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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.

LINK: ‘Note Verbale‘, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Section) - 22 April 2007 Issue

“At the age of 38, I decided to step out of the rat race of New York, join the Peace Corps and board a plane for Manila. This blog is dedicated to my adventures in the Philippines for the next two years. Wish me luck.” This is how Julia Campbell, an American Peace Corps volunteer whose dead body was found several days ago by rescuers in a remote village in Mountain Province, described herself when she started her blog in December 2004.

During the past couple of years, the growth of blogs in cyberspace has been remarkable and phenomenal. 

Leading blog tracker, Technorati, reported that as of March 2007 there are more than 70 million blogs in the blogosphere, a term originally coined jokingly, they say, by American blogger Brad L. Graham in 1999, which has reference to the community of bloggers. Technorati reported that there are at least 1.5 million blog posts each day and approximately 1.4 new blogs are created every second.

For those not in the know, a blog, an abbreviated version of the term “web log”, is an Internet-generated journal where the user may write, edit, and post entries, usually displayed in reverse chronological order, about practically anything from facts to fiction, from news to mere announcements, from commentaries or opinions to personal experiences and share them to the on-line community to view, read, link, or comment on. The term “web log” was coined by American blogger, Jorn Barger in 1997 while the short form “blog” was the idea of a certain Peter Merholz.

Blogs are actually the digital evolution of traditional journals and diaries, where people keep a running account of their personal lives. With the facility and convenience of the Internet to capture different media formats, several types of blogs were also born, like ‘photoblogs’ for photographs, ‘vlog’ for videos, ‘podcasting’ for audios, ‘moblog’ for those generated by mobile devices, ‘splogs’ for that pernicious spam blogs, ‘slogs’ for a slice or section of a regular business website, or a ‘blawgs’ for legal blogs.

From being a mere social network of personal and individual online journals and diaries more than a decade ago, the blogosphere is increasingly re-defining mass media, human interaction and global culture today.

Blogs have the capability of shaping and even influencing public opinions and events. Blogs are easy repository of desired information or even entertainment, in the same vein that they could be the root cause of conflict and antagonism. Some fortunate bloggers earn good money from their blogs through on-line advertisements or by publishing a ‘blook’, the term used for published books based on blogs.
 
It is not difficult to understand why blogs are consistently and aggressively becoming a very popular mode of human expression. There is no other form of public and mass media nowadays that could compete with blogs in terms of facilitating, propagating and pushing the exercise of freedom of speech and expression beyond the limits of costs, regulations and censorship.

Blogs are largely anarchic and generally beyond the ambit of prior restraint and the usual restrictions obtaining in mainstream mass media, although bloggers are certainly not immune from criminal liability or certain legal responsibilities by reason of their posts. Each blogger therefore becomes responsible for his or her acts in cyberspace.

On February 22, 2007, a court in Alexandria convicted an Egyptian blogger for insulting Islam and the Egyptian president on his writings in the Internet.

Former flight attendant Ellen Simonetti of North Carolina was fired by Delta Airlines for inappropriate entries in her blog that documented her personal life and experiences. In 2006, however, she successfully published a book about her blog entitled: “Diary of a Dysfunctional Flight Attendant: The Queen of Sky Blog”.

Early this month, Malaysian Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin was quoted to have said that bloggers should not be exempt from the same controls as the mainstream media, and accused them of using lies to overthrow government.

Blogging is about human freedom.  And it would be here to stay and further revolutionize human expression.

LINK: ‘Note Verbale‘, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Section) – 1 April 2007 Issue

Prior to the introduction of the movable type printing press by German goldsmith and inventor, Johannes Gutenberg, in 1450, there was no economic incentive for pirating written works. It was also very expensive and painstakingly slow to copy manuscripts by hand.

But the printing press changed altogether this environment and the protection of written works considered as intellectual property became a noteworthy concern of states.  And so at the instigation of French novelist, poet and playwright, Victor Hugo, and the association of literary artists that he founded in 1878, an international agreement called the “The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works” was born in Berne, Switzerland on September 9, 1886.

Creation, distribution and usage are the usual processes involved in any intellectual property governed by copyright particularly written works. Creation would mean how the written work would be fixed in some tangible medium. Distribution is how the tangible medium of expression would be put in circulation for the general public to use usually upon payment of some consideration.

The development of earlier technologies like phonograms, radio, television, film and home video gave a new face on the manner by which an intellectual creation are created, distributed and used. These technologies became an alternative medium of expression in addition of course to the usual printing and publication. Verily, the copyright regime did not have much difficulty addressing these innovations to protect the rights of creators, publishers or distributors.

But all of a sudden, the emergence of user interface in digital technology, or the ability of computers to communicate online in a network, brought about a paradigm shift. 

Many creators and authors are able to take advantage of cyberspace to publish and distribute their own works through websites and blogs without the usual intervention of publishers, printers and distributors. They say that this promotes greater access to knowledge.

On the other hand, some publishers and distributors of written works also joined the bandwagon to catch up with technological developments by publishing books on line in electronic format known as ‘e-books’ or distributing written works using the Internet as a marketing tool. But others think that this technology would drive them away from their usual business.

The biggest challenge though that online technology poses is on digital copyright. With the ease of uploading and downloading files in whatever format in the computer network, there is much difficulty regulating or controlling how a work of intellectual property is distributed and used. How the copyright regime would evolve to effectively address online piracy and infringement is now a serious global concern.
 
As part of the effort, the Philippine Intellectual Property Office led by its Director-General Adrian S. Cristobal Jr. with the assistance Atty. Louie Andrew C. Calvario of its Copyright Support Services in partnership with the Japan Copyright Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) represented by Geidy Lung and Kentaro Sugiura just concluded this week the “Sub-Regional Roundtable on Copyright-Based Business: Authorship, Publishing and Access to Knowledge.”

The major issue that local and foreign participants sought to address was the identification of key strategies towards the development of publishing industries and access to knowledge. The forum included presentations on new models in the digital environment like Creative Commons and reprographic rights organizations.

It would obviously take the stakeholders a lot of time, patience and efforts to address nagging issues confronting copyright vis-à-vis Internet technology. 

The information technology revolution however is not something to be afraid of or be perceived as a necessary evil.  It should be taken both as an opportunity and challenge in fostering access to knowledge, the formation of new business models, and bringing about a positive global culture.

After all, any human endeavor, like law, should be taken as technology neutral.