Jan 26: Mumbai : Launch of Creative Commons-India at IIT Bombay

Creative Commmons is a very important, international non-government
organization that seeks to really open up channels of communication that
are increasingly bound by ever stricter copyright rules and regulations.

It is applicable to many areas of documentation: both academic and
non-academic as well as industries like music, film/video, publishing,
telecommunications among others.

Creative Commons Launch

Creative Commons, India will be launched on January 26th
[4:00 pm to 6:00 pm] at KReSIT auditoriurm at IIT Bombay, Mumbai.

See map for directions to get to IIT Bombay, Powai:
http://www.iitb.ac.in/campus/howto/howtoget.html
http://www.iitb.ac.in/campus/howto/iitblayout.html [Building No. 37]


Confirmed speakers at the launch event:
Mr. Joichi Ito [Chairman, Creative Commons]
Dr. Catharina Maracke [Creative Commons, Global Coordinator]
Mr. Nandu Pradhan [President and Managing Director, Red Hat, India]
Mr. Shuddhabrata Sengupta [Sarai-CSDS]
Prof. Deepak Phatak [KReSIT, IIT Bombay]
Lawrence Liang [Legal Lead, Creative Commons, India]

Other Events:
Two parallel workshops on Creative Commons: January 26th, 27th
[ www.techfest.org ]

Please contact Shishir K. Jha, Project Lead, CC-India for further details:

Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management
IIT Bombay
Powai
Mumbai - 400 076
E-mail: skjha[at]iitb.ac.in
Tel: 022-25767845

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Information on Mr. Joichi Ito

Mr. Joichi Ito is a Japanese-born and American-educated businessman who
has many areas of interest and expertise. He was recently been appointed
the Chairman of Creative Commons. He is also the Chairman of iCommons [the
international Creative Commons].

He runs the World of Warcraft guild, which is composed of several venture
capitalists, CEOs and other influential members of the Internet economy.
He also wears many other hats. He is, among other things, general manager
of international operations for Technorati, chairman of Six Apart Japan,
founder and chief executive of venture capital firm Neoteny, and a board
member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers [ICANN],
Mozilla Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. He is is also the
founder of Digital Garage, PSINet, Japan and Infoseek, Japan.

Mr. Ito will speak about the importance of Creative Commons for a growing
global digital culture in light of the launch of the Indian creative
commons jurisdiction on January 26th. The intimate interaction between
technology, law and culture in digital products is creating new challenges
for enterprises, individuals and other organizations. How is the digital
landscape getting altered with the emergence of licenses such as creative
commons? Can new models be envisaged which will seriously accommodate the
sharing ethos of the common individual? These and many more issues will be
addressed by Mr. Joi Ito.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] is an alternative and a more
flexible approach to copyrighting. It provides licensing and contract
schemes to allow creators to waive, in an aprior manner, some of their
rights that copyright automatically assigns to them. CC basically favours
"some rights reserved" rather than the traditional copyright "all rights
reserved" approach.

The straightforward logic is that there is nothing to stop creators from
unilaterally waiving some or all of their copy-rights.

As a result of the considerable spread in the sharing of information
through computers and the internet, we are presently witnessing a vast
alteration in the information landscape. These changes are inaugurating a
digitally enabled information revolution. The challenge before a country
like India is to ensure that the digital information revolution is
accessible to as many people as possible in various sectors of the economy
and society.

The impact of digital copyright is expected to be acutely felt in the
academic world as well as in music, film/video, telecommunication and
publishing industries. Creative Commons can make a significant
contribution to these areas.

Email - skjha@iitb.ac.in