iCommons Switzerland

["Claude Almansi" <claude.almansi AT bluewin.ch>]

Hi Corsin, Martin and All

On 5/1/07, Corsin Camichel <cocaman AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Martin, Claude and list
>
> Thanks for your responses and information.
> I made some thoughts about the next steps and I think what would help
> the most would be to bring some big player (musician, author, any
> other content creator) to the license. Like a musician releasing one
> of his songs under a Creative Commons license. That would bring the
> biggest echo from media and is a good starter.

Good idea - and I believe it is also behind the choice of John Buchman
as host for the launch, as Buchman is CEO of Magnatune.com, which is a
label that demonstrates how creative commons licenses can work in a
business model (see program of the launch in
<http://www.tweakfest.ch/festival/2007/program/program_detail_de.php?id=program1175721754658327?conference?3>).
And there is a kind of Swiss Magnatune, www.starfrosch.ch. We could
encourage public broadcasters to present the works of starfrosch
artists  and other artists using CC or other non/less restrictive
licenses, encourage the organsation of live concerts, of film
showings.

> > - Incite content producers that are financed by public monies 
> (Universities, SSR SRG, mseums, some foundations) to use non restrictive 
> licenses for their web content
> Is not the BBC doing something in this direction?

Yes, together with Channel 4,  Open University, British Film
Institute, Teachers'TV and others, but the BBC pilot part ended in
September 2006, and they are now evaluating. See Creative Archive
License Group http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/. And then the BBC's
was a CC license sui generis, because access to the works was/is
restricted to UK residents. Open University at least is going on with
the project: see http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php

> A launch party is of course cool for all the geeks and techies out
> there. But I think we need other kind of groups to support CC (we
> hackers still believe in "all knowledge has to be free", so that's why
> a lot of us already use it).

I'd never qualify as a geek, even less as a techie :D. There are other
paths than tech to the interest/involvement in free access to
knowledge and content. Mine was French 18th c. literature - even more
of a non starter than tech as an advocacy argument, granted. But
actually, it's rather that I got interested in both for the same
reason: there are sharers and there are hoarders, and I am and was a
sharer, even before PCs.
There are lots of sharers around, techie and non techie ones. There
always have  been,  and sharing is being made more attractive by  the
success of sharing enterprises like Wikipedia (1).
CC licenses make sharing easier. It's a question of showing concrete
application possibilities.

Best

Claude


(1) 2 weeks ago I was teaching a preliminary intensive French course
for people who had registered for a bilingual French/English Master's
course at Università della Svizzera Italiana. No one objected to the
fact the activities I had prepared were almost all collaborative,
aimed at letting them share what each already knew. It worked fine:
they decided to start a specialised glossary for the course  using a
shared online spreadsheet.