Creative Commons, the non-profit corporation dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, announced that it has expanded its International Commons (iCommons) project in Jordan and the Middle East, through Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property (AGIP).
Chairman of Creative Commons and Professor of Law at Stanford Law School in the US, Lawrence Lessig said, "We are very excited to have Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property leading the iCommons project in Jordan," adding that "AGIP's participation is crucial to our growing effort in promoting the international cultural commons."
Meanwhile, Executive Director of AGIP's Regional Office Mr. Charles Sha'ban, expressed his sincere contentment over AGIP's involvement with Creative Commons. "We are very pleased to be the first Arab country to bring the International Commons to this region. We hope that this project will be a step forward towards building the digital commons in cyberspace," he stated.
Announced in March 2003, iCommons is Creative Commons' project to make its machine-readable copyright licenses useful worldwide. As the leading institution for Jordan, AGIP will coordinate a public effort to translate the Creative Commons licenses literally and legally into Arabic, to be used in Jordan.
Jordan joins Brazil, Catalonia, China, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Spain, Taiwan and the United Kingdom in this effort.
"The international Creative Commons project is unique in the sense that it offers new concepts to the current copyright legal system," said Mr. Rami Olwan, an e-commerce legal consultant at AGIP and project lead for iCommons in Jordan.
He added that iCommons seeks to adapt itself to the developments taking place in cyberspace and the difficulties posed by the digital revolution.
With this move, AGIP, the first to bring the iCommons project to the Middle East, joins a list of highly reputable organizations assisting in the Creative Commons projects. These include but are not limited to Oxford University, Research Center in Administrative Science (CERSA) at the University of Paris II, the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Universitat de Barcelona, and Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
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For more information, kindly visit http://creativecommons.org/projects/international/jo/
© Press Release 2006
