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cc-eyebeam - Re: [cc-eyebeam] Re: Welcome to Distributed Creativity

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Subject: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19

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  • From: Heather Ford <heather AT gn.apc.org>
  • To: cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-eyebeam] Re: Welcome to Distributed Creativity
  • Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 20:40:40 -0800

Hi all,

I'd like to bring another perspective from the developing world. I'm a South African and have been doing Internet development work for non-profits in South Africa for the past 4 years. I'm currently at Stanford University working on community weblogging models for use in telecentres and community access points in developing countries.

I'd like to start by saying that I'm a big fan of Creative Commons because I think that, aside from offering a very practical alternative to the default copyright rules that govern content, cc catalyses people to question the default copyright model and its impact on development.

There are, however, very significant issues that need to be addressed if we want to make Creative Commons relevant to the developing world. South Africa is a developing country where we import a lot more culture (and 'intellectual property') than we export. There are a lot of reasons for this, which I won't go into, but the main effect of this is that we are becoming incredibly immersed in American culture and are fast losing knowledge of our roots.

Creative Commons licenses offer a wonderful way for developing countries to gain access to content and also for individuals within these countries to stimulate local cultural development. As Glenn says, this is just *one* way for us to advance ideas about how we think intellectual property rights should work - but the good thing is that it can engage more people in a debate that is usually confined to the meeting halls of politicians and lawyers, and those much bigger monsters like the WTO and TRIPS that have such a huge impact on our innovation and development.

What I'd really like to see is that developing countries use Creative Commons licenses - and distributed creativity models - to become actively engaged in the culture-making process. If people use the licenses to adapt content to local contexts (and I think that this feature is essential to the success of cc in the developing world) then it can become very useful to the culture industry in South Africa.

For example, a musician writes a song and releases it under a share alike license. A South African picks up the song and puts a marabi rhythm to it and then distributes the song. This is much better, I think, than just making it cheaper for South Africans to buy music - because what we don't want is for it to become easier to become more reliant on the US for giving us our culture.

Another feature that would be great for the developing world is a license that allows translation into a local language. In fact, I think of translation not only in terms of language, but in terms of local context. All the content in the world can be free, but if its not locally relevant, then its not really useful. This is especially true for educational content.

I look forward to the discussions (and arguments) that I hope will follow.

Heather Ford.





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