The State of Creative Commons in Latin America · Global Voices
David Sasaki

Coauthored by Jose Murilo Junior and David Sasaki
Global Voices has become a supporter of Creative Commons licensing not due to ideology, but because our website depends on it. The translations we post, bridging bloggers from different languages and cultures, are modifications of original works, requiring either the author's permission or a Creative Commons license that allows for derivatives. All of the various CC licenses also allow our editors and contributors to freely share the photographs, images, and podcasts from everyday citizens across the globe without acquiring the written permission of each individual. Enabling bloggers, podcasters, musicians, academics, and artists to more easily disseminate their works to a global online audience is one of the primary objectives that brought an international group of cyberactivists to Rio de Janeiro for iSummit 2006.
Nearly a year ago Global Voices published an article on the state of “free culture” and Creative Commons in Latin America. At the time, Chile had just become the second Latin American country, after Brazil, to launch Creative Commons licenses and Argentina would soon follow. Much has changed in those brief eleven months and it is time once again to survey the progress of Creative Commons in Latin America through the blogs of the movement's main proponents and with the help of an informative booklet from the conference.
Brazil:
Launched in April 2004 , Creative Commons BR was the first fully functional regional CC affiliate. Inaugurated with the help of FGV law school's Center for Technology & Society (CTS), it has Ronaldo Lemos as its most vibrant executive. Free Culture, Open Business, and Overmundo are some of the new initiatives CC-BR is now participating and the hosting of iSummit06 is a display of the Brazilian movement's importance in global terms.
The influential role of Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, a great supporter of the new licensing model in Brazil, cannot be denied. As a well-known
musician, who at the same time is in charge of Brazilian cultural policy guidelines, he's managed to translate the concepts into actions: he collaborated in the development of the sampling licenses in 2004, participated musically in the Wired CD (rip, sample, mash, share) and now his iSummit06 keynote speech about globalism was the first document created with the CC-Office plug-in tool, recently launched at the event. There is also a great video about Creative Commons in Brazil.
However, in the days leading up to the conference, many local bloggers criticized the limit on the number of Brazilians who could attend the event. Hernani Dimantas, for example, thought the conference was exclusive and elitist.
Esse Icommons no Brasil significa a copyrightização do copyleft pelo grupinho do minc e os satélites do cc. Acho uma afronta que deixam de fora dos debates aqueles que pensam diferente (no meu caso). Sinceramente, populismos a parte, não sei onde esse oportunismo quer chegar.
Jorge Machado and Pablo Ortellado who were scheduled to speak at the event, cancelled their engagement when hearing that Brazilian participation would be restricted:
“Much to our regret, we recently have been informed that the ICommons Summit has adopted a policy of restricted participation.
Only two weeks before the event some of the interested Brazilian participants were informed individually about the impracticality of their participation. The argument stated by the organizational board was that the event was designed for 200 participants. We understand that this event, as any other, has physical limitations, but we do not agree that the solution to this is the selection of the participants. The organizational board invited people who they considered “important”, excluding creators, students, artists, researchers and members of the civil society. Even considering that Rio de Janeiro is a city that has hundreds of options to host big events, the organizational board has not started a dialog about the “problem” – which is a peculiar practice for an event that aims to overcome the obstacles to free access to culture –and has decided to exclude an important part of the Brazilian community.
This surprising attitude substantially opposes the spirit of opening and integration, particularly excluding the Brazilian community that supports the adoption of free licenses. Therefore, we have come out publicly to protest the elitist character assumed by the event and hope that someday in the future the organization will put into practice what they stand for in theory.”
Chile:
Creative Commons Chile was first launched July of 2005 under the leadership of Claudio Ruiz who blogs at Quemar Las Naves [Burning One's Bridges], where he summarized the second day of the summit (ES):
En estos momentos tengo un problema. En paralelo se realizan dos conferencias. En la que estoy estamos viendo temas relativos al dominio público y como se puede construir dominios públicos nacionales desde el gobierno. La presentación más interesante ha sido la de el chico de Free Culture UK y de su repositorio de obras que están en el domiinio público, algo similar a lo que conversamos alguna vez en la lista de Creative Commons Chile. Haré el contacto con él para ver la forma en la que se podría llevar a cabo. En la otra sala se habla de los Educational Commons, y de cómo a nivel educacional la generación de lugares comunes creativos aparece como fundamental para alentar la mejora de los contenidos recibidos y entregados en ambiente educativo.
In Ruiz's own presentation he emphasized the need for alliances between Creative Commons and public institutions such as libraries and universities. He also noted that Creative Commons Chile has highlighted the lack of civil society in Chile that is only now starting to coalesce.
Argentina:
Following a well-attended July seminar, Creative Commons took shape officially under the leadership of Ariel Vercelli. On Friday he wrote his first impressions from the summit (ES).
