Open Content Licencing 2005

Next up is Ian Oi from Blake Dawson Waldron, the lead lawyer on the development of the Australian CC licences. His talk builds on a collection called International Commons in the Digital Age which details the iCommons and related work. The key issue in his work on the project was of course the translatability of licences across national jurisdictions, but on the other hand the Australian licence also needed to reflect Australian specificities (such as the GST, for example).

Another issue related to the collection of commercial royalties. In the Australian context, the Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA), for example, first needs to have the rights of collecting royalties for musical content assigned to it, which complicates the creative commons licencing system. APRA has taken a relatively cooperative approach here, and discussions are ongoing as to how to handle royalties for musical content.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor Tom Cochrane from QUT now starts the second session, which will introduce in more detail the iCommons project. Neeru Paharia is the first speaker, and she begins by once again flagging the launch of the Australian CC licences.

iCommons recognises the need to translate the CC licences (or at least theiir legal layer) into the different legal jurisdictions for which they're aiming to apply. National laws are subtly or not-so-subtly different, of course, so it isn't possible simply to take the original US law-based licences and use them in other jurisdictions. The process began with Japan, and has now launched some 15 licences world-wide, with licences for over 70 other countries still underway. But beyond the licences themselves the aim is also to grow the number of CC adopters in each country, of course. Ultimately, this is hoped to create a global pool of licenced content, with content being able to be used under equivalent but locally appropriate licences (or a generic world-wide licence where no local licence exists). This is complicated by specific national issues such as the inability to waive specific author's rights or the existence of collecting societies.

Lessig and LogoAfter these introductions we're now moving on to Lawrence Lessig's keynote. His aim today is to place the CC movement in some context, to provide a motivation for the project. His main theme, therefore is 'remix', and he notes that culture itself is remix, every day - from politics to the arts: we decide what to consume and what to construct and (re)create from this input. The main observation here is that this form of remix is free: unregulated by law; there is no requirement for permission to be able to do this. In fact, it needs to be free in order to avoid infantilising our culture, to ensure the basic human right of being able to 'write' our culture in ordinary ways

I'm spending today and tomorrow at a conference here in Brisbane: Open Content Licencing with special guest Lawrence Lessig. This is part of QUT's involvement in the Australian section of the Creative Commons project. Justice Ron Sackwell begins proceedings, introducing Lessig and rehearsing some of his work - the Eldred v Ashcroft case challenging US copyright law, and his recent book Free Culture in particular. He also draws the connection to Australian copyright law especially in the wake of the US-Australian free trade agreement, and points out the challenges before us.