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You are cordially invited to attend and participate in the regional conference of Creative Commons in Asia and the Pacific in the Philippines on 5-6 February 2009 to be hosted by the Arellano University School of Law, Lead Public Institution of Creative Common – Philippines. The principal venue for the event will be at the Coral Ballroom of the Manila Pavillon Hotel situated at the heart of the City of Manila.

The conference aims to showcase the various initiatives of Creative Commons in Asia and the Pacific and for the stakeholders to get together in a forum to define the roadmap of Creative Commons in the region following the 2008 iCommons Summit in Sapporo, Japan.

About Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that promotes the creative reuse of intellectual and artistic works – whether owned or in the public domain. Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach.

Currently, at least 20 country jurisdictions belong to Asia and the Pacific Region, namely: Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Mainland China, Georgia, Hongkong, India, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam.

For information about the 2009 CC Asia Pacific Conference in Manila, visit the conference website by clicking HERE or view the following advisories:

Advisory No. 1 -  Registration and Accommodation Information

Advisory No. 2 – Registration and Accommodation Updates

Advisory No. 3 – Travel Advisory for Foreign Participants

Advisory No. 4 – Program of Activities

LINK: ‘Note Verbale‘, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Section) – 4 May 2008 

With the age of information technology at the center stage of human interaction, there is an emerging global consensus for collaboration in providing access to learning and knowledge and developing a wide range of educational resources in cyberspace that are free and open for everyone to use outside of the traditional models. It is referred to as ‘open education’.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration in September 2007 and now signed by over 1,500 individuals and more than 150 organizations all over the world urges educators and learners participation in the open education movement, and the promotion of open education resources and open education policies.

Open education operates on different framework from open university, e-learning, open content to wikis, e-books, legal commons or open coursewares. And these methods are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Sir John Daniel, President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), in a speech before the William Flora Hewlett Foundation Grantees Meeting in a symposium on Open Learning Interplay at the Carnegie Mellon University on March 12, 2008 said:

“Open education broke open the iron triangle of access, cost and quality that had constrained education throughout history and had created the insidious assumption, still prevalent today, that in education you cannot have quality without exclusivity.”

“Open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods, and open as to ideas. That is a good framework to think about open education.” quoting and paraphrasing a 1969 address of ‘The Economist’ editor, Geoffrey Crowther, an early advocate of open education whose speech was still probably written in a typewriter.

In the first forum dubbed as “Open Education: Are we ready and where are we?” held on April 23, 2008, the Philippine Commons and the e-Law Center of the Arellano University School of Law advanced the idea that ‘open education’ should refer to any scholarly, academic or guided initiative that promotes access to learning and knowledge in a free, open and collaborative environment using the tools and infrastructure of information technology.

Open education is an initiative whose time has come.

In the words of Kristine Mandigma, editor-in-chief of Vibal Foundation: “In leading economies technology and knowledge are the critical factors of economic growth.” She emphasized though that innovation is the key.

Greg Moreno of Bayanihan Books believes that open education would eventually fill the gaps in the educational system as technology attempts to address the issue of content quality and commercial viability.

Lawyer Michael Vernon Guerrero of Philippine Commons submits that open education empowers people. He thinks that open content is the first step toward collaboration as international endeavors in this respect continue to grow, develop and mature.

Miriam Coprado of the Department of Education shares the view that while government continues to pursue the integration of information technology in the educational system, the contribution of the private sector remains a most important element.

But the societal significance of open education was best expressed by Siegfried Herzog, resident representative of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in the Philippines, during the forum when he said:

“Remember, knowledge is power. Whenever access to knowledge is restricted, there is an issue of power behind it – a ruling elite will control knowledge in order to maintain power. If we truly believe that power should be vested in people, not in elites, anything that increases access to knowledge and deepening of knowledge is welcome. Open education is thus not just a nifty tool to enhance skills. It is a way to build a freer society.”    

Certainly, open education empowers because it is built upon a platform of collaboration, equal opportunities, and open access to knowledge that could shift the paradigm of conventional educational systems that are perceived to be discriminating.

LINK: ‘Note Verbale’, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Times) – 13 January 2008 Issue

 There is probably no mass media technology that could compete with cyberspace in terms of propagating and circulating ideas and human expressions. The Internet is now the leading repository of music, video, photographs, live journals, books, presentations, documents, and other forms of artistic, literary, educational and even scientific creations.

The existing copyright regime applies, and provides legal protection, to this intellectual property works expressed in digital form. The arrangement is of course perfect especially so that in many countries copyright attaches to the work from the moment of creation. But this legal safeguard could also stifle creativity, public exposure, and in a sense impose some restraint on the creator’s freedom of choice particularly on the manner on how the netizens could use, exploit or distribute the work. And this is what Creative Commons seeks to address.

