Open Content Licencing

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.

Brian Fitzgerald now outlines the concepts behind the Creative Commons project: sharing, accessing, collaborating and negotiating content, culture and production with a minimum of fuss. The commons intends to be a repository of open space or commons unencumbered by large transaction costs and threat of law suits, and encourages creative innovation as a core economic driver, especially also in its form of peer-to-peer production and user-led innovation. To enable all this, the CC offers a set of easy-to-use licences which also aim to use IP as a leveraging device, leading more IP to be opened up to free access.

The international CC movement is gathered under the iCommons banner, and QUT takes the lead in the Australian context, translating the licences and philosophy of the creative commons into national legal frameworks; this work has now been completed. Additional recent work also includes the development of a variety of licences for specific contexts, for example the sampling and remixing of music. Many content producers and copyright holders around the world have begun to use CC licences in their various guises.

To launch the new CC licences in an Australian context, some of our Creative Industries students have developed a 90-second animation called "Get Creative", which is now premiered.