Archive for the ‘ News ’ Category

Invitation to Join CC Global Network; Notice of Termination of MOU or Affiliate Agreement

28th March 2018

Dear CC-SG community,


Some of you may be aware of the restructuring at CC (HQ), including the introduction of a new global membership structure <https://creativecommons.org/about/global-affiliate-network/>. The MOU between CC and CAPTEL (i.e. CC-SG affiliate) has also ended.

With this, we the current CC-SG team (Chung Nian, Hisham, and Ivan) have reviewed how best to continue supporting and organising CC initiatives. This announcement shares our thinking and rationale.

 

Here’s the TLDR version:



Purpose of CC-SG
The CC-SG informal group was primarily formed to see through the porting of the SG version license in 2008 (released as version 3.0 in). <https://creativecommonssingapore.wordpress.com/category/press-release/>.

 

The CC license now at version 4.0 <https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions> has been designed to operate even better internationally, this has effectively removed the need for porting especially in the case of CC-SG.

Community & publicity
The second main aspect of CC-SG was to promote awareness of CC and help provide localised information.

 

From the start, such activities have been done in individual capacities and taken place organically as grassroots activities tend to be. CC-SG is grateful to have the support of educators and individuals, who have either actively used CC materials and/ or shared CC with their own private and professional circles.

In reality, anyone can become a CC advocate.

With the CC Global Network formally in place, this means anyone can volunteer to be a CC advocate by applying directly to CC.

 

 

As such, the following platforms will be retired/ archived:

  • CC-SG Google group mailing list
  • Blog/ website
  • Facebook page

 

That said, if anyone feels strongly that they should be maintained AND are willing to take over the overall responsibility of managing the platforms, please feel free to contact Ivan <ramblinglibrarian@gmail.com> and/or Hisham <contact@mhisham.org> by 1 May 2018.

 

Sincerely and with Best Regards,

CC-SG team:
Ivan Chew (Public Lead)
Mohd Hisham (Community Manager)
Lam Chung Nian (Legal Lead)

2018
03/28
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Announcing the first Creative Commons Singapore Festival 2011

Date: 11/11/11 Friday.

If you own the copyright, you can exercise choice. Share. Remix. Show.

Part 1 – “SHARE”. September 1st – 30th. 2011

  1. Pick any original work of yours. E.g. a photo, a written work, a play, a performance, video, music.
  2. Adopt a cc license (creativecommons.org/choose). You might want to read the cc FAQ too (wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ”).
  3. Post your work to any platform of your choice.
  4. Share the link at this FB page.

Part 2 – “REMIX”. October 1st – 31st. 2011

  1. Download your pick (from Part 1 or your preferred CC source) and mix it up.
  2. Take note of the attribution & CC license requirements.
  3. Post your remix to any platform of your choice (CC license preferred, or depending on your source CC terms). Remember to credit the source.
  4. Share the link at this FB page.

Part 3 – “SHOW”. November 11th, 2011 (11/11/11)
It’s CC Festival at The Pigeonhole HackerSpaceSG, 6pm – 10pm. It’s a meetup, really.

  1. Here’s the Google map – g.co/maps/tv7f9. Address is 70A Bussorah Street, Singapore 199483. Walk up to the premises between 6pm – 10pm.
  2. HackerSpaceSG says there’s beer and wine; payment is via a tip jar/ donation bowl. If you bring along finger-foods to share, we might give you a hug (unless you’re adverse to hugging, thereby we’ll find some other way to thank you!)
  3. We’ll screen CC-licensed works from Singapore and worldwide. But mostly we’ll just chillax and get to know people better.
  4. You are welcome to find your own corner, or corner your would-be audience, to talk about your work, barcamp-style.
  5. We welcome all CC SG adopters to treat this like a CC Pasar Malam, promote your wares, and encourage others to use/ reuse.

NOTE: The earlier stated venue was The PigeonHole, so please update your calendars etc. to HackerSpaceSG, 70A Bussorah Street, Singapore 199483.

Questions? Email the CC-SG Community Manager Ivan Chew (ramblinglibrarian@gmail.com)

CC-SG DAY logo
“CC-SG DAY logo” contributed by kany1120, CC-BY-NC.

