Luxcommons

The interns and a Google Policy Fellow at CC HQ in San Francisco have finished their summer programs today. A recording of their informal final presentations is available on Ustream. The first 10 minutes are by Greg Leones from Australia, who demos the new online Jurisdiction Database (dubbed the “Miracle Database”), an excellent tool for analysing different jurisdictions, including english re-translations. Luxcommons is pretty proud to find that the luxembourg licences are, so far, the only french language versions included. Have a look at the query interface. Thanks for the effort Greg!

The two other presentations are from Alea Garbagnati, a legal intern from UC Hastings, talking about her work on restructuring and redrafting the CC FAQs and Tal Niv, the Google Policy Fellow (and PhD student at UC Berkeley) detailling her work on the CC Contribution Project.

More videos on the Creative Commons Ustream channel.

The Cologne University Library, the Cologne University of Applied Sciences Library, the Cologne Public Library, the Academy of Media Arts Cologne Library and the Library Centre of Rhineland-Palatinate announced to publish their catalog data in cooperation with the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre (HBZ).

All data is published under the Creative Commons CC Zero. The data is in the public domain, hence it belongs to all and may be used for any purpose without restrictions. To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

Links:
HBZ Press release (english)

Heise Online Meldung (german) (Google translation to english)

Jonathon writes:

We recently attended a workshop in Luxembourg as part of Communia, the EU policy network on the digital public domain. There was a focus on bringing together themes from previous events to make a series of policy recommendations to the European Commission (watch this space!).

Below are a few notes highlighting some of the talks and discussions that we thought might be of particular interest to readers here:

Read on:
http://blog.okfn.org/2010/02/03/7th-communia-workshop-luxembourg/

Extensive report (in french)
http://www.europaforum.public.lu/fr/actualites/2010/02/communia/index.html

Dear all,

The seventh Communia workshop in Luxembourg City is approaching fast!

It’s the policy recommendation workshop and thus crucial for the goals of Communia. The working groups meet on the 31st January to finalise their recommendations. The first workshop day is a general overview of different policy fields relating to the public domain, the second day is devoted to alternative compensation systems and a policy recommendation wrap up session.

Sunday 31st January: Communia Working Group meetings (full day)
Monday 1st February: Communia Policy Workshop (full day)
Tuesday 2nd February: Communia Policy Workshop (ends at 16h)

The workshop page is at http://www.communia-project.eu/ws07
There you will also find the programme, links to the registration page, hotel and travel information and a Google map with additional info.

Please register and book your hotel (using the provided form) as soon as possible!

Very much looking forward to welcome you in Luxembourg,
On behalf of the organisers:
EEAR, Germany, NEXA, Italy and Luxcommons, Luxembourg with the support of CRID, Belgium and CERSA, France
Patrick Peiffer,
Luxcommons asbl

Youtube: “How copyright extension in sound recordings actually works“,

Informative cartoon by the Open Rights Group on the music industry efforts to mislead politicians through massive lobbying and ignoring ALL evidence (incidentally presented at the European Parliament on 27th January). The proposed term extension is paid for by the european consumers  and, tragically, with virtually no benefit for the performers or cultural production.

You may sign a petition and find out more at www.soundcopyright.eu.