IT Law Journal

administrator January 14th, 2008

Creative Commons International: The Porting Process

This article adopts the document “Worldwide Overview,” and its subpages, available at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Worldwide_Overview, with footnotes outlining the Philippine experience.

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The Creative Commons generic, or “unported,” licenses are jurisdiction-agnostic. They do not mention any particular jurisdiction’s laws or statutes or contain any sort of choice-of-law provision. In light of this, although the licenses could function in legal systems across the world, some aspects of the “unported” licenses may not jibe with a particular jurisdiction’s laws. Hence, the International Commons project allows the porting of the Legal Code to accommodate a specific jurisdiction’s legal background rules.¹

The Process of porting

1. Project Lead and Institution or Law Firm Identified

The Project Lead is the central figure for the porting of the licenses into national law. He/she is an expert in copyright law, more often than not a lawyer, and more often than not associated with the Institution or Law Firm. In some jurisdictions Creative Commons International (CCI) identifies the Project Lead first and asks him/her for help in finding a renowned copyright Institution or renowned Law Firm. In other jurisdictions, the CCI is in contact with the Institution/Firm first and tries to find a Project Lead from within.²

Whether for the application for the project lead and public institution, or for the porting of the generic licenses towards a jurisdiction-specific licenses, the Director³ of the CCI had to be contacted.

The project lead had to read all the relevant documents, including the porting checklist, required in license porting from the iTeamSpace repository of the CCI, in preparation of the necessary processes in the production of the license drafts.

The project lead had to check the jurisdiction’s current licenses.⁴

Considerations as to the prevailing circumstances involving Collective Rights Management, within the jurisdiction, also had to be made.

2. Production of First Draft

To preserve the global spirit of Creative Commons, CCI strives for utmost similarity between the licenses worldwide. It is thus important for CCI that the porting be very close to the original and go into the specifics of national law only when absolutely necessary. Once the first draft of the licenses is produced, it is re-translated into English. This is also important for CCI, so that it can learn what differences the legal systems of the respective jurisdictions have brought into the Creative Commons licenses.⁵

3. Online Public Discussion

Creative Commons makes the first draft of the licenses accessible on the CCI website, via a mailing list and archive, for public discussion.⁶ Both the Project Lead and CCI make concentrated efforts to drive expert traffic toward the project e-mail list.⁷

4. Production of Second Draft

In a new draft, the Project Lead incorporates relevant ideas that were put forward in the public discussion. This second draft, however, is optional since the Project Lead may decide to keep the original published, if none of the ideas brought forward seem usable. The Project Lead generally provides an English translation for the second draft, but which was not necessary for the Philippine porting process since the drafts have always been in English. There was no second draft created as there were no additional details or suggestions acquired from the public discussions.

5. Creative Commons Reviews Second Draft

In some cases, the”review” is done on a public email list, while in others, it is done offline. Either way, the Project Lead and Creative Commons work on producing a result everyone will be happy with.⁸

If and when the draft has been cleared to be adopted by CCI, the public lead had to port the other five (5) unported Creative Commons licenses, i.e. the CC-BY 3.0, the CC-BY-SA 3.0., the CC-BY-NC 3.0., the CC-BY-ND 3.0., and the CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 licenses.⁹¹⁰

6. Production of Human-Readable Translation

Ease-of-use by non-lawyers has been Creative Common’s priority since its birth. Therefore, it is important that, in addition to the ported licenses, the Project Lead produce a translation or adaptation of the human-readable layer in the national language, the Commons Deed, which gives a brief graphic explanation of what the licenses stand for.¹¹

7. Ported Licenses posted on creativecommons.org

Up to this point, creativecommons.org would have listed links pointing to the Lead’s website, and to important places of national discussion and/or press coverage (as provided by the Project Lead). At this moment, however, CCI place the full final licenses, plus the Commons Deed, on the CCI website, in the national language.¹²

8. The Launch

Whether the launch be in form of a party, a convention, a television program, a press conference or all of the above will be up to the Project Lead. What is important to CCI is that the event attract the kind of publicity we need to make sure that people will know where to turn to for “creative work available for others to create upon and share.”¹³

1. http://creativecommons.org/international/ [↩]
2. In the Philippines, CCI is working with the e-Law Center of the Arellano University School of Law to create Philippine jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses.The Arellano University School of Law is the Public Lead Institution, while Atty. Jaime N. Soriano, the Executive Director of the e-Law Center therein, is the Philippine project lead for the Creative Commons affiliate in the Philippines. http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/ph/ [↩]
3. Catharina Maracke. See http://creativecommons.org/about/people#67 [↩]
4. No Philippine-specific license was officially released prior to the porting procedure for the Version 3.0 licenses. The process of porting the generic license of Creative Commons 2.0 licenses — which has been undertaken by the Creative Commons project lead after he has been identified to be so up to the interim stage between public discussions and the production of the second draft — was overtaken by the release of Creative Commons versions 2.5 and 3.0. Hence, the whole process of porting, towards the Creative Commons 3.0 licenses, had to be re-initiated. [↩]
5. The first draft of the Version 3.0 Philippine license, using the CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 as a template, was submitted to CCI late March 2008 for their initial comments. Suggestions from the representatives from the University of the Philippines – Internet Society Program, which were made during the public discussions of the previously proposed 2.0 Philippine licenses were incorporated into the Version 3.0 Philippine-ported license, when and if they remain to be applicable. Correspondence with CCI ensued for certain clarifications on the proposed ported 3.0 license’s wordings. The draft was submitted in English, a recognized alternative national language to the Filipino language. English was adopted so that the license would not experience any entanglement with political undercurrents relating to the Tagalog-based Filipino language, and more importantly, for convenience, inasmuch as English is the recognized language in Philippine courts. [↩]
6. http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/ph/ [↩]
7. The final copy of the first draft was submitted late May 2007, and was posted for public discussion immediately thereafter. The public discussion was completed, without new comments, at the end of June 2007. By early July, the set of 6 licenses were submitted to CCI. [↩]
8. CC Philippines was informed of certain developments in the CCI approach on the moral rights stipulation during Atty. Guerrero’s personal visit to the CCI office in Berlin on late July. As it is a major modification, the item was taken back to public discussion. Absent any opposition to the new wordings, the second draft was submitted to CCI by late August 2007. [↩]
9. The six license drafts were submitted to CCI on 10 September 2007. [↩]
10. Additional clarifications were made by CCI on the wordings of the second draft, and the draft licenses were subsequently modified. The major modifications were made early November 2007, while styling modifications and proofreading were made through mid- to late November. The final draft was submitted to CCI on 28 November 2007. [↩]
11. There was no need to create a translated Deed since the Philippine jurisdictional licenses remained in English. [↩]
12. The XHTML files were submitted by 3 December 2007, and an error in the BY-SA file was rectified on 12 December 2007. The files were made available in the staging portion of the Creative Commons website to allow further checks before making them live. The HTML files were made live by noon, Philippine time, on 15 December 2007, in time for the Creative Commons 5th Birthday Party and the CC Philippine jurisdictional license soft launch. [↩]
13. The Philippine jurisdictional licenses were soft launched on 15 December 2007. The formal launch was set on 14 January 2007, to invite more people to join in the festivities marking the milestone. [↩]

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