The version 4.0 license suite and CC0 are now available in Korean as a result of the collaborative work of CC Korea volunteers. The 4.0 licenses are also now available in Czech, thanks to the work and leadership of CC community members from the Czech Republic. 

For the Korean translations, the process was initiated by a group of CC Korea members as a collaborative project in 2017 and was on hold before being resumed in late 2018. The Korean translations were drafted by Soohyun Pae, professional translator and former CC Asia Pacific Regional Coordinator, and then reviewed by Jay Yoon, the former Public Lead of CC Korea who is a practicing lawyer. The final draft for review was submitted to CC HQ on Feb 8, 2019. With the kind support of the Korea Copyright Commission, the public consultation was held from Apr 1 to Apr 30, 2019 through a dedicated webpage and the announcement was made by CODE through its social media and by the Korea Copyright Commission on its website. The public consultation went smoothly and was completed with no major issues found.

Now that the Korean translations of 4.0 and CC0 licenses are available, CC Korea plans to share the news online through various channels and hold offline events to celebrate the work and promote the use of the licenses to the Korean public and local institutions.

For Czech, the process began in 2014 and went on to include input by several legal experts and two public consultations. Finally, after many drafts over the past five years, the translations went live in June 2019. The multi-year process was led by Matěj Myška, Lucie Straková, Anna Drgová, Jiří Marek, and Martin Loučka. 

Congratulations and thanks to everyone for their great work and support throughout the long road to publication of these two important translations! 

Korean 4.0 licenses:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.ko 
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.ko
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode.ko
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode.ko
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.ko
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.ko

Korean CC0: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.ko

Czech 4.0 licenses:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.cs
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.cs
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.cs
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.cs
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode.cs
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode.cs

The post New official translations of CC legal tools published for Korean and Czech appeared first on Creative Commons.

Many friends from the CC and open education communities have noticed my absence from meetings and conferences in the past six months. I’m ready to share why.

I was diagnosed with an auto-immune liver disease in 2005, and with liver cancer in September, 2018. The cancer was caused by the underlying liver disease. Once the cancer was diagnosed, my doctor quickly sent me to the Mayo Clinic. I spent the entire month of December in twice-daily radiation and round-the-clock chemotherapy. Bottom line: I needed a liver transplant to live.

You may have heard about the organ shortage in the United States. There are simply not enough organs available to people who need them. Most countries have similar unfortunate statistics. Want to help? Sign up to be a donor (US link) and talk to your family about your decision.

Because I was not sick enough to receive a cadaver liver, my only option was a living donor transplant. Amazingly, the human liver can regenerate itself if you cut it in two. After learning of my health status, 16 friends and family volunteered to donate part of their liver to me. To say I was overwhelmed by their generosity is an understatement.

It seemed appropriate then, when the Mayo Clinic selected my liver donor, that it would be the person who helped train me in open education – David Wiley (read David’s blog post). I have known David for over a decade. He is a friend and colleague, and he saved my life. 

I am pleased to report David and I successfully completed the liver donor transplant on June 28. Without David’s generosity, I would have been dead from cancer in a year. No words can adequately express how thankful I am. His gift will both allow me to live a full, healthy life, and will enable me to work with all of you to create universal, equitable, inclusive and meaningful learning opportunities for everyone.

David is home recovering and growing his liver back to full size. I will be at the Mayo Clinic through the end of July. After the Mayo surgeons skillfully transplanted ⅔ of David’s liver into me, he and I laughed about organ remixes, if he should receive attribution, and wished we’d have asked for a CC tattoo on my new liver.

I also want to thank:

• the CC staff, my CEO, and our Board for their complete and ongoing support
• TJ Bliss and David’s wife Elaine who cared for David post-surgery
• my partner in life, Lesley, who has been by my side throughout

It continues to be my life’s honor to work for this fine organization and with you good people, and I look forward to doing so for many years to come. 

With gratitude,

Cable

The post Sharing, Generosity and Gratitude appeared first on Creative Commons.

Just last month, Muslims all over the world celebrated the holy month of Ramadan, the month of prosperity, sharing and spiritual healing. Since 2010, Arab world–based Creative Commons communities have celebrated Ramadan by organizing “Creative Commons Iftars” (CC Iftar) across the region.

A CC Iftar is a social event, organized by the CC chapter’s community members, where members gather to break the fast, share the table and food, engage in conversations and discuss innovation, technology, and their community’s role as a CC Chapter. The Iftars are built around the basis of CC’s vision of sharing and giving from the community to the community. The Iftar has different goals depending on the chapter’s priorities, but the main objective of the CC Iftar is to share a meal with the CC community, friends and partners.

At the CC Summit 2019, Lisbon, we organized a CC Iftar open to all Summit attendees. , During the Iftar, we dined and shared conversations. CC CEO Ryan Merkley joined us with a small word of gratitude, which made us feel more connected to the organization.

