Creative Commons licenses are coming to Hong Kong - most likely this year!
Since August, a committed group of people have been working to localize Creative Commons licenses and educate the community about why this alternative approach to copyright will be good for Hong Kong. Check out the video, pictures and notes from our November workshop.
While many people and businesses will always choose to protect their works under traditional "all rights reserved" copyright, many people here in the community are eager to share their creative and intellectual works more broadly in a way that the Creative Commons "some rights reserved" licenses make possible.
Thanks to the hard work of Professors Yahong Li and Alice Lee at the University of Hong Kong law faculty, we now have a draft of the Creative Commons license converted into language that will hopefully hold up under Hong Kong IP law. It has been posted here on the Creative Commons website. We are seeking feedback from the community - particularly from those who understand Hong Kong IP law. If you have questions, criticisms, or comments, please click on the "post a message" link and join the discussion.
As I've mentioned in the past, Hong Kong is behind Mainland China and Taiwan when it comes to Creative Commons and the free culture movement. We're hoping to catch up. I'm pretty optimistic that we will, given that we've got some awesome people committed to the project. One in particular is Ben Cheng who works with me at Hong Kong U. An open source programmer, wikipedian, and dedicated free culture advocate with strong community connections, his work so far has been critical in keeping things going.
In Mainland China, where CC-China Mainland officially launched last year, some scholars are hoping to use CC and the free culture movement as a way to help empower underprivileged groups. Prof. Wang Jing of MIT recently wrote a paper about some of those projects, which can be downloaded here (PDF). My good friend Isaac Mao is also one of the people who first brought the Creative Commons movement to the mainland Chinese web community several years ago.
The Taiwan CC folks are organizing a great meeting for next weekend in Taipei called the International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age. I'll be giving a talk on Sunday about why free speech needs free culture. I'm looking forward to learning a lot from the other presenters about what's happening around the region, and how our group in Hong Kong can collaborate with people around Asia to promote free culture.
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