Creative Commons (CCi) – EPF: Creative Partnership

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Since summer 2008, EPF has closely cooperated with Creative Commons International (CCi) to establish the Creative Commons (CC) licensing framework in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. A web-based application developed by CCi helps people to share their creative work in the public domain or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, under certain conditions. The result is not only an increase in the sum of raw source material online, but also a cheaper and easier access to intellectual materials, as well as a new opportunities for income generation for creative people. Overall, the program will enable the legal sharing and reuse of cultural, educational, and scientific works among creators, educators, and the public in the South Caucasus and beyond. Recently at Libre Planet, the Free Software Foundation’s annual conference, Creative Commons was honored to receive the foundation’s award for projects of social benefit. The award is presented annually to a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society by applying free software, or the ideas of the free software environment.

To implement the program, EPF partners with the the Center for Information Law and Policy (Armenia), the Young Lawyers Union (Azerbaijan), and Business Intelligence and Valuation GROUP – BVG, Ltd (Georgia). These three organizations were selected and awarded grants as part of a competition.

By mid-September 2008, the three local partners produced a base-line assessment of the current national copyright frameworks in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Each analytical paper includes: a) a brief history of copyright law and intellectual property rights in the particular country; b) outline of and links to major legislation and international treaties that affect copyright and intellectual property rights in the particular country; c) how the Creative Commons licensing framework might fit into current legislation; d) changes (if any) that need to be made to the current national legislation and policy to accommodate the CC license; and e) other issues.

Following this, EPF hosted national stakeholder discussions in each country to encourage commentary and criticism from their respective local expert communities. This significantly improved the partners’ understanding of the current national copyright framework and of the possible modifications that need to be introduced to better align the CC licenses to local law. The analytical reports and the local stakeholder community recommendations were further discussed at a regional workshop in October 2008 in Tbilisi. Led by Ms. Nena Antic, an experienced CC legal lead from Serbia, the workshop was instrumental in increasing participants’ understanding of the license porting process among the three partner organizations.

By late December 2008, the three partners developed second drafts of their CC license (BY-NC-SA 3.0), which were put up for public discussion on the CC South Caucasus web-site: (est. by CCi in November 2008), and were commented on by the CCi experts by the end of February 2009. Since mid-February 2009 each partner has been working on translation and customization of the CC’s informational material, such as Commons Deed, FAQs, Trademark Policy, Disclaimer, Legal Concepts, Choosing a License, and other related content into national languages and to the national legal context.

At a recent Board Meeting of (the Global) Creative Commons mentioned the establishment of an “innovative partnership with EPF which led to a competitive selection of affiliate institutions in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and a regional South Caucasus workshop” as one of CCi’s key accomplishments over the last six months of 2008