The past two years have been specially vibrant, with a wide range of projects including the Open Book Project , a UNESCO regional seminar on OER in the GCC and Yemen,  Notre Dame University—Louaize in Lebanon signing an memorandum of understanding as an affiliate, Google hangouts on various occasions to tackle pressing issues in the digital ecosystem, and the Al Jazeera English translation of the The Data Journalism Handbook  to Arabic.

Other projects include #FreeBassel campaign support and the two historic meetings: the Regional Meeting to restructure, build capacity, share best practices, and the translation meeting to officially translate the 4.0 version of the CC license suite into Arabic. 2016 is also projected to have more exciting developments for the rapidly-growing CC community in the Arab world.

After an extensive process, the legal team finished the CC4.0 Licences Arabic Translation Draft for public consultation.

The public consultation is an open forum where everyone, including lawyers, active license users, linguists, translators, and others are invited to contribute to the project. If you have comments about different aspects of the licenses, particularly in regards to legal, linguistic or usability issues, please feel welcome to provide feedback and share your thoughts by replying to the thread in Arabic.

Comments should be submitted as soon as possible to allow enough time for review, so we encourage you to post here or to the CC Arab World list before the 21st of July 2016.

As efforts across the Arab world continue to expand and gather peer support, we hope that the this public consultation will foster more collaboration. Inter-jurisdictional support is a model that is particularly strong in the region, and hopefully it can become a viable approach for future projects.

Congratulations to the CC Arab World! We look forward to your public comments.

*An Arabic version of this announcement was posted to the CC Arab World list as well.

The post CC 4.0 Arabic Translation Draft Open for Public Consultation appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re excited to see this work progressing as more people are able to use the CC licenses in their own language. Look for a few translations from outside the Nordic region—including some involving teams from several continents!—in the near future.

The post Norwegian translation of 4.0 published appeared first on Creative Commons.

Internationalization was one of the 5 main goals of the 4.0 licenses, so this is an important milestone for the CC community. Our translation policy was written to reinforce that goal: if the licenses work everywhere, everyone should be able to use them in their own language without needing to worry about what the original English version says. The official translations are accessible to anyone, anywhere wishing to have access to the official legal text of the 4.0 licenses in Finnish.

Particular kudos go out to this team for their detailed work: producing linguistic translations is difficult! Many words don’t have exact equivalents between languages, especially where you’re bringing in specialized language from countries with different legal systems. Teams working on translations go through a detailed review of their work with CC to ensure that the meaning of the documents lines up. This often involves many detailed questions about exact meanings of words and the legal concepts they refer to, especially when no one on the CC legal team speaks the language. (If you’re particularly curious, you can look at some of the notes in the translators’ guide.) The Finnish team anticipated most of the questions we might have asked, providing a detailed explanation that will be useful as an example to others, and their thorough work has paid off.

Keep your eyes out: several more translations are in the final stages of review and will be published in the coming months! In the meantime, we join CC Finland in celebrating the launch of the first official 4.0 translation.

Read CC Finland’s announcement.

The post Finnish translation of 4.0 published appeared first on Creative Commons.

We are proud to announce the launch of the Creative Commons 3.0 Switzerland ported license suite. Huge thanks to Mélanie Bosshart, Phillip Perreaux, Simon Schlauri, Hartwig Thomas and the rest of the CC Switzerland team for their hard work and dedication in perfecting the Swiss ported licenses.

You can access the new licenses through our license chooser and learn more about the CC Switzerland team at their website.

As mentioned in our announcements of the Ireland 3.0 licenses and the Uganda 3.0 public discussion, CC is working to finish a small number of ongoing 3.0 ports while pushing ahead with the public discussion on the 4.0 licenses. These involve six long-running porting projects that CC committed to completing in 2011.

We encourage all teams and community members to participate in the 4.0 drafting process. You can view the first draft of the 4.0 CC BY-NC-SA license at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0_Drafts.

The post Swiss 3.0 Creative Commons licenses now available appeared first on Creative Commons.

“The Public, West Bromwich – Welcome to The Public Entrance Free” / ell brown / CC BY

We are pleased to post for public comment the first discussion draft of version 4.0. This draft is the product of an extended (and unprecedented) requirements gathering period involving input from CC affiliates, community and stakeholders. Thanks to all of you who contributed your valuable time and energy in the policy discussions and drafting sessions in support of this draft.

We crafted this first draft (v4.0d1) mindful of the overarching design goals first articulated at the 2011 Global Summit:

• Producing a 4.0 suite that addresses pressing challenges of important adopters, including those in countries where localized version of CC licenses have not existed, and never may, for any number of reasons;
• Maximizing interoperability, reducing license proliferation and promoting standardization where possible; and
• Longevity and ease of use.

We have also been mindful of supporting those for whom version 3.0 is working well. We will continue efforts to ensure those constituents are aware of our support throughout this process and our eagerness to see those implementations thrive.

We’ve documented and discussed all of these at length, and are excited to hear back from our community on how we can still better accomplish these goals. Here are some highlights of the major policy and drafting choices reflected in the draft, as well issues on which we would especially value your input. Join the discussion!

