Building the Australasian Creative Commons

Tomorrow I am planning to attend the Building the Australasian Creative Commons conference on at the State Library in Brisbane. I am particularly excited about the session called ‘An Orchestra of Millions’ with one of the speakers being Sylvain Zimmer, Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Jamendo. Jamendo currently have 10,000 published albums all under creative commons licenses.

Creative Commons was started by Professor Lawrence Lessig from Stanford University, San Francisco. Much like the licenses used by the free software movement, creative commons developed a series of licenses which creators can attach to their works enabling a wider range of uses than would otherwise be possible under copyright law. Among other options, creators may elect to allow freedoms such as: open sharing of their works, sharing for non commercial purposes, and may specify whether attribution is required. The purpose of this is to ensure the exchange of creative works and to allow creators the opportunity to sample without the need to obtain permission from the copyright holder.

In his text, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity Lessig explains the concept of a free culture (at pg xiv):

A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past... The opposite of a free culture is a permission culture – a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators form the past.

The conference in Brisbane will provide:

...an opportunity for those interested in the free internet to come together to exchange ideas, information and inspiration. It brings together experts from Australasia to discuss the latest developments and implementations of Creative Commons in the region. It aims to be an open forum where anyone can voice their thoughts on issues relating to furthering the commons worldwide.

More information including the conference program can be found at the Australian Creative Commons website.

Later in the week I hope to blog about my attendance and let you know about all the exciting information and ideas that follow from this ‘meeting of the minds’.

Further Reading
Creative Commons Australia: http://www.creativecommons.org/
Professor Lawrence Lessig: http://www.lessig.org/
Jamendo: http://www.jamendo.com/