectual development, or easy public access to this knowledge. “[Copyright] rules written for a different century don’t make sense given the technology of this century. The rules are too costly and too complex for a range of creators of knowledge to take part,” said Lessig.
Prof. Coenraad Visser, Head of Mercantile Law at the University of South Africa, said the internet had helped generate a wide range of information that creates many opportunities for developing countries. But “information feudalism” – the use of passwords on websites and the tightening of copyrights in some cases were holding back this potential.
Andre Rines, a volunteer at ccSA and the person responsible for writing the ccSA licence, took participants through the key areas of the licence which will soon be available in several southern African languages.
The launch event was crowned by a cocktail party where the main attraction was not necessarily the savoury snacks and the fine tunes from Joburg’s ‘340ml’ music band, but rather the animated discussions on the potential the Creative Commons movement could unleash in Africa.

By Emrakeb Assefa

JOHANNESBURG-- Described by many the father of Creative Commons (cc), Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and successful author is excited about the three-day “Towards an African Digital Information Commons conference being held in Johannesburg, this week. Creative Commons (cc), an initiative born in the United States with a number of progressive thinkers from various universities including Stanford, MIT, Duke and Villanova, is now taking a firm hold in other continents. Lessig, one of the main speakers of the conference, has high hopes that the concept is taking root in Africa. The project makes available flexible, customisable intellectual property licences that creators and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. Creative Commons provides a balance between the full copyright control normally accorded intellectual property and the unfettered, free-for-all of the public domain. In an exclusive interview with the Highway Africa News Agency (HANA), Lessig speaks of what motivated him to launch the movement, and the thinking process that made cc a compelling concept among many free culture activists. Coming from a law background in the United States, a country with some of the most stringent copyright laws in the world, Lessig is an authority on intellectual property law and his two books on the subject namely “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” and “The Future of Ideas” are frequently quoted when discussing Creative Commons.

Though considered the father of Creative Commons, Lessig modestly declines the title saying the ‘idea’ behind the initiative was the brainchild of his client Eric Aldridge who sued Ashcroft in the United States Supreme Court over repeated extensions of a copyright over a period of 40 years.

“We lost the case; but it gave birth to the cc initiative,” he says.

A father of 20-month-old son, Lessig reticently compares his fatherhood to that of him being the ‘father’ of cc. According to him, as a father to his son, he played a tiny part, which he calls ‘the fun part’ in the beginning. But when the fun ends, others do the work, he notes, drawing an analogy between how he is performing as a father to his son to that of his role in the cc movement.

He says while he is having all the fun traveling all over the world, launching Creative Commons projects, his wife is raising his child alone just as other people are promoting the cc movement in different parts of the world.

But in the words of Heather Ford, Commons-sense Project Manager at LINK Centre at Wits University, Lessig is the bravest man she knows. He launched Creative Commons against the flow of the mainstream establishment and broke free of the elitist culture of the legal fraternity.

Lessig says cc aims to build a legal framework that is empowering and allows the products of human cultural creativity to enter the ‘lawyer-free zone’ of the public domain. It builds on the notion of the inflexible copyright tradition of ‘all rights reserved’ to constitute a concept of ‘some rights reserved’ where the ‘right to copy’ means making attributions and protecting the ‘moral rights’ of the creators by not misrepresenting their works.
Talking of his expectations and challenges in introducing cc into the African continent, Lessig says he generally encounters two conflicting viewpoints from audiences. “There is a lot of interest in cc as it allows a kind of freedom in which creativity can flourish in a contributing manner. But there is also a lot of skepticism such as the view that we are trying to take down business models like the music industry by taking out copyright.”

He says the second perspective is wrong. As a lawyer, the idea is to make copyright more flexible and easy for use. “It is a little bit like the personal computer when it was first introduced; difficult and complex to use. But Mackintosh made it user friendly. In a similar manner, we want to make a Macintosh of copyright law so that it becomes user friendly and is controlled by the creators rather than the other right users such as publishers.” Hence, the “right holders” who are themselves often not the authors of creative works, but rather big firms who own the rights and aim to maximize their value, can become redundant as the license is made easily accessible and as such it is a lawyer free zone.

“Our initiative is to get the law out of the way and get creativity along the way,” Lessig affirms.

“There are a lot of people who hate copyright, but we are not here to replace copyright but to use and build on it so that the artists have control over their creativity, not the publishers or the big music companies,” he explains. In this manner, the ‘right to copy’ goes beyond commercial use and allows the sharing of cultures such as African culture.

At first glance, the idea of cc might appear to be “guilty of elitism” in the African context since the target audience of cc is an online audience, and thus not a majority audience. But many people in Africa go online as ‘proxies’ for others who do not have regular access.

For example a schoolteacher in search of some teaching aids to be printed out and used off-line in classroom; or the university librarian who surfs in search of a reasonably priced online database that can later be used by an entire academic community.

But there is more to it, explains Lessig.

“Our first target is creators and not internet users. We are here to facilitate licenses that allow artists to create culture and contribute on existing cultures,” he states.

He further explains that cc can be more useful in Africa as its image is more interesting and more compelling than what is shown in the media – “about fighting, starvation, diseases and so on,” he says, adding, “There is a bigger picture and an initiative like cc allows African artists to have access to the mainstream culture industries to introduce their compelling cultures, music and arts.”

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.

By David Kezio-Musoke

JOHANNESBURG-- FOR those who think the fireworks begin today, you have got it wrong. Two days ago, two pre-conference events were already paving the way for last night’s public launch of Creative Commons SA (ccSA) at the Rosebank Hotel here in Johannesburg. On Tuesday morning, a pre-conference workshop under the theme ‘Using Creative Commons (cc) to Licence Publicly-Funded Knowledge’, attracted about forty delegates from various Non-governmental Organisations (NGO’s). Later in the day, professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law school delivered a public lecture which he dubbed, ‘Innovation creativity and culture: Digital approaches to the commons’. Lessig and several colleagues came up with the concept of Creative Commons in 2001, as an alternative to increasingly restrictive copyright laws.
At the workshop, there was open discussion on how NGOs, libraries and governments can provide publicly funded knowledge under the cc licence. The workshop attracted a wide range of delegates including Anne Annriette, the Executive Director of the Association for Progressive Communication (APC), David Bernard of Sangonet THETHA, cc South Africa’s Director, Heather Ford and cc’s legal lead Andrew Rens.

Rens has been at the forefront of developing of Creative Commons South Africa’s (ccSA) licences, sensitising lawyers in the country on the details of ccSA and adapting the concept to fit within South Africa’s legal framework. At the workshop Bernard talked about the importance of availing knowledge from publicly funded institutions, under the cc licence, while Ford discussed the challenges faced while promoting and using the cc licence.She said, “Using cc licences means that one will never make any money from his or her work, and that one is also opening oneself up to abuse by plagiarists.”
“But what does this mean for librarians, researchers and others? It means authors and users need to be aware of the effects of use and re-use.”
Ford added that publicly funded libraries would benefit from good quality, free content available that can be copied freely.

In his lecture, Lessig amused listeners with his explanation of the differences between the ‘non-exclusive rights economy’ and the ‘exclusive rights economy’, equating the former to the world of scientists and academics and the latter to the world of musicians such as Britney Spears.

Lessig, an authority on intellectual-property law said that while the ‘non-exclusive rights economy’ doesn’t need a monopoly to advance, but in the exclusive rights economy, copyright is exclusively regulated.

He said, “While scientists and academics have a legitimate obligation to provide their knowledge for others to build on, Britney Spears doesn’t have any legitimate obligation to provide her music to anyone. That is an ‘exclusive rights economy.’”
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