complete press contact list for creative commons

[Glenn Otis Brown <glenn AT creativecommons.org>]

press release
attached as pdf
below as text

Attachment: CC_Iberia_Press.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

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CREATIVE COMMONS TO OFFER SPANISH AND CATALAN COPYRIGHT LICENCES WITH 
UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

University of Barcelona is spearheading the effort to translate 
Creative Commons licenses into Spanish and Catalan.

Palo Alto, USA and Barcelona, Spain - February 24, 2004 - Creative 
Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative works 
free for copying and re-use, announced today that formal work has begun 
for expanding its International Commons (iCommons) project to the 
Iberian peninsula, with both Spanish and Catalan translations in the 
works.

The University of Barcelona will lead the effort.

"We are thrilled to be working with the University of Barcelona," said 
Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at 
Stanford. "With its rich heritage and linguistic reach, Spain can serve 
as a model for many countries in expanding the global cultural commons. 
And we're excited to begin work on Catalan versions of the licenses in 
parallel."

"We think that Creative Commons' project is very interesting and 
therefore we have decided to promote it from a public institution as 
the University of Barcelona," said Ignasi Labastida i Juan, project 
lead of the iCommons efforts in Spain and Catalonia. Ignasi Labastida i 
Juan added, "Since the project of the licenses appeared, we thought 
that we needed adaptations for our own laws and in our languages. The 
idea to create iCommons Catalonia was very important to us since we are 
not well known but we speak the seventh language in the EU in terms of 
number of speakers - more than ten million."

First announced in March 2003, iCommons is Creative Commons' project to 
make its machine-readable copyright licenses useful worldwide. As the 
lead institution, University of Barcelona will coordinate a public 
effort literally and legally to translate the Creative Commons 
licenses. University of Barcelona will field comments on an archived 
email discussion at the Creative Commons website:

<http://www.creativecommons.org/discuss#spain>
<http://www.creativecommons.org/discuss#catalonia>.

Spain and Catalonia join Brazil, Croatia, Italy, Ireland, Finland, 
Japan, China, Taiwan, France, and the UK in the iCommons effort. 
Several other iCommons jurisdictions and languages will soon follow.




More about Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use 
of intellectual works, whether owned or in the public domain. It is 
sustained by the generous support of The Center for the Public Domain, 
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Hewlett 
Foundation. Creative Commons is based at Stanford Law School, where it 
shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school's Center for 
Internet and Society.

For general information, visit <http://creativecommons.org>.

For more information about iCommons, see
<http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/>.


More about University of Barcelona

The University of Barcelona, founded in 1450, is the oldest and largest 
of the six universities in Barcelona, and of the ten in Catalonia. It 
has 76,000 students - more than half of the total student population of 
Catalonia - and is the second largest in terms of students number in 
Spain. The University of Barcelona has four campuses, in different 
parts of the city. The University is the main Spanish university 
research centre, and one of the leaders in Europe, in terms of projects 
and the quality achieved in this field. One of the aims of the 
University is to create, transmit and expand the cultural, scientific, 
and technical knowledge and to contribute to society's development.

The university is particularly interested in fostering international 
relations, and for many years has been the leader among European 
universities in numbers of student exchanges organized as part of the 
Erasmus program. Since 1995, the UB has implemented a quality program 
aiming fundamentally to design mid and long term strategies in order to 
evaluate and improve teaching and research in public higher education.

For more information about University of Barcelona, visit 
<http://www.ub.edu>.






Contact

Christiane Asschenfeldt (Berlin)
iCommons Coordinator, Creative Commons
christiane AT creativecommons.org

Ignasi Labastida i Juan (Barcelona)
Project Lead, iCommons Spain
University of Barcelona
ilabastida AT ub.edu

Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director (Palo Alto)
1.650.723.7572 (tel)
1.415.336.1433 (cell)
glenn AT creativecommons.org

http://creativecommons.org

Press Release