Cc-hk mailing list

["Eric Eldred" <ericeldred AT gmail.com>]

hi, CC-HK,

I'm Eric Eldred, a co-founder and member of the board of
directors of Creative Commons, and I'd like to introduce
myself to the CC-HK list, where we can all contribute and
do some work toward setting up the Creative Commons Hong
Kong project.  Already I have to thank you for your
enthusiastic input.

In Shanghai now I'm living and learning.  I'm an American and
can't become Chinese even though I can eat with chopsticks.
I came to China first a year ago for the Mainland China CC launch 
in Beijing, and I came back to stay a few months ago.  I'm very 
interested in several areas, especially helping Chinese free culture 
and innovation.  There are some unique challenges in Mainland
China and Hong Kong, but we all share the big ones such as
the culture of sharing, how to deal with collecting societies,
and relating to hybrid business models.  We have to deal with
the criticism from many that CC is not appropriate for a
developing nation where artists need to make money in the
face of global cultural monopolies.  We are not against
copyright, we just use it as judo against the abusers.

Another problem internal to CC but not unique to it is how
to relate the legal side of CC to the cultural side, the
law professors to the real users, the artists, scientists,
educators, netizens.  We started mostly from law schools,
but with the idea that out there were some communities of
users who needed our licenses in order to compete with
popular mass culture.  The process of developing licenses,
translating them, and porting them to each local jurisdiction
must involve users as well as legal experts.  With the 
3.0
licensing process we have spun off the generic license from
the U.S. license.  

We want to avoid the appearance of domination from the U.S.
or Beijing or Hollywood or anybody.  CC is a U.S. non-profit 
corporation and retains trademark rights.  We will have a 
contract, a memorandum of understanding with the CC-HK project, 
to preserve those rights, but CC-HK will be independent.

Likewise, CC has established iCommons, a mostly independent
corporation that promotes free culture worldwide but should
not be confused with CC.  CC cannot take political positions,
since it is a U.S. non-profit corporation, an NGO.  You are
invited to iSummit in Dubrovnik this June to meet with
many others in iCommons.  At the same event, CC International
will host a meeting of legal project leaders of CC organizations
to work on common problems.

CC has been very successful in launching organizations in
many nations now.  With the CC-HK project we need to build
on that success with the able leadership of Christina. She
will detail the work process and we should coordinate
everything here.

Already we have some volunteers and have started some
face-to-face meetings.  I cannot direct this process, I am
not Christina's boss, she will correct me if I misstate
anything, but I think we can start to try to identify some 
local funding sources for our continuing work.

The project should be based in a highly regarded university
law school or research institute with the best project leads
who are at the same time in full agreement with our principles,
willing and able to do the work, and able to win the support
of everyone concerned in order to complete the job successfully.

After the license porting is completed there will be a formal
public celebration and launch, and CC will help organize this.

After the launch, the job is not complete, because there are
other activities to work on.  On the cultural side, for example,
there are salons to promote user communities, and on the 
Science Commons and ccLearn side of CC there are other things
that CC-HK could do, locally and internationally.  Some people
will want to work directly with iCommons.

There are two groups on this list, Hong Kong people and others,
and we should be careful to distinguish.  This will be an
education process for all of us, we must both learn rapidly
and communicate ideas to as many people as we can who are
concerned with the process.  Christina will take the lead.
I will stand by as a direct link to the CC board in case of
any problems or concerns you may have.  I look forward to
meeting you in person as well and getting to know beautiful
Hong Kong and its culture and people.

Eric Eldred

Contact details as of 2007-04-17

Eric Eldred  沈树人

mailto:
ericeldred AT gmail.com
mailto:ericeldred AT usa.net
mailto:ericeldred AT post.harvard.edu
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Director, co-founder, Creative Commons
http://www.creativecommons.org/
http://www.eldritchpress.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/Eric_Eldred

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Eric Eldred
沈树人  （Shen Shuren)

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