New Creative Commons Licenses Released For Intergovernmental Organizations
from the no-more-excuses dept
Even though Creative Commons licenses have only been in existence for just over a decade, it's now hard to imagine the online world without them. The ability they offer to modify or even cancel copyright's monopoly has led to all kinds of innovation, and given that success (as well as one or two failures), you might think there's no need for any more CC licenses. Creative Commons begs to differ:
We're pleased to announce a new suite of Creative Commons licenses specifically designed for intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). IGOs produce a wide array of valuable information and content, ranging from scholarly and scientific papers to environmental data. Just like other creators who seek wide dissemination of their works to achieve maximal impact, IGOs benefit from using CC's well understood and widely adopted licenses.
A new license is needed, apparently, because IGOs have one or two special requirements. For those who are interested, Andres Guadamuz has a useful post on his Technollama blog explaining what's new and why. He has no doubts about the significance of these new licences:
It may be easy to miss the monumental importance of this new licence. Creative Commons has enough acceptance in the legal mainstream that it will be adopted by the likes of the World Intellectual Property Organization and the OECD. It could be argued that this might be detrimental to CC, as it shows that it is now being used by the establishment as a fig leaf to cover the deficiencies inherent in copyright protection. The reality is that this sets CC as the international open content standard, and sends a strong message that it should also be adopted by governments to release their own data. In other words, there are no more excuses not to adopt CC, and this can be used by open content advocates everywhere to answer for once and for all stupid questions about the validity of open licences.
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Filed Under: copyright, creative commons, intergovernmental organizations