UPDATE: CC Singapore Day, 11 Nov, 2011 presenters (as posted at the Facebook event page):

  • DJ Reiki will share some of her CC-licensed works.
  • Justin Koh (got arm-twisted) to share about his CC musical endeavors on soundcloud. Justin contributed audio and videow for CC SG Fest.
  • Tech65.org, Chinmay Pendharkar, will share about their CC podcasts.
  • A screening of a made-in-SG CC-licensed film. I’ll keep mum on what this is about. If you grew up in 80s Singapore and have an inkling of the music scene, I think you’ll like this one. This 20min documentary brought a tear to my eye at the end. [Post-event: Video unveiled]
  • Sponsored goodies from Lunarin. Their lead singer couldn’t make it but very kindly donated their band merchandise in support of CC Singapore Day.
  • Thanks to HackerSpaceSG for being the venue host.
2011
09/01
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Two recent copyright-related news in Singapore

Here are two recent copyright-related news in Singapore. Since Creative Commons is built on the foundation of Copyright, these two cases would be of interest to those following the Creative Commons movement.

#1 – They’ve only just begun – to charge
TODAYonline. 28 Dec ’09.

“… the Composers and Authors Society of Singapore (Compass)… is clamping down on the illegal use of copyrighted music for weddings.

… It has sent letters to wedding photographers and videographers asking them to buy the licences for songs they wish to use – on their corporate websites and in their works – while stopping short of suggesting active enforcement.”

LINK
The article mentions some wedding photographers/ videographers advising their customers not to use copyrighted songs in their amateur montages. One customer was quoted as saying that he has decided to “do away with music completely on his photo montage, to be shown during his wedding reception next month.”

#2 – MediaCorp wins counter claims of copyright infringement against RecordTV
channelnewsasia.com. 21 Dec ’09.

“RecordTV was held by the High Court to have infringed copyright laws by allowing users to record programmes shown on MediaCorp’s Channel 5, Channel 8 and Channel NewsAsia.

In 2007, RecordTV had sued MediaCorp for millions of dollars for groundless threats of copyright infringement. MediaCorp then counter sued.

… The judge ruled that RecordTV is liable for copyright infringement by communicating MediaCorp’s broadcasts and films to the public, and he granted MediaCorp’s request for an injunction against RecordTV.

Justice Ang also ruled that damages in favour of MediaCorp would be assessed by the Registrar.”

LINK

Related: The High Court’s judgment was reported in this article, Copyright law and the digital revolution: High Court judge lays out grounds of judgment, TODAYonline. 30 Dec ’09:

“”As technology advances, and consumers are more able to consume media in different ways, Justice Ang said “it cannot be that copyright law would have thieves of us all”.

Reformation of copyright laws to “reflect a wide array of societal interests in the digital revolution” will be a challenge to lawmakers, the industry and the public for some time to come, he said.

But the judge gave examples of how legal principles – or “straightforward, immutable maxims” – can still guide judgments.

“It is permissible to time-shift (viewing of broadcasts through recordings). It is not permissible to copy for profit. It is permissible to copy extracts for educational purposes. It is not permissible to authorise another to copy when one does not possess that authority,” he wrote in his 36-page judgment.

Stating his reasons for allowing a counter claim of copyright infringement by MediaCorp against Internet start-up RecordTV, he said he found RecordTV not liable for making infringing copies of the MediaCorp Broadcasts and Films, but found it liable for authorising the making of copies by its customers.”

LINK

2009
12/30
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Singapore – CC Monitor

For those interested in Creative Commons related data for Singapore and other jurisdictions, check out the CC Monitor site at monitor.creativecommons.org/Main_Page. It is a site that “contains automatically collected data, graphs, research and collectively written commentary on the global adoption of Creative Commons licenses”.

CC Monitor

From the page on Singapore:

Compared to the rest of Asia, Singapore has a higher freedom score. With 31.5% of Singaporeans choosing the most liberal BY license, compared to Asia with 7.1%. BY-NC-ND was also a popular choice with almost 24%. However, compared to 43.7% of Asia choosing the same license, Singaporeans still choose less restrictive licenses as a whole.

