Creative Commons 10th Birthday

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In December 2012, Creative Commons is turning ten.

To celebrate, Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, in collaboration with the New Zealand Film Archive, is hosting a public screening of RiP: A Remix Manifesto.

With interviews from Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig and remix artist Girl Talk, the film looks at the fate of copyright in an online world.

As Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ Public Lead Matt McGregor puts it, “More than anything, the film represents how far Creative Commons has come in such a short space of time. In New Zealand, Creative Commons licences are being used by schools, universities, museums, libraries, artists—and even the New Zealand Government itself.

“Clearly, the culture of sharing and collaboration celebrated in RiP: A Remix Manifesto has become mainstream, at an astonishing pace.”

The Creative Commons licences are free legal tools that allow copyright holders—including artists, scientists, teachers and government agencies—to give advance permission for users to share, remix and reuse their work.

Co-founded by Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig in 2002, the Creative Commons licences have been introduced to over seventy countries, and applied to well over 500 million objects. The licences have been adopted by everyone from The White House to Wikipedia.

The licences were ‘ported,’ or translated, to New Zealand copyright law by a range of legal volunteers in 2007. Since then, thousands of New Zealand artists, teachers, scientists and publicly funded organisations have started to use Creative Commons licences.

In 2010, Cabinet joined in, approving the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (or NZGOAL). Under NZGOAL, all public agencies are strongly encouraged to release their data using a Creative Commons licence.

Since 2010, there have been a number of examples of innovative reuse of public data—including an app for the Tongariro Crossing and ANZ’s famous Truckometer, which uses Creative Commons licensed data from NZTA to predict economic activity.

Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand is also running a crowdfunding campaign at Pledgeme.co.nz. The money will be used to pay two university students to develop Creative Commons resources for New Zealand schools.

In so doing, Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand is helping to fulfil the global vision of Creative Commons, which is, as the international mission statement reads, “nothing less than realizing the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.”

What: RIP: A Remix Manifesto

When: December 5, 7pm

Where: New Zealand Film Archive Nga Kaitiaki O Nga Taonga Whitiahua,84 Taranaki Street, Te Aro, Wellington 6011

How much: $8

Why: The tenth birthday of Creative Commons.

ENDS

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