Singapore Announces Ported Creative Commons Licenses
Published July 25th 2008.
From CreativeCommons.org Press release:
Patricia Escalera, July 25th, 2008
San Francisco, CA, USA and Singapore City, Singapore — July 27, 2008
Today Creative Commons Singapore announces the completion of the locally ported Creative Commons licensing suite. In close collaboration with Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy (CAPTEL), the Creative Commons team in Singapore, led by Associate Professor Samtani Anil and Assistant Professor Giorgos Cheliotis, adapted the licenses both linguistically and legally to Singaporean national law. The Creative Commons licenses, now ported to 47 jurisdictions, enable authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms in efforts to promote a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach to copyright.
The Singaporean Creative Commons licenses, available soon online, will be celebrated today in Singapore City at the International Symposium on Electronic Art. The event will also feature a panel, organized by CAPTEL and Creative Commons Singapore, to introduce the audience to key copyright issues in the digital age and also share tips for creators and users to avoid common pitfalls in the field of copyright law.
The panel will, in addition, explain the aims and philosophy of the Creative Commons initiative and the specific nature and uses of the Creative Commons licensing suite in Singapore. Stanford law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig will address the audience to commemorate the completion of the licenses.
Following the event, the CC Singapore team hopes to initiate a series of educational talks to explain the philosophy of Creative Commons and the practical ways in which users can implement the licenses.
Project Lead Samtani Anil adds, “We also believe the launch of the Singapore CC licenses will lead to a better appreciation of the ambit, contours, and limits of the existing copyright regime in Singapore in relation to the sharing and dissemination of culture and the advancement of innovation. This, we believe, will sensitize various stakeholders to the avenues that are open to them to share their works in accordance with their wishes and needs.”
The CC Singapore team is supported by team members Assistant Professor Warren Chik, Vinod Sabnani, Tham Kok Leong, Lam Chung Nian, Harish Pillay and Ankit Guglani.
About Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy
Please visit http://captel.ntu.edu.sg for more information.
The Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy (CAPTEL) is a research center founded to investigate and research issues on how businesses and economies are being affected by the challenges of new technologies on law, regulation and policy. CAPTEL is located at the Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University.
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as members of the public.
Please visit http://creativecommons.org for more information about Creative Commons.
Contact
Dr. Catharina Maracke
Director
Creative Commons International
catharina@creativecommons.org
+49.30.280.93.909Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit
http://creativecommons.org/international/sg/
Creative Commons Singapore 
It’ll be great if there was a post on the differences between the Singapore CC license and the US one.
I’ve directed your comment to the CC-Singapore team. They’re very busy with their lecturing schedule, so we’ll see if they can provide an explanation. Thanks!
Hi Coleman, this is the reply from Giorgos:
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For now I would just say that the essence of the licenses is the same, irrespective of whether one uses the US version, the Unported version (which I think is the one you are referring to), or the SG version.
The difference is that the SG version is tailored to the language of the Singapore copyright law, so that it is written in a language that would make it readily understandable and unambiguous to singapore-based lawyers. So, if there were ever a dispute over a CC-licensed work in Singapore, use of the CC-SG license would help guarantee that a Singapore-based court would interpret the license terms correctly.
So, for the user/author it doesn’t make much difference which version you use, but using your local jurisdiction version of the license would be much wiser (plus it helps grow a local community of authors around the local licenses).
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