ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

Inspired by the Creative Commons and the innovation & freedom it brings to the oftentimes ossified realm intellectual property rights, I was very interested to learn of their new Version 3.0 licenses.

VOR Radio, which was launched with a Creative Commons 2.5 license, will be shortly upgraded to a 3.0 license.

I’ve also made this blog, and Groundviews, now come under (different) Creative Commons licenses. Because of the nature of Groundviews, I began with a license that I hope I can with the passage of time and the gradual acquiescence of the content providers (authors), change into a more open license. This blog on the other hand allows for the re-use of content, so long as it with full attribution.

As it noted on their website:

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”

Thus, a single goal unites Creative Commons’ current and future projects: to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules.

Here’s an interesting video that explains it further.