iCommons Developments

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.

The aim is to explode the amount of CC-licenced content, improve searchability for this pool of content, and promote the development of derivative material. In support of this process, there now is a semantic Web search engine for CC-licenced content (influenced by Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web vision). The Internet Archive is also involved here, offering access to the CC-licenced content available in its archive and hosting any CC-licenced content for free. In another development, Wired recently included a CD of songs by well-known artists who released these songs under CC licences and encouraged remixing.

A new software project of the iCommons network is Mixter, a Friendster-like system which supports the exchange and remixing of sampled songs and helps build communities of users remixing one another's content. Mixter goes beyond this, however, as the kind of remixing it enables can work for many forms of content, not only music. Other open content projects are the open content record label Magnatune, the Public Library of Science publication, or MIT's OpenCourseWare, as well as the UQ/QUT collaboration Australian Creative Resources Online.

Neeru now moves on to showing some ways in which CC licencing systems have been embedded into existing systems, such as the Garageband music community, the P2P filesharing system Morpheus, the image community Flickr, or the music community Soundclick. How can this content be curated, then (a question not unrelated to issues brought up by the International Internet Preservation Consortium)? There is a wealth of information available, in various formats, and search and discovery mechanisms need to keep up with this.

Some interesting information on what licences people use, finally: 97% require attribution, 67% allow derivative works, and 67% also disallow commercial use of their works.