We all felt a sense of occasion in the air yesterday at the launch of the Australian bit of the International Creative Commons Project. The Faculty of Law at QUT has had a big hand in translating the creative commons licenses into Australian legal-speak, and there are some exciting cultural applications and initiatives happening around the place. One of the funkiest is the Australian Creative Resources Archive – a kind of recycling plant for digital, or digitised, content.
ACRO is a Federally funded archive of video, music and other creative material built to provide creative raw materials that help stimulate the production of new broadband content.
ACRO is designed to fulfil an important role in the new creative environment offered by broadband technologies. Artists, educators, and researchers are becoming more restricted in the material they can use because of changes to copyright law. ACRO will reverse this trend by providing access to large amounts of high quality multimedia material.
Using Creative Commons licenses, content contributors can maintain more flexible control over their material than that offered by traditional copyright. If you provide content to ACRO, you decide what you want to happen with it. You can, for example, provide free use for education and non-commercial purposes while also allowing commercial use of your materials under circumstances that you are comfortable with. You decide what can happen with your content.
Extra gravitas was provided at the launch by the virtual presence of Larry Lessig, whose presentation involved, without a doubt, the funkiest use of powerpoint (I think it was powerpoint) I have ever seen.
2 responses to “Creative Commons Launched in Australia”
the launch of iCommons.au in australia was a momentus occassion. i feel the audience present were not quite aware of the potential that such a program has for IP and copyright usage in Australia and of how close they were sitting to the existing collision of “protective” regulatory scheme, and its more flexible alternative, exemplified by creative commons and its ethos.
as a user of the licenses, i am so pleased that Creative Commons it is finally becoming a part of Australian domestic law. this is a big step for the law because it marks the begining of what will hopefully be a change in copyright that will see the breaking down of excessively restricting systems of “protection” and bring Australian copyright law in parallel with a more fluid concept that creative types in australia favour.
it is imporant from here that iCommons.au builds itself up as an integral part of the Australian creative industry, and makes itself avaliable (and known) as a strong resource for the creative community.
projects like ACRO can only help this process.
_elliott
Elliott,
Thanks for your feedback – and stay in touch as things progress!