Creative Commons statement at WIPO CDIP

[Disclaimer: What follows is the vetted CC version. There were a couple of errors in the version I read at the meeting]

Statement by Creative Commons to CDIP5

(Geneva, 26 April 2010)

Thank you Mr Chairman for the opportunity to make a statement; we would like to join other delegates in congratulating you for your appointment. Creative Commons appreciates the importance of the work of this Committee, and particularly welcomes the invitation as an observer awarded to us during the 4^th session.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work as some rights reserved, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof. Creative Commons also encompasses projects dealing with education, open access, open science and cultural development. Creative Commons International has projects and jurisdiction-specific licences in 102 countries, with 19 more jurisdictions in the process of drafting licences. This encompasses a vast network of volunteers who are engaged in the principles of sharing information for the wider good. Millions of objects are already shared under CC licences.

We would like to point the delegates to the fact that Creative Commons was already mentioned during the 4^th session as an important tool for reaching balance for developing countries, I refer you to pp.24-25 of the CDIP4 report.

We also strongly believe that Creative Commons offers developing countries opportunities to legitimately access scientific and educational materials released under a Creative Commons licence by researchers and public institutions in the developed world, something that is already taking place. We are aware that this does not solve digital divide access issues, but we believe that making the works available under permissive licences is a step in the right direction.

As mentioned already, Creative Commons strongly supports the work of this Committee. We are encouraged in particular by the work in Technology Transfer and in studying the public domain, and also welcome the work of the SCCR in “Limitations and Exceptions for Educational Activities”. We would like to point out that CC is creating a prototype tool for marking and tagging public domain works, which we expect to have that out by mid Summer 2010.  Any work on tools to facilitate the ID of and access to public domain content must interoperate and have buy-in from all stakeholders who possess information about and can facilitate the marking of such content.

Our work also includes heavy involvement in scientific arenas. Particularly, we are currently engaged in creating standardized patent licenses, which we believe can produce important result for developing countries.

Thank you.