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We are excited to announce the International Commons — an offshoot of our licensing project dedicated to the drafting and eventual adoption of jurisdiction-specific licenses. The International Commons is being lead by Christiane Asschenfeldt (email), with help from member jurisdictions.
Completed Licenses
We have completed the process and developed licenses for the following jurisdictions:
Project Jurisdictions
The process of developing licenses and discussing them are still in progress for the following jurisdictions:
Upcoming Project Jurisdictions
- India: Shishir Jha, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
- Luxembourg: Patrick Peiffer, Luxcommons (EBLUL asbl).
- Macedonia: Bardhyl Jashari, Metamorphosis Foundation Skopje.
- Peru: Pedro Medizabal and Oscar Montezuma, CPSR-Perú.
- Portugal: Pedro Oliveira, Universidade Catolica Portugesa.
- Singapore: Samtani Anil, Deputy Director Nanyang Business School.
- Tanzania: Paul Kihwelo, Dean of Faculty, Open University of Tanzania.
- Turkey: Emre Bayamlıoğlu, LL.M Southampton, Faculty of Law, Istanbul Bilgi University.
- USA: John Palfrey, Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
- Venezuela: Professor Dario Alvarez, LTAD- FAU- UCV.
Upcoming Launch Dates
- Turkey: May 12th, 2006
- Denmark: June 8th, 2006
- Peru: June 27th, 2006
- Columbia: August 4th, 2006
- Norway: open
- USA: open
- Switzerland: open
- Nigeria: open
More Information
Imagine the licenses as the Legal Code processed by the respective legal "operating systems" of various jurisdictions. A complete overview can be found here. It is the aim of International Commons to "port" or adapt the licenses for use across those different operating systems. This will involve both the literal and legal translation of the licenses by teams of volunteers in various jurisdictions around the world.
Our licensing model includes three levels: the human-readable Commons Deed, the lawyer-readable Legal Code, and the machine-readable Digital Code or metadata. The International Commons project will port the Legal Code to accommodate a specific jurisdiction's legal background rules, while the Commons Deed and Digital Code will remain the same.
Our generic licenses are jurisdiction-agnostic: they do not mention any particular jurisdiction's laws or statutes or contain any sort of choice-of-law provision. The licenses are, however, based on the U.S. Copyright Act in many respects. This means that, though we have no reason to believe that the licenses would not function in legal systems across the world, it is at least conceivable that some aspect of our licenses does not jibe with a particular jurisdiction's laws.
Creative Commons Brazil Movie
In the spring of 2004, a documentary film crew followed Creative Commons staff to Brazil. This ten-minute video covers the launch event, the impact on the country, and the people behind the project. It's a great look at how a country adopts the licenses and what it means to them.
Translating our movies
Those wishing to translate our flash-based movie explanations into other languages can download all the related files on our movie translation page.
