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The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay launched Creative Commons India (ccIndia) this weekend, with the aim of providing easier access to educational and other content.

‘At IIT Bombay there is a lot of educational content, including web-based courses that the institute would like to make available under a flexible Creative Commons licence,’ said Professor Shishir K. Jha, project lead of Creative Commons India.

The ccIndia was formally launched on Friday 26 January at (more…)

The fourth annivesary of the founding of Creative Commons coincided in Poland with a Do-It-Yourself festival called “PrzeTWORY”, which stretched over a weekend in Warsaw, Poland. Creative Commons Poland used the opportunity to celebrate the birthday by handing out gifts - DIY style.

The event was a two-day market of independent and DIY art, design and crafts, including works made during the festival from recycled goods provided by the organizers. The festival’s name, loosely translated, means both “recycled things” and “food preserves” - playfully showing roots of modern independent crafts.

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Last year’s annual Free Culture, Science and Technology festival held in Zagreb dealt with the proprietarisation of knowledge in medicine, agriculture and science through patents and copyrights ‘ and looked at counter-projects aimed at creating a “knowledge commons”. This year’s festival, which starts today and ends on 27 January, will focus on the ’spectrum’ commons, open communication technologies and citizen media. But why is this topic an important one to discuss? (more…)

From 31 October to 2 November, I attended the inaugural United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens, Greece. The forum stems from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a global effort to address how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used for development.

Being a UN summit, its format was based on the creation of texts: the 2003 Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action and the 2005 Tunis Commitment and Agenda for the Information Society. But this Summit was also different: it took a multi-stakeholder approach, allowing business and non-governmental voices into the sessions where the texts were being thrashed out by governments, (more…)

What is the role of museums and art centres in today’s networked information society where the open-source economy and free culture are building a new reality for communication? How can artists and the public be included in this situation? And what are the real challenges of experimental art fields when opening up the black box of so-called “art pieces”?

The DIVVY/dual project, run by the international NPO, Gadago (host of the Art & Design event calendar, a TokyoArtBeat) is a long-term initiative to openly discuss the answers to these questions. The project started with a series of events consisting of an exhibition and a public symposium in Tokyo.

One of the highlights of the exhibition was Type-Trace, a software piece by artist Takumi Endo and engineer Shinya Matsuyama, showcased in a contemporary art gallery in the Ginza area of Tokyo. The piece is an interactive application that records all the keyboard strokes you make, similar to Spyware. The application plays back the writing along a timeline just like a movie; the main feature is that it reflects the delay time between each keystroke into various visual representations of the output text. For this version, the more time the writer spends before typing a word, the bigger the font size become. Using this visual translation, the viewer can visually understand the process of each person’s writing experience. All the text inputs are licenced under a Creative Commons licence, and will be used for a text mash-up function that will be included in the alpha release of the software (with GPL) on the project website shortly. This is aimed at developing not only the individual piece as an end product, but also to propose a new aesthetics and custom which pays more attention to the process of production than the end result.

As a parallel event, a public discussion was held on 24 September at the NTT InterCommunication Centre, a new media art centre open since 1997 in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The author organized the event under the rather defiant title ‘Is Open Source art possible?’, and guests from various backgrounds attended.

First, Kiyoshi Kusumi, the former editor-in-chief of Japan’s distinguished contemporary art review, “BT magazine”, who is now a freelance art strategist; explained that the birth of non-proprietary art activities could be found in the Fluxus movement of the 60’s in New York. Indeed, many artists who participated in the movement were freely sharing ideas and arranged massive collaborative performance works: most of all, the scores of these performance pieces were sold openly so that anyone could interpret and adapt the works of these acclaimed artists. In this case, these ’scores’ can be considered the ’source’ of artistic actions.

Noboru Tsubaki, an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist who has recently been mediating the art scene and the global issues with his “United Nations application” initiative, introduced his Radikal Dialogue Project where participants can submit their designs for the Israeli/Palestinian separation wall blocks. He explained why he decided to open up the creative process to the public by adopting a Creative Commons licence for the project website; insisting on the importance of open participation in order to build a base for rising political awareness and enable strong artistic expressions. Tsubaki also stressed the role of the artist as amplifier of noise and irrationality in order to constantly present alternatives to de-facto media.

Hiroo Yamagata is an advocate of hacker culture, an MIT alumni, and translator of all Lessig’s books into Japanese. Yamagata raised the critical question of whether the simple proliferation of “free content” could really improve people’s creativity. He quoted Claude Levi-Strauss who once wrote that creative process needs a certain obstacle as an object of resistance and that making all resources available would eventually kill the creativity of a society. However, by responding to each of the project presented by the other discussants, he also pointed out that the nature of art forms is shifting from ‘installation’ as an individual output to a ‘platform’ as a base for sharable creative process, which could nevertheless justify the employment of open-source type projects in today’s artistic domain.