Creative Commons ya no es lo que era, crece de forma increíble, tal vez irreversible: luces, cámaras, mucha gente, intereses, política de traje, ministros, gente de todos lados. Aquí estamos, en Rio de Janeiro, en el segundo International Commons Summit. Lessig dio los nuevos anuncios, nuevas etiquetas que muestran las condiciones de licenciamiento, nuevos sitios, iniciativas, la vinculación de Creative Commons con otras organizaciones. El proyecto de CC en Office de Microsoft, y los más de 140.000.000 millones de enlaces que da google sobre las licencias de Creative Commons. Ito, unos mintutos después, comentó algo más de iCommons como organización y algo de la situación actual a nivel mundial con temas open source y open content.
Vercelli also writes at Aprender La Libertad (ES) [Learn Freedom], the weblog continuation of his recently published book by the same name.
Mexico:
Mexico was the first Latin American country to launch their licenses with a legal workshop called iLaw in which intellectual property scholars spoke to an audience of lawyers, students, and bloggers about the need for Creative Commons licenses and how they fit into Mexico's specific legal framework. Since that inauguration (ES), project leaders León Felipe Sánchez and Jorge Ringenbach have been busy spreading the mission to content creators and government institutions. Among the most notable of achievements, Mexico's Presidency now distributes all of their online content with a no derivatives CC license. Cultural initiatives have also found success such as the Mexicommons Creativity Contest, which awarded musicians, podcasters, photographers, and graphic designers with Creative Commons-licensed works. A showing of the short film Elephants Dream (ES) in Mexico City attracted around 30 attendees who discussed how artists can take advantage of the licenses. León Felipe Sánchez observed that most of the inquiries focused on how artists can still make money while also encouraging their works to be widely distributed. Sánchez also remarked that the Creative Commons Mexico team is now trying to convince the Ministry of Education to apply non-derivative, non-commercial licenses to public text books so that teachers can legally make copies of texts and lessons for their students.
Peru:
Peru's launch of Creative Commons will follow the iLaw inauguration model used by Mexico. And it starts tomorrow! Project leaders Oscar Montezuma and Pedro Mendizábal Simonetti both attended iSummit 2006, where they described the relationship established with Peru's blogging community. The CC Peru logo, for example, was designed by blogger and illustrator Javier Prado. An essay contest was also put on which gave free iLaw admission to three winning bloggers who answered the question “Why Creative Commons?” Carlos Wertheman, a popular writer and member of the Peruvian blogger community, will moderate two of the iLaw panels.
In his presentation, Oscar Montezuma emphasized that CC Peru needs to convince the national community of lawyers that Creative Commons is not an anti-copyright movement, but rather, tries to give more sense to copyright law. He also hopes that Peru, which will most likely soon enter into a free trade agreement with the United States, can serve as a model for other countries whose copyright law would change because of free trade negotiating. Finally, like many of the project leaders, Montezuma said that connections between Creative Commons Peru and civil society will be crucial.
Colombia:
Following Peru's inauguration, Carolina Botero, Jaime Daniel Rojas, Andres Umaña, and Alfredo Vargas plan to officially establish six Creative Commons Colombia licenses on August 21st. Botero described her impressions on the first (ES) and second days (ES) of the summit.
Las primeras presentaciones de la mañana fueron muy buenas pues se centraron en reflexionar sobre el camino de Creative Commons. James Boyle recordó la necesidad de sostener que aunque existan diversas libertades detrás de CC hay una meta común, la necesidad de recordar que la creatividad se soporta en las creaciones anteriores y en la necesidad de tener acceso a ellas, que en la construcción de esta idea se debe cuidar tres aspectos: no hay comunidad detrás de simplemente liberar, no solo se trata de quitar intermediarios en la cadena y no se puede olvidar la balanza creador/receptor. Jhon Willbanks presentó Science Commons, la idea y el desarrollo que ha venido teniendo el proyecto en el último año, un panel que continuó más tarde con experiencias locales muy interesantes. Jenny Toomey fue la siguiente en hablar, desde Future of Music Coalition, quien mostró la visión del artista que busca una remuneración y vivir de su música, una posición entre el acorralamiento de la industria discográfica y una inseguridad frente al esquema CC, una idea que les atrae y les asusta.
Colombia's page in the iSummit booklet reveals what could make for an exciting inauguration:
Our idea for a launch event is to combine an academic presentation (lead by professor Lessig's lecture and involving Colombian initiatives related to open access for information), with an artistic oriented session (artists and art that share the possibility of reusing content and freeing it).
Representatives from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Guatemala were also present at iSummit 2006, but remain in the early planning stages of releasing Creative Commons licenses in their respective countries. That doesn't mean, however, that they aren't already planning ambitious projects. Carlos González Yanes, for example, spoke of his desire to host a central online library of Creative Commons-licensed works which would show Puerto Rican writers, artists, and musicians how their creations can be distributed widely by embracing CC.
Much of the legal discussion at the conference focused on how Creative Commons’ generic licenses are specifically applied to each country's legal code depending on how they define moral rights. There was also an apparent dichotomy between those who believed that a multitude of licenses were needed to offer the greatest flexibility in what aspects of a work are protected and those who think that numerous licenses make the whole project too confusing for newcomers. But despite that small divide, iSummit 2006 was much more noteworthy for the common currents of thought and the collaborations between like-minded projects that were formed. iSummit 2007 will take place in Croatia in June and it appears that at least a few more Latin American participants will be involved as official CC representatives.