MDC to make Creative Commons common

Malaysia is the first South-East Asian country to embrace the Creative Commons intiative, announced Multimedia Development Corporation Sdn Bhd last week. Datuk Dr Arif Nun, chief executive officer of MDC, said more than 100 local music artistes and creators of digital content have so far licensed their works under the initiative.

MDC, the host of the initiative in this country, is encouraging the 130 MSC-status (Multimedia Super Corridor) companies – as well as all other Malaysian intellectual property owners – to license their products under Creative Commons. The company had on March 29 signed a collaboration agreement with Creative Commons, a San Francisco-based non-profit organisation, to adapt its licences to suit the Malaysian context.

Creative Commons enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes. Its intention is to avoid the problems that current copyright laws create for the sharing of intellectual property.

This form of intellectual property licensing is suitable for digital works, which can be easily duplicated and modified, especially with today’s remix culture – where someone might rip a CD track and modify it digitally on a computer.

The project will only be officially launched next March, but the MDC has already started a competition to drum up more interest; there are cash prizes of RM10,000, RM5,000 and RM3,000 to be won. Details can be found at www.creativecommons.org.

Creative Commons is more flexible than the traditional “all rights reserved” type of licensing, Arif said. With Creative Commons, intellectual property owners can declare “some rights reserved” or even “no rights reserved.”

“This promotes easier sharing or building upon the creative work of another,” he said, adding that Creative Commons promotes the “cross-fertilisation of ideas, with people you may never meet.”

According to him, you could compare Creative Commons to the software industry’s open-source movement. “Whereas Creative Commons is for (digital) content,” he said.

The MDC announced that audio and audio-visual recordings, music, digital images, video, text and interactive content could be licensed under Creative Commons.

But not software. This is already provided for by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, it said.

In the Creative Commons licence, intellectual property owners are free to stipulate exactly how someone else can use or modify their works. Or how someone can distribute or profit from the works or their adaptations. Or even if someone is allowed to profit from their intellectual property at all.

There is no charge for licensing a piece of work under Creative Commons, said the MDC.

The Creative Commons initiative was started by US cyberlaw and experts in intellectual property laws in 2001.

More than 30 countries have adopted Creative Commons, including Britain, Canada, Australia, Japan, China, France, Germany, Spain, and Taiwan.

For more details, go to www.creativecommons.org.my.

Source : Steven Patrick, The Star In-Tech

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