[Last accessed 10 Oct ’09]

CC Monitor is a project initiated by Creative Commons and the Communications and New Media Programme of the National University of Singapore, with support from the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation. Content is available under Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

BTW, our CC SG public lead, Giorgos Cheliotis, is also a founding member of the CC Monitor project. Several other contributors are also based in Singapore, like Ankit Guglani (SMU), Clint Gono (SMU), Jackson Tan (NUS), Pratichi Joshi (NUS), Sofia Morales (NUS). The Singapore page (as of 12 May ’09) includes responses from CC-SG community manager, Ivan Chew (in response to an interview by Jackson Tan, as well as from Giorgos Cheliotis.

If you have insights to share about CC-adoption in Singapore (e.g. you’re a CC-adoptor yourself or you consciously do not want to adopt CC), the CC-SG team would love to hear from you.

2009
10/10
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The Official Unofficial Creative Commons Facebook Application

From CreativeCommons.org (18 May 09) – Fred Benenson writes:

Last weekend I spent Saturday morning writing the Creative Commons License Application for Facebook. The premise is simple: installing the application allows Facebook users choose and place a CC license badge on their profile page indicating which license they want their content to be available under. Alongside the badge is text that explains what content (Photos, Videos and Status & Profile text are currently available as options) is licensed…

… There are some limitations to this application and you should consider it in beta, so apologies in advance if things break or don’t work properly.

I’ve added the Facebook application:
Creative Commons License on Facebook

Thanks, Fred Benenson!

2009
06/05
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Presentation at HIP Parent Seminar

Fyi, dear readers of the CC Singapore blog, I will present on “youth and user-generated content (UGC)” at an event for parents and educators this Saturday, organized by IPOS and the HIP (the Honour Intellectual Property alliance).

I will be speaking as an NUS lecturer, and not as CC Singapore, though I will talk about CC as well and how it provides a solution for legal sharing and reuse.

But the focus of my presentation will be on the opportunities and dangers of UGC, in an effort to educate parents on the associated risks (which extend well beyond copyright), but also to suggest that they should encourage their children to post/remix content and through that improve their media literacy skills. 

I’m curious how this will be received by the audience, but in any case it sets a nice precedent for working together with IPOS on IP-related matters. 

More info on the event: 

http://www.ipos.gov.sg/topNav/prg/gen/World%20IP%20Day%202009%20-%20Public%20Seminar.htm

~ Giorgos Cheliotis

2009
04/17
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“CC Zero”: Expanding the Public Domain

From CreativeCommons blog (11 Mar 09):

CC0 (read “CC Zero”) is a universal waiver that may be used by anyone wishing to permanently surrender the copyright and database rights they may have in a work, thereby placing it as nearly as possible into the public domain. CC0 is not a license, but a legal tool that improves on the “dedication” function of our existing, U.S.-centric public domain dedication and certification. CC0 is universal in form and may be used throughout the world for any kind of content without adaptation to account for laws in different jurisdictions. And like our licenses, CC0 has the benefit of being expressed in three ways – legal code, a human readable deed, and machine-readable code that allows works distributed under CC0 to be easily found. Read our FAQs to learn more.

Link

2009
03/12
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Singapore licenses are online!

In all the enthusiasm after we finally made it and among the million other things each one of us is involved in we neglected to communicate the merry news on this blog. Yes, after some delay, the Singapore versions of the Creative Commons licenses are now online and available for all Singapore-based authors to use. Just head over to http://creativecommons.org/international/sg/ for an overview of the licenses.

To license your own work (say your blog text or a photo you have taken) under a Singapore-specific Creative Commons license go to http://creativecommons.org/license/ to choose the appropriate license (just make sure you choose “Singapore” as your jurisdiction). After answering a couple of simple questions about the types of uses that you wish to allow, the website will give you some code that you can copy and paste into the webpage where your content lies.

