Creative Commons Hong Kong: Launched!
Left to right: Edmon Chung, Ella Koon, Charles Mok, Rebecca MacKinnon, Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, Alice Lee, Yahong Li, Pindar Wong, Chitat Chan, and Peter Ma.
With the launch on Saturday October 25th of Creative Commons Hong Kong (CCHK), our community took the lead in promoting education and creativity in Hong Kong. CCHK is the 50th Creative Commons jurisdiction to launch around the world. This was made possible by CCHK’s host organization, the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC) of the University of Hong Kong, law professors Alice Lee and Yahong Li, Chairman of the CCHK Preparatory Executive Committee Pindar Wong, project manager Haggen So, and many other hard-working community volutneers from the education, arts, business, and non-profit sectors. For the list of key community volunteers please click here.
Saturday’s launch, held at the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity, emphasized education, youth, and the arts. In addition to speeches by CC Founder Prof. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford and CC Chief Executive Joi Ito, community volunteers described how CC licenses can be used by educators to share, translate, and adapt courseware in a legal and easy manner. Musicians demonstrated how flexible licensing encourages musical creativity and innovation, film makers discussed how CC licenses make it easier for activists and non-profit organizations to disseminate and share documentaries about matters of public concern. A lively workshop was held by a group of Hong Kong bloggers, many of whom publish under CC licenses and who have been eagerly awaiting the localization of CC licenses in Hong Kong. To support Hong Kong bloggers’ desire to share content with one another legally, the local blogging platform, MySinablog on Saturday rolled out a new feature that enables users to easily affix CC licenses to their blogs. Hong Kong singer and actress Ella Koon even made an appearance to talk about why she supports CC licensing and why she has published her promotional photos and computer wallpaper under CC licenses. For the full programme and list of participants please click here.
In his Saturday speech, Joi Ito spoke passionately about next steps for Creative Commons around the world. He is working with the World Wide Web Consortium, as well as many software and internet companies, so that creators of content can embed their copyright and authorship information into the digital “code” of their works — whether they choose CC or traditional copyright. That will enable a work’s author and copyright information to “travel along with it” as it is shared, copied, and remixed. Works with CC licenses will be more easily searchable, encouraging their legal use. “I’m not political,” he said during a Friday night pre-launch panel. “Just like the Internet… things really get interesting when they are being used by everybody no matter what their political leanings are. That’s my goal for Creative Commons.”
On Friday October 24th Creative Commons founder Prof. Lessig delivered the Inaugural Lee Shu Pui Leung Wai Hing Distinguished Lecture in Digital Media at packed theater on campus. He called for an end to the “copyright wars,” suggesting that there is a middle ground between “copyright extremists” who would criminalize a whole generation of young people who copy, share and remix music, video, and pictures largely for non-commercial purposes, and “copyright abolitionists” who want to do away with copyright entirely. Creative Commons is one effort to create that middle ground. Copyright, he believes, is necessary in order to encourage and protect innovation. But innovation is done by professionals as well as amateurs: “copyright needs to encourage both.” He pointed to a number of examples of how “the law is out of synch” in ways that threaten to limit public discourse about national issues in the United States. When it comes to copyright law, he argued, the United States is not a good model for Hong Kong to emulate.
