Cc-hk mailing list

[Rebecca MacKinnon <rebecca.mackinnon AT gmail.com>]

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?"