If now you find that this is too complicated because perhaps you don’t know how to enter this code on your webpage or blog, you could just enter manually on your webpage a notice about the license you wish to use for the content hosted on that page (be it pictures, text, music, or anything else) and add a hyperlink to the respective license “deed” (e.g., link to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/sg/ if you wish to use the BY license). You’re done! Now a user who visits the webpage will be able to see that you license your content under a specific CC license and will also be able to click on the hyperlink to read the terms and conditions of the license. This way of doing things is not exactly optimal, as you have not included the code that the first method I described above will generate for you. Without that code it will be more difficult for search engines and software tools to automatically identify your content as CC-licensed. So I would suggest using the first method whenever possible. But for a human user it will be all the same. 

No matter what you do, just make sure that before you license your work under a Creative Commons license you understand the terms of the license you are using and make it easy for anyone viewing your page to access that license so they can understand the terms as well. Note that unless you are a legal expert or have a particular fascination with legal documents, you do not need to read the whole license text to understand the license. You only need to read the short and simple license “deed” (such as in the link above), which captures the essence of the license in a few words. If after visiting the links above you are still unsure as to which license to use you may find answers to your questions in the Creative Commons FAQ. 

As a last note: if you are a Singapore-based author/creator there is nothing stopping you from using another country’s license from the Creative Commons website, but it makes all the sense in the world to use the Singapore-specific licenses – these are crafted with a language that is tailored to Singapore law and this will be helpful for local legal experts and courts in case you ever need to take legal action against unlawful uses of your content. So, you’re doing yourself a favor if you use the Singapore-specific Creative Commons licenses (and of course you’re also making those of us who worked on them happy to see the licenses used in practice)!

Finally, it goes without saying that if you read this and you are designing/administering a Singapore-based online community which allows users to post their own content online, you should consider integrating the choice of Singapore CC licenses in your website design, so that whenever users wish to use a CC license your website can give them the option to do this as part of the upload process. Flickr is a good example of implementing this in practice – it allows users to choose a CC license for their uploaded photos and will then automatically add a license notice on the respective pages hosting these photos. It will also allow users to search for photos which are CC-licensed here  or browse through them by license type here.

 

PS. Big thanks to all those who helped finalize the licenses and put them online, including Anil Samtani of NTU, Warren Chik and Ankit Guglani of SMU, and the good folks at Creative Commons San Francisco and Berlin.

2008
11/29
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Panel discussion: Copyright And The Creative Commons

Posting this here, as an archive. The announcement was originally posted at:
http://www.isea2008singapore.org/conference/conf_panels.html#samtani:

Copyright And The Creative Commons
Chaired by Associate Professor Samtani Anil and Associate Professor Harry Tan

Date: 27 July (2008)
Time: 1:30pm – 3:30pm
Venue: Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design and Media, B1-3

An introduction to the key copyright issues that arise as a consequence of new technologies in interactive and digital media. The panel will highlight steps that can be taken by creators and users of copyrighted works to avoid some of the copyright landmines that exist. The panel will also explain the aims and philosophy of the Creative Commons initiative and the specific nature and uses of the Creative Commons licensing suite, and its flexible model of allocating rights; we will hear about CC-related projects. And from stakeholders on what CC mean to them personally and to their institutions.

Organized by the Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy (CAPTEL) and Creative Commons Singapore.

CAPTEL and Creative Commons Singapore are also delighted to announce the launch of the Creative Commons Singapore licensing suite at ISEA2008.

Link

2008
09/16
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CC Singapore License Draft in Public Discussion

Posting this here, as an archive. This post, originally published at the Creative Commons site, is perhaps the post that started off the final stages of CC-Singapore (‘cos up till then, few in Singapore knew even about the porting over of the CC license to Singapore:

Michelle Thorne, June 23rd, 2008

On behalf of CC Singapore, we are pleased to announce that the draft of CC BY-NC-SA adapted to Singaporean law (PDF) is now in public discussion. The CC Singapore team, lead by Anil Samtani and Giorgos Cheliotis and hosted at the Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy (CAPTEL), has been working with Creative Commons International to port the licenses to local copyright legislation. A launch event to celebrate Singapore’s completed licensing suite is scheduled in for July 27th.

As part of the public discussion, we warmly invite you to join CC Singapore’s discussion list and share your comments with local and international legal experts.

Thank you and congratulations to CC Singapore!

Link

2008
09/16
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Creative Commons Singapore

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