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.