Creative Commons, a non-stock, non-profit global movement of prestigious organizations and stakeholders now existing in more than fifty countries, provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. They can use CC to change copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved”.

Creative Commons is not anti-copyright. On the contrary, it is based on, and works within the framework of, copyright and recognizes that every intellectual creation in the digital world is entitled to both legal and moral respect.

Certainly, Creative Commons does not deny the commercial use or distribution of works. Come to think of it, it can even open up better avenues for subsequent commercial opportunities.

Pure and simple, what Creative Commons provides the authors, artists, educators, and scientists is the option, to let the world knows exactly how they want their works or creations used, distributed or even exploited, as a legal alternative to the default regime called copyright. In short, Creative Commons is all about freedom, promoting free culture and knowledge sharing.

While copyright principles are almost uniform in every country that recognizes it since the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, some of its terms still vary.  Thus, Creative Commons embarked on porting its licenses in each country affiliated with it to make sure that local CC licenses conform to domestic copyright laws.

In the Philippines, this author is the legal and public lead of the project jurisdiction with the Arellano University School of Law, through its e-Law Center, as the lead public institution.

The country has successfully ported its local Creative Commons license last December 15, 2007 and is now available for pinoynetizens to use.

Tomorrow, January 14, the Arellano Law School will hold the official public launching of Creative Commons – Philippines and its ported licenses. The launch will be preceded by open sessions on free and open source software and e-learning. The event will be capped with a CC-PH concert featuring local bands and the Arellano Law Singers, who will perform their original works under a Creative Commons license.

Artists, educators, scientists, authors, bloggers and creators of works who use the Internet as a medium may now avail of the Creative Commons Philippines License Version 3.0 by visiting the website – http://www.creativecommons.org/ or http://www.philippinecommons.org/, and there they can choose their option or freedom.

With Creative Commons, it is perfectly legal to share, remix and share.

LINK: ‘Note Verbale‘, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Section) – 17 June 2007 Issue

Advocates and ‘philosophers’ of Creative Commons across the globe gathered in Dubrovnik, Croatia for the third international summit, this time to address the future of free culture in cyberspace.

Among the new initiatives is to look at opportunities to fund open content using alternative business models, explore the prospects of open education, the strategic approach of going more local rather than global, and how to increase government use of open access licensing for publicly-funded materials,

The summit also played host to a series of concerts by local musicians, screenings of open movies from Denmark, Brazil, South Korea and Australia, and an exhibition of six of the world’s innovative artists who support the concepts of shared ownership and distributed creativity.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization of people around the world who believe in the freedom of choice in cyberspace built upon the copyright regime.

Norms and culture always precede law.  Law is always a response to the needs of society. And this was how the 1886 Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, also known as the ‘Berne Convention’ was born. Prior to the introduction of the movable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450, there was no real economic incentive for pirating written works.

On the other hand, the Internet, over which much of the intellectual creations are published nowadays, is built on a platform of neutrality and a culture of freedom of expression. With the phenomenal growth of the Internet though, there is a global apprehension on the ease and threat of infringement of the work of others.

The same principles in the Berne Convention however continue to govern copyright in the digital world in almost all jurisdictions to ensure that intellectual creations are amply protected as a legal property of their creator.

But with copyright being the legal default in any digital content, there is also the tendency, or even the probability, to stifle creativity and the freedom of expression that cyberspace supposedly guarantees.

The Creative Commons movement seeks to resolve this conflict between protection and propagation of digital expressions of ideas by giving authors and creators the option to choose how their works should be treated in cyberspace.

Creative Commons is not about doing away with copyright.  It co-exists with copyright and would not have been around without it. 

Creative Commons is also not an extension of copyright because the movement has no statutory or legal authority to give authors or creators more protection or additional legal rights more than what the copyright regime presently offers.

Creative Commons simply provide an effective set of legally enforceable instruments that sets the basis for the authors and creators to modify, reduce or even waive existing legal protection that could hinder free market, use or exchange of ideas.  Creative Commons does not impose; it only provides an option to the users a workable legal environment of flexibility.

The so-called ‘licenses’ of Creative Commons should be defined in the context of the author’s freedom to choose and deviate from the normal applicability of copyright rules.  With a Creative Commons license reflected on a digital work or content, the author or creator is freed from some restrictions of the copyright default if only to embrace the free culture from which the Internet is built upon in the first place.

Every year, the people behind and who supports Creative Commons would expectedly gather to look back and look forward and see where the movement is at that point in time.

But for sure Creative Commons would be just like the monumental fortress of Grad that sits as a bastion of freedom in the old town of Dubrovnik, with the splendor of the sunset and its glorious landscape of the Adriatic sea on top of a mountainous terrain.

Free culture, freedom of choice and respect for the rights of others are the underlying notions behind the success of Creative Commons.