Following the arguments of Yochai Benkler, we may say that the plasticity of our network must be augmented by our own commitment in order to build a critical, self-defining culture. And, the role of art should be, vis-Ã -vis of the broader culture in general, a platform of recursive questioning and redefining of the social realities we are facing every day, in order not to fall into any ideological blindness. As Gilles Deleuze said, philosophers create concepts and artists forge percepts, both in the effort to propagate questions, and not answers.

For more information and feedback on the event, see the reviews in PingMag and Japan Times.

Photograph: Open Source art with the Divvy/Dual project, by Gen Kanai (Mozilla Japan), CC BY-ND 2.0

The third Creative Commons Japan seminar held on 26 September welcomed a diverse range of panelists. Heather Ford from iCommons announced the new phase of the Creative Commons movement where open business, culture and education emerge as the new contexts of our era. Chiaki Hayashi, from Japan’s biggest creators network Loftwork, described how and why the very notion of openness is not only a virtue but also a vital engine to sustain communication between Loftwork’s 6 000 designers and illustrators. Tadashi Nakanishi from ClipLife, a Creative Commons licensed video sharing portal run by the ex-national telephone company NTT, explained their interest as Japan’s infrastructural ISP in contributing to the growth of cultural heritage and independent new media. Finally, Larry Lessig discussed his ideas on why “hording” cultural goods, using examples such as (more…)

Final preparation for Science Commons’ upcoming conference in Washington, DC is under way. The two-day, invitation-only event, hosted by the National Academies of Science, will kick off on Tuesday 3 October.

‘The Commons of Science’ conference will bring together over 45 scientists, leading policy makers and other commons advocates to discuss issues surrounding the free flow of scientific material. The Science Commons team (with the help of Jim Campbell and Harlan Onsrud from the University of Maine) hopes to open the lines of communication across disciplines to help further the existing vision for making scientific data more accessible.

The attendee list (found here) includes those from the scientific disciplines themselves (geospatial, archeology, biological sciences, anthropology etc.), as well as representatives from the (more…)

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the Highway Africa conference held at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Over the years, Highway Africa has become one of the biggest ICT conferences in Africa with more than 500 delegates from all over the world gathering to discuss internet governance, ICT policy, media and democracy in a town where bars nearly outnumber churches.

One of the highlights of this year’s conference was the first Digital Citizens Indaba (DCI), a blogging conference with a specific focus on Africa. This free conference (delegates, for the most part, just had to cover their transport costs) was, according to co-ordinator Colin Daniels, “…a gathering of African bloggers, media practitioners, and civil society” and was less of a conference on (more…)

Prof. Larry Lessig gave his keynote speech on “The Read/Write Society” at the end of the second day of the Wizards of OS 4 conference (read part 1 and part 2 of our WOS 4 coverage). He began by telling the story of John Philip Sousa, an early 20th century American composer who believed that the development of first voice recording machines would “ruin artistic development” and cause “the vocal cord to [be] eliminated”. A year ago, I heard him use this example at the opening of ccPoland, where he used it to show how those with stakes in more traditional forms of cultural production can block the growth of novel forms - as is happening today with p2p technologies, for instance. This time, Larry Lessig pointed out a different issue - that the “machines” that Sousa was complaining about were in fact killing a more decentralised and grassroots form of cultural production. Times when “young people together [were] singing the songs of the day or old songs” were coming to an end.

Larry’s argument is that while the capacity to produce, and not just use cultural products was largely lost in the ‘Read Only’ 20th century, a ‘Read / Write’ culture is re-emerging in the (more…)

During day two of the Wizards of OS 4 conference (read about the first day in part 1), a panel titled ‘Business and the Commons’ initiated a discussion on how to “make money with free bits”. During the iSummit in Rio de Janeiro Joi Ito, chairman of the board of iCommons, named this as one of the key questions that the free culture movement is facing.

Ronaldo Lemos from ccBrazil started the session by presenting a developing countries perspective on commons-based business. According to him, open business can take two forms. One is what he calls the “legal commons” - a business model based on an idea of sharing and using open licenses. Netlabels like Magnatune, open access journals like PLoS or the Brasilian press agency Agencia Brasil are all examples of this approach. The other form he calls “social commons”, which are more typical of developing countries and contexts in which intellectual property is a foreign idea to most. Social commons thrives in situations where technology arrived before the law, allowing autonomous creative industries to appear. These often take for granted free sharing and dissemination outside of a legal (more…)