IT Law Journal

administrator January 14th, 2008

CC-PH set to Participate in the ACIA: International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age

This article combines the contents of Welcome (http://meeting.creativecommons.org.tw/), Original Proposal (http://meeting.creativecommons.org.tw/ac:original-proposal), and Open Legal Content And Creative Commons (http://meeting.creativecommons.org.tw/program:open-legal-content-and-creative-commons) shared under CC-BY-SA 3.0 http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

During the Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting held at Revelin, Grad, Dubrovnik, Croatia, during the iCommons Summit in June 2007, the idea to have an “Asia Commons” meeting by December 2007 was brought to the forefront. Since it was agreed that Taipei would be a convenient location to hold the meeting, Creative Commons Taiwan was asked to plan for the said meeting. Creative Commons Taiwan subsequently proposed that the meeting be set on 19-20 June 2008. A Pre-meeting of Creative Commons jurisdiction project teams, and reception for all workshop participants is set on the afternoon of 18 June 2008. The venue would be the Academia Sinica located at 128 Academia Road, Section 2, Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan.

In the BoF meeting during the iCommons Summit, the following objectives were proposed — which have since been adopted by the ACIA workshop — (1) Strengthening the “Asia Commons” by bringing in more members and improving links to related organizations within the Asia Pacific region; (2) Promoting the commons in the region, and providing a forum to develop practical strategies for this promotion; (3) Providing a forum for industry engagement, and in particular identifying and presenting successful commercial uses of open content licensing within the region; and (4) Providing a forum for discussion of topics of importance to the Asia Commons (e.g., the meaning of ‘open’ in our age, and the history and role of the commons in Asia). The workshop aims to be an open venue for people to formulate Asia Pacific perspectives on the issues of commons in our age. The language of the meeting is English.

The two day seminar hosts a battery of speakers, whether in a panel or speaking individually. The full program of the international workshop can be found at http://meeting.creativecommons.org.tw/ac:program

Creative Commons Philippines will speak on Open Legal Content in the morning of January 20 within the panel tackling “Case studies and project showcases.” The abstract of the piece provides:

Laws and jurisprudence, as they intimately affect the public, should remain public and not locked as proprietary content by way of the creation of the derivative work of “collection.” It is suggested that proponents of the commons, in their jurisdictions, find ways of gathering public domain materials to equate the collections being pursued by proprietary entities, especially in the absence of government effort to provide the same, in the same direction that FLOSS has been made an alternative to the previously predominant proprietary software in the market. Although it may be contended that this line of project(s) is predominantly in the realm of law practitioners and law students, the direction, however, assures the availability of materials that would aid ordinary citizens to be informed of their rights, obligations, and potential liabilities as provided by public documents. The availability of the said resources also provides for the raw data that could be useful in the development of other value-added law-related documents, which if released similarly, could benefit the commons and/or society in general.

It is with this background that emphasis is being made to the region-wide cooperation being cultivated to gather multi-jurisdictional legal content. The Philippines, for example, has multiple public resources available to satisfy aspects of legal research. One of these is the LawPhil Project developed by the Creative Commons Philippine jurisdiction lead public institution, Arellano University School of Law. In turn, the LawPhil Project, among other entities in the region, has contributed to the content available in the Asian Legal Information Institute resource. Further efforts remain to be important to support this direction.

Following the pattern of development of this class of legal content, fresh efforts are being exerted to create another class of content, i.e. value-added law-related documents, that are to be released to the commons, preferably through Creative Commons licensing. This is to provide alternative to proprietary law books, which are usually limited by printing considerations (such as content volume-to-price ratio, update requirements viz existing inventory, etc.) The availability of licensed legal content can provide substantial impact in law education, the delivery of legal services, etc., that could inure to the benefit of society as well.

Active participation by legally-interested individuals in the development of a single comprehensive resource is also being contemplated.

ACIA is organized by people at Creative Commons Taiwan, and National Digital Archives Program, Taiwan (Cultural Academic Socio-Economic Educational Promotion Program, and The Academic Applications and the Dissemination of the Cultural Heritage Project) in collaboration with Creative Commons jurisdiction project teams in the Asia Pacific region, Creative Commons San Francisco and Berlin offices, and with the assistance of colleagues at Arellano University School of Law, Harvard Law School, Mississippi College School of Law, Law School of Renmin University of China, The University of Hong Kong, Queensland University of Technology.

The host research institutes at Academia Sinica are Institite of Information Science, Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Research Center for Information Technology Innovation.

To know more, see http://meeting.creativecommons.org.tw/

• ITLJ 4-1
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