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Public Domain Day 2015

Constant invites to the Public Domain Day 2015 (Screening)

When: Saturday 7 February 15:00-22:30
Where: afternoon: Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique KBR LIBRARIUM, Mont des Arts, 1000 Bruxelles &
evening: NOVA, Rue d’Arenberg 3, 1000 BRUXXEL

The Public Domain Day is celebrating works of art which enter into the public domain because their copyrights have expired. These works can be freely enjoyed, used, changed, republished by everybody.
The Public Domain Day in Brussels is co-organised by Constant, the Royal Library of Belgium, Nova Cinema, CRIDS.

Programme

The afternoon takes place at the Royal Library and is dedicated to Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the writer of Le Petit Prince.

15:00 Storytelling for children of the Petit Prince, in Dutch and French. parents allowed.
15:45 Launch of the website saintexupery-domainepublic.be, a collaboration with Romaine Lubrique
16:00 Conference by Severine Dussolier about the special copyright case of de Saint-Exupéry in France. In parallel there is a workshop for children.
16:15 Guided tour along books that entered in the public domain
17:00 End

The evening programme takes place at Cinema Nova.

17:30   Hands on comics workshop around George Herriman / Krazy Kat Stéphane Noël, Pascal Matthey and other comic artists. Erwin Dejasse will contextualise the work of Herriman.
19:00   A Table d’hote is offered in the bar.
20:00-20:30     Sreening Monsieur Fantomas ; Ernst Moerman, 1937, BE, 17 minutes,
20:30-21:00     Performance The death of the Authors, 1943 (see below)
21:30-22:41     Screening Inferno, Liguoro, Padovan, Bertolini, 1911, IT, 71 minutes With live soundtrack by Jean-Philippe Saulou and Benjamin Chaval

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CC Affiliates 2015 mixtape

The global community of Creative Commons Affiliates is starting a new tradition: collectively compiling an annual mixtape of great music from artists using CC licenses. This idea follows the 10-year anniversary mixtape that the European Affiliates put together back in 2012, only this 2015-edition covers the entire globe. We hope that this will be the beginning of an annual tradition: a musical tribute to – and celebration of – the talent of the artists and Creative Commons sharing tools.

The mixtape has been made by the Creative Commons Affiliates – the custodians of the CC licenses in each of these countries – as a fun volunteer side-project to showcase the musical wealth of their countries. This means, and we’d like to highlight this, that these are not artists officially endorsed by Creative Commons, but rather personal favorites of some of those community members advocating sharing culture and promoting the use of CC licenses.

Across the world millions of creators are using Creative Commons licenses to promote and spread their creativity and to find a global audience. Many of these are music artists, performers and songwriters and for this year’s tape a whopping 25 countries have contributed, covering 4 continents of amazing music cultures and artistic talents of all audio trades. Dive in to discover what the world has to offer while at the same time appreciating sharing culture. Enjoy!

You can find the mixtape on Archive.org; Soundcloud or Free Music Archive. 

More info on the tracks and respective licenses in this file.

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Open Belgium. CC for open data projects.

As open data and open data projects are becoming increasingly important as value creators in the modern-day economy, it is nice to see that important efforts are being made to professionalise and perpetuate the open data community. For a while now, it has become clear that the initial approach – which was mainly conceived as an app-competition – doesn’t suffice to keep the communities engaged, nor has it proven to be a breeding ground for sustainable businesses. Luckily high-level initiatives like the Apps4Europe project are being rolled out to provide opportunities to establish a more nurturing environment for the open data community and to foster and streamline the value creation process.
On the legal side of things, the global Creative Commons community has been working hard for the last couple of years to make sure version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses caters to these particular needs of open data projects. We personally believe that the new version has set a great standard for the coming years. Unfortunately we also see that data-owners of all sorts are increasingly coming up with proprietary licensing suites. It has not been said that these different license sets are lacking anything in terms of legal thoroughness or comprehensiveness. But we do fear that this license proliferation leads to increased complexity for the end user, especially when combining different datasets. Compatibility issues are never far off and different attribution standards could lead to a legal skein.
If we really want to harvest the potential of open data, we must look beyond regional and national interests when considering yet again a new licensing suite. The open data community is a global movement, so open data projects and it’s licenses should keep this premise in mind. Furthermore, data owners shouldn’t try to use copyright to force attribution claims through proprietary licenses. There are other and better ways to achieve that. Lastly, we should try to set licensing standards. Best practices for data-owners so we can standardise the way content and metadata are being licensed. This is something that can already be found in the Europeana licensing framework for cultural heritage institutions and seems to pay off in the long run.
For Open Belgium, Creative Commons Belgium has invited two very interesting speakers to dig a little deeper into this topic of licensing for data projects and license proliferation. First up is Katleen Janssen, board member of OKFN Belgium with over 12 years research experience in open data and public sector information, who will give a talk about the danger of license proliferation and how we can try to counter the preconceptions a lot of data owners have about the need of proprietary licenses. Afterwards Thomas Margoni, senior researcher at iVIR in Amsterdam, will explain the changes that have been made to version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses and how this can benefit open data projects.
Be sure to check out the rest of the program too. Join us at the Open Belgium Conference during Data Days (February 17-19) for an interesting day of sharing knowledge and a couple of drinks afterwards! 
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CC’s Next Generation Licenses — Welcome Version 4.0!

We proudly introduce our 4.0 licenses, available for adoption worldwide as of today. These licenses — more than two years in the making — are the most global and legally robust licenses produced by CC to date. They incorporate dozens of improvements that make sharing and reuse of CC-licensed materials more easy and dependable than ever before.

We emerged from the Global Summit in Warsaw with ambitious goals. The 4.0 licenses achieve those goals, and more. These licenses are well-suited for use by governments and publishers of public sector information and other data, especially in the European Union where sui generis database rights exist. Other features include (greatly) improved readability and organization, common-sense attribution, and a new mechanism that permits those who may have violated a license term to regain rights automatically if corrected in a timely manner.

None of these improvements could have been achieved by CC alone. We have always leaned heavily on the brilliance and dedication of our impressive network of legal and public licensing experts. Just as important has been the active, vocal involvement of the broader CC community. We remain true to our stewardship obligations because of them, all of whom are deeply passionate about the issues we tackle. The 4.0 licenses, Creative Commons, and the public license development process are all the better for the involvement of these participants.

You can find highlights of the most significant improvements on our website, track the course of the public discussion and evolution of the license drafts on the 4.0 wiki page, and view a recap of the central policy decisions made over the course of the versioning process.

With the 4.0 licenses published, we will be turning our attention to official translations of the legal code in partnership with CC-Netherlands. Translations of our new deeds are also underway, with the Dutch version already completed.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the process. With your help, the 4.0 licenses are the most global, robust, and user-friendly CC licenses to date. Congratulations everyone!