[Cc-hk] Monday's CC meeting
Rebecca MacKinnon
rebecca.mackinnon at gmail.com
Tue Jul 31 02:53:29 EDT 2007
Thanks to everybody who attended last night's meeting! Sorry for
those of you who tried to call in on Skype - the wifi kept kicking me
off the network for some reason. Fortunately there were only one or
two of you and I promise in future I will sort out the remote
participation issues a bit better :) Anyways, here is a summary of
what went on:
We were honored to be joined by Dr. Catharina Maracke, International
Coordinator for Creative Commons International. (For a full list of
attendees, see the bottom of this summary.)
- HOST INSTIUTION, LEGAL LEAD & COMMUNITY LEAD: Catharina announced
that the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at HKU will serve as the
host academic institution for bringing CC to Hong Kong, thanks to the
generosity and decisiveness of JMSC Director Prof. Ying Chan. HKU Law
Faculty Professors Alice Lee and Li Yahong will head the legal team,
working with others in the legal community who want to help in
localizing the CC license to Hong Kong law. Rebecca MacKinnon,
Assistant Prof. at the JMSC, will for now serve as community point
person, with the help of other members of the Hong Kong community. As
Catharina explained, the leadership team of CC HK can evolve over
time, and Rebecca certainly hopes that CCHK's public spokesperson
will ultimately be a HK person not a recently arrived American. But
this current arrangement seems to Catharina and the other people at
CC headquarters as the most expedient approach to getting things off
the ground and running.
- LOCALIZATION OF THE CC LICENSE: One very important thing needs to
happen before an official Creative Commons Hong Kong organization can
be launched: The international Creative Commons license needs to be
localized into Hong Kong law, with versions both in English and
Chinese. HKU Law Profs Alice Li and Li Yahong will spearhead this
effort, and welcome other lawyers and law students in this community
to get involved with helping. Once a draft of the localized license
has been created, it will be circulated in the community for comments
and suggestions. Then it will be revised into a final form. Once it
has been completely finalized, only then will it be possible to
officially "launch" a Creative Commons Hong Kong organization. Profs
Lee & Li :-) are hoping this can happen within the coming half year.
Catharina says that the amount of time needed in different countries
has varied dramatically: in some places only a few months were
needed, in other countries it took several years. How long it takes
in HK is up to all the lawyers and law students in our community here.
- USING THE LICENSE BEFORE THE CC HK LAUNCH: Before the CC HK
license is launched, people in HK are certainly free to use works
that have been created and published/distributed under any CC license
anywhere on earth, as long as of course we follow the terms of the
individual license (i.e., whether the specific license is non-
commercial only, whether it allows remixing or not, etc.). Many
people in Hong Kong are already publishing their own works under the
generic international CC license, and we should all feel free to do
so. This is naturally better than nothing but it will not necessarily
hold up in a Hong Kong court if somebody uses your work in ways not
permitted by the license you selected. A question was asked whether
CC licenses have been upheld by courts in other jurisdictions and
Catharina cited a couple examples of yes.
- THE LAUNCH: Once the Creative Commons license is completely
localized under Hong Kong law and everybody is happy with it, it will
be incorporated into the Creativecommons.org website, in the area
where anybody creating content anywhere in the world can go to select
the license they need. (See http://creativecommons.org/license/) As
soon as is practical after that, based on funding and logistics, we
would plan to hold an official Creative Commons Hong Kong launch
event. Schedule permitting, we would hope that such luminaries as
Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig would come out. It would be
great to combine this with seminars or workshops that would help to
educate the legal community, government officials, educators, media
organizations, artists, students, and general public in Hong Kong
about CC.
- PROMOTING CC IN HONG KONG: Many people in the meeting talked about
how much work there is to be done in educating the government, the
universities, the media, the arts community, and pretty much
everybody in HK about CC and why it's a good thing, how the licenses
can be used (and how they can't be used), etc.. There are lots of
projects we can organize and support. Many people in the room already
have specific projects they want to undertake. If you would like to
propose a project or claim a particular area in which you'd like to
promote CC, please go to the "Volunteer" area on our wiki and declare
your interest. http://cchk.wetpaint.com/ If you don't have an
account on the wiki, just sign up on the right hand side of the page,
and then you will be able to add your thoughts and information easily.
- FUNDING: We will of course need to raise funds to pay for a launch
event and other CC promotion activities. It's likely we will want to
hire somebody part-time to handle administrative coordination for the
project. These funds will need to be raised from local businesses,
individuals, other institutions, and perhaps there could also be
public funds - as Charles Mok pointed out.
- GOVERNMENT RELATIONS: This is a good time to get going on CC HK
because the Digital Copyright law is still under advisement. There is
a lot of work to be done in educating regulators and lawmakers about
the fact that there are alternatives beyond traditional copyright
that might help to foster creativity and innovation in Hong Kong.
Charles Mok has many good ideas about how we can proceed on this.
- REGULAR MEETINGS: It was suggested that we hold a CC HK meeting at
least once every 2 months so that we can all continue to brainstorm
and update each other where various aspects of the project stand.
These don't always need to happen at HKU - they could be hosted by
different members of the community on different months, so sometimes
we will be more convenient for people on Kowloon side and sometimes
more convenient for HK Island, etc.
- WEBSITES, EMAIL LIST, ETC. : Right now, since CC HK has not yet
officially launched, we cannot create an official "Creative Commons
Hong Kong" website without causing problems for CC International, as
well as causing confusion in the community here about whether or not
there is a localized license. Meanwhile we will use the "Fans of
Creative Commons" Wiki at: http://cchk.wetpaint.com/ to inform the
community and invite broad participation. Hopefully all of you will
sign up for accounts on the wiki and use it to organize the work you
want to do. I would suggest using Google Docs or a separate password
protected wiki to jointly work on documents and projects in a more
private space.
We will also continue to use this e-mail list. If there are people
you know who want to get involved, they should sign up here:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-hk
ATTENDEES: (Please correct me if I got your name wrong or let me know
if I missed your name. I didn't have everybody's full name and not
necessarily all titles.)
Dr. Catharina Maracke, International Coordinator, Creative Commons
International
Prof. Ying Chan, Director, HKU Journalism & Media Studies Ctr.
Li Yahong & Alice Lee, HKU Law Faculty
Hagen (sorry don't have full name - please let me know)
Deki - famous "Just a Sidekick" blogger :)
Janet Lau - City University
Micky Yip - City U, Legalvoice.hk
Nicky Tse - Trainee solicitor, Hau, Lau, Li & Yeung
Paul Cheung - City U., Legalvoice.hk
Chong Chan-yao HKU director of student dev
Ben & Oiwan Lam, Inmedia
Randy Shek - DotAsia lawyer, HKU, etc
Charles Mok - HK Internet Society etc.
Kenneth Yip- ASTRI.org - HK Applied Science & Technology Research
Institute
Greg, Chinese U. information engineering student
Uta Lam - blogger, web 2.0 entrepreneur
Yat Siu, CEO of Outblaze
Rebecca MacKinnon, HKU
Rebecca MacKinnon
Assistant Professor, Journalism & Media Studies Ctr.
University of Hong Kong (http://jmsc.hku.hk)
email: rmack at hku.hk
blog: www.RConversation.com
Tel: +852-2219-4005
Co-founder:
www.GlobalVoicesOnline.org
"The world is talking. Are you listening?"
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