Following in these footsteps, here at CC Jordan, we held our CC Iftar on Thursday 30th.May.2019 (25th.Ramadan.1440). The main goals of the CC Iftar were to meet with the CC Jordan community, friends and partners, recap the latest updates, briefing about the CC Summit 2019 and discuss our future activities.

The community discussed the future activities with huge enthusiasm, members suggested to continue advocacy about Creative Commons and the use of the set of licenses, and the open culture wave around the world. Other members suggested to organize a CC Salon, preferably early September of this year.

Looking forward to our CC Salon? Wait for our updates and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

Photos CC Jordan, CC BY 4.0

The post Sharing community and breaking the fast: CC Jordan’s 2019 Iftar appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re happy to announce that Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley has been named as a Harvard Berkman Klein Center affiliate for the 2019-2020 academic year. His research and writing will focus on models for sustainability and growth that support the digital commons, and will explore communities working in the gallery, library, archive, and museum space; those working in, and advocating for, access to knowledge and education; and individual artists and content creators.

The Berkman Klein fellowship program aims to “create a protocol, a culture, a spirit that puts the emphasis on being open, being kind, being good listeners, being engaged, being willing to learn from one another.” The program is made up of a diverse community of members working across an array of university, government, private, and nonprofit institutions. For more information about the program and for the full list of new and returning fellows, affiliates, and faculty associates, visit the center’s website.

Additionally, CC community member Julia Reda, Member of European Parliament with a focus on Digital Rights, will be joining the Berkman Klein Center this year as a fellow. With a joint project at Berkman and the MIT Media Lab, Julia will advance research on how to modernize the academic publishing system to enhance equitable access to knowledge.

Please join us in congratulating Ryan and Julia!

The post Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley named as Harvard Berkman Klein Center affiliate appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons welcomes progress on official language translations of both 4.0 and CC0 due to our dedicated network of volunteers and a commitment by the European Commission (EC) to ensure the legal code for each is available in all official languages of the European Union. We expect a significant increase in the number of official translations to 36 languages total and the number of users who can read them to more than 3 billion in the next 3-5 months. With the European Commission’s decision to adopt CC BY 4.0 International and CC0 for all content and data it produces comes a firm commitment to collaborate with Creative Commons and its community to complete the remaining official translations of 4.0 and CC0 so that all 24 official languages of the EU are completed.

As of 2019, CC’s community has produced official translations of 4.0 in 23 languages (including English), and as of June 2019 has published CC0 in 13 languages (also including English). These numbers on their own own reflect an impressive and sizeable effort by our community, thanks also in part to travel grants from the Ford Foundation to bring together volunteer translators, and funding by others. As of June 2019, the total number of users able to access and understand the 4.0 licenses and CC0 in their first language totaled approximately 2.25 billion.

The assistance of the EC in developing first drafts of these legal documents is made possible through its impressive translation team. That team is working with CC’s translation processes to ensure drafts are reviewed publicly and that all interested members of the CC community in countries where those languages are officially recognized have the opportunity and are encouraged to contribute to the review and editing of drafts.

Additionally, CC is seeing a number of other complicated and sometimes multi-jurisdictional translations cross the finish line through the hard work of our community. Just last week, the official translation of CC0 into Spanish was completed and published [link], and shortly we will push live 4.0 translations of Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Korean and Slovene.

This push doesn’t end with these excellent efforts by our community, however. CC remains committed to ensuring that everyone understands the 4.0 licenses and CC0 in their language of choice, however widespread (or not) the language. So it was with delight that only a few weeks ago, UNESCO adopted its 2019 UNESCO OER Recommendation that, as amended at its recent meeting with the support and input of Creative Commons, recommends member states support the linguistic translation of open licenses, which includes CC BY and CC0. While not yet formally adopted, it is expected to be accepted later this year by the UNESCO General Conference. Once in place, Creative Commons will work to secure funding to expand its translation work for 4.0 and CC0 into languages that may not be as predominantly used as those already translated, but that are equally important to ensuring that users of Open Educational Resources (OER) and CC-licensed works everywhere, especially in remote, rural, migratory and other similarly underserved communities, are able to understand the license terms in their language of choice.

We thank the CC community and the European Commission for its dedication of resources, especially the efforts of Pedro Malaquias. We look forward to ongoing work with our community and funders to make full access to CC licenses and legal tools for everyone a reality.

Please contribute your input on pending translation drafts of 4.0 licenses and CC0, which are available for public comment through June 21, 2019.

Bulgarian (4.0 and CC0)
Croatian (CC0)
Czech (CC0)
Danish (4.0)
Estonian (4.0 and CC0)
Greek (CC0)
Hungarian (4.0 and CC0)
Irish (4.0 and CC0)
Maltese (4.0 and CC0)
Romanian (4.0 and CC0)

The post Progress Soars on Official Translations of 4.0 and CC0! appeared first on Creative Commons.