Database rights

As anticipated, the license fully licenses database rights on the same terms and conditions as copyright and neighboring rights. We have heard no compelling reason for reversing course on this new policy, and all early feedback suggests this is a welcomed change despite questions about their utility. We have taken care to ensure that the license only applies where permission is needed and the licensor holds those rights.

Other copyright-like rights

Rights beyond copyright and neighboring rights are more complicated, however. We know from our community that other sui generis, copyright-like rights exist and more have been or will be proposed. These include press publisher rights in Germany and catalogue rights in Nordic countries. We remain concerned that these “ancillary rights” (the term coined for use in the draft) could undermine or interfere with expected uses of the licensed work, much as sui generis database rights (and their treatment in 3.0 and its ports) have vexed CC licensors and licensees in Europe for years.

We have taken the approach in this first draft of requiring waiver of those ancillary rights, but only if possible and then only to the extent necessary to allow the work to be used as intended under the license. (These ancillary rights do not include the traditional group of rights long excluded from CC licenses and reserved to licensors, such as trademark, privacy and personality rights, and similar.) We look to our community for input on this important policy choice.

Moral rights

Treatment of moral rights is the other central policy issue addressed in this draft. In 3.0 (unported) and a rough majority of the 3.0 ports, moral rights are generally reserved and unaffected by the license. Yet in other ports, those rights are reserved only where they cannot be waived, suggesting the licensor is waiving those rights where possible, and possibly without limitation. The difference is nuanced but not trivial, and merits consideration.

For purposes of this first draft, we have chosen a middle ground: where waiver is possible, a limited waiver (or non assert) is granted to allow the work to be used as otherwise permitted by the license. For all other purposes (or where a waiver or non assert is not permitted), those rights are fully reserved. This proposal draws heavily from the proposal made for 3.01, and is intended to re-start the discussion for 4.0 where that discussion left off. We look forward to hearing the views of our community on this proposal as well.

Proposals under development

A few policy decisions are still under consideration and will benefit from further public discussion before formal proposals are made. To the extent these decisions involve existing terms in 3.0, we have [bracketed] related provisions in the draft. These include technical protection measures and the definition of NonCommercial. On the former, discussion during the requirements gathering period was robust and productive, but not conclusive on any approach. We plan to use a portion of this public discussion period to curate use cases that will inform a formal proposal. Ideally, these use cases will be based on demonstrated needs (or lack thereof) by licensees for a change from the prohibition in 3.0. As for NonCommercial, more discussion is necessary if any of the current proposals or arguments for changing that definition are to be advanced. Consequently, we have left the definition unchanged in this first draft. On both of these issues, look for prompts from us on the license discussion list and this blog, and please contribute your voice to the discussion.

Other features

The draft license has several new features deserving of attention and your feedback. Attribution and marking requirements are now centralized in a single location and clarified for ease of understanding and compliance. The collecting society provision is dramatically simplified, though operating in the same spirit as in 3.0. Overall, we have strived to simplify, better organize, internationalize and enhance usability whenever possible. We welcome your ideas for making this license still better in these respects and more.

We need your input!

One of our highest priorities is to ensure to the extent possible that the 4.0 licenses work seamlessly in as many jurisdictions, and for as many constituents, as possible. Please help us identify provisions that could be improved to operate better in your locale and for the communities of CC adopters you care about.

We have updated the 4.0 wiki with a special page dedicated to this first draft, where you can find the full draft of BY-NC-SA and a detailed chart comparing this draft to version 3.0, among other resources. The primary discussion forum continues to be the license-discuss list. We look forward to hearing from you!

The post Version 4.0 – License Draft Ready for Public Comment! appeared first on Creative Commons.

The public discussion is a key part of Creative Commons’ license porting project. It is an opportunity for you, content creators and license users, to engage in the drafting process and give your input on this collaborative effort. We warmly invite you to join CC Ireland’s discussion list or visit their website and share your comments with local and international legal experts.

Thank you and congratulations to CC Ireland!

The post CC Ireland discusses Version 3.0, invites comments appeared first on Creative Commons.

ccLearn’s own Executive Director, Ahrash Bissell, submitted a paper last fall entitled, “Permission granted: open licensing for educational resources.” In it, he argues that “open licenses are critical for defining Open Educational Resources” and “explain[s] the logic of open licensing” in terms familiar “to teachers, funders, and educational policy-makers.”

Ahrash’s isn’t the only interesting read in the mix; there is also David Wiley and Seth Gurrell’s paper spanning “A decade of development…” which presents a “history of the idea of Open Educational Resources, overview[s] the current state of the Open Educational Resources movement, report[s] on critical issues facing the field in the immediate future, and present[s] two new projects to watch in 2009.”

Actually, all of them sound pretty fascinating, especially one “personal and institutional journey” at the University of the Western Cape (this one involves the struggle for political freedom) by Derek Keats. All papers illuminate different aspects of the open educational resources movement, a movement that has grown steadily since inception. You can view them online, or download the PDFs. We will also be hosting Ahrash’s paper on ccLearn’s resources page shortly.

The post Open Learning: Open Educational Resources Issue appeared first on Creative Commons.