MYPAT was performing (photo provided by MYPAT, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 China Mainland license.)

Recommended by Professor WEN Tiejun and Professor Jing WANG, consultants of Advisory Board of Creative Commons China Mainland, WANG Chunyan, Project lead of the CC China Mainland, together with other project team memebers, SHI Song, ZHENG Yi and XU Jianping, made a visit to the Migrant Youth Performing Art Troupe(MYPAT) at Tsinghua University on the evening of July 8th, 2007. MYPAT was giving a performance there at the invitation of the Organizing Committee of the conference on “Social Integration and Employment of Rural Migrant Workers from the Perspective of Partnership between the Government, Enterprises and Civil Society”.

Before the performance, WANG and SUN Heng, head of the troupe, had in-depth exchanges. WANG gave SUN a brief introduction of CC project, including its background, nature and purpose, the development of CC on the China Mainland and the CC licenses. The troupe head showed great interests in CC project and the approach of CC licenses. SUN said that as artistic creators, they want to share their creation with others but infringement and pirate are constant headaches and concerns, therefore they have been looking for a proper way to disseminate their works, in which the creators must be respected first, and their works can be disseminated for public welfare. SUN was glad to see that the idea and approach of CC licenses coincide with what the troupe expects. SUN was also pleased to see that CC China Mainland recorded their performance and will release it under a local CC license. SUN also expressed his interests in further cooperation with CC China Mainland and in adopting CC licenses to the website and related contents of MYPAT.

The performance was presented by SUN Heng, DUAN Yu, XU Duo and JIANG Guoliang from MYPAT jointly with the kids from Tongxin Youth Art Troupe. The audience enjoyed twelve original songs, all of which were recorded and would be presented on CC China Mainland official website under a local CC license.

About MYPAT

MYPAT is a non-profit folk art troupe established by several rural migrant workers, to provide cultural and artistic performance for rural migrant workers. Most of the members are workers from other provinces in China, each of whom is good at a certain artistic field. They give performances and held activities to promote rights and interests of migrant workers in their spare time. Since the troupe was founded on May 1st, 2002, it has insisted on its idea “to speak with songs, to safeguard rights through art”. They have released two albums “Workers are in the same family” and “Singing for the labor” respectively on September 10th, 2004 and May 1st, 2007, covering 24 selected excellent works within these five years. Taking ballad and rock as their form, the songs are full of feelings, which frankly speak out the true voices of the workers on a strange land in Peking. Each of the songs is drawn from an unforgettable experience of the workers, and expresses their bitterness in daily life.

On the afternoon of December 16, 2006, a birthday party was held by Creative Commons China Mainland (CC China Mainland) in Beijing to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the launch of the first CC licenses, live with people in other seven cities around the world.

December 16th was the most freezing day in Beijing since the beginning of this winter. However, people from colleges, websites, associations, companies and law firms, who concern and support CC with their great passion, assembled in the FIT Complex of Tsinghua University to celebrate CC’s birthday. The design and decoration were made by volunteers from Law School of Renmin University of China. Two groups of fantastic “CC” slogan consisting of colorful balloons on the walls seize your sight immediately. Different kinds of attractive posters exhibiting “CC” slogan also can be seen everywhere. These posters extended basic theory of CC, “Share, Reuse and Mix legally”. They were all designed by Patrick Deegan, a teacher of the Digital Art Department in the Software Institute of Peking University, and Zhangjing, a postgraduate student of Xu Beihong Art School in Renmin University of China.

And the party began. It was hosted by Wang Chunyan, project lead of ccChina and associate professor of Law School of Renmin University of China. She gave her sincere appreciation to people who were concerned about and in favor of CC, welcomed attendants and wished that there could be a great promotion of CC through this party.

attendants show their concerns and support for CC through personal presentations and small group talks or discussions. The official website of CORE adopted the CC protocol since the China Mainland version of CC licenses launched in March 29, 2006. Mr. Gong Zhenyang from CORE shared the significance of licensing open resources for education under a CC license. Chinese Wikipedia is also the user of CC licenses. It administrator, Shizhao, introduced that they had adopted two of the most liberal licenses of CC to publish their works. The CEO of Feedsky, Lv Xinxin, showed his favor for CC directly, and proposed that when compiling the setting of Feed, the official CC China Mainland licenses would be chosen with no doubt.
Caiqing, the founder of New Photo Net, said despite that they encountering CC last year, the public knowledge of CC’s use and value were far from enough, however, he also hoped that the introduction of CC could bright their users’ terminals more effective copyright protection. Moreover, they showed the photos releaseed under CC licenses in NPhoto.net and Wikipedia. The AllWiki’s administrator, named Han Yuwen, learned about CC when attending the Chinese Wiki Summit Forum just a week ago. With great interest in CC, he believed that it was needed to have creators’ commercial benefits protected more effectively while sharing their works. He also suggested that CC should promote itself more to let more people know about it. The production manager of CCW, Lin Jiuzhe, said that CC had offered people flexible ways to manage their copyrights, “To preserve some rights” rather than the rigidity traditional idea, “To preserve all rights”. At the same time, he emphasized that privacy of customers and rights to choose on one’s own should be respected by websites.

Kenneth Fields and Patrick Deegan, who are both teaching at the Department of Digital Art in Software Institute of Peking University, are zealous supporter of CC. They have made significant contribution to Creative Commons China Mainland. during the party, Patrick shared his experience of CC with others. and his students also brought us their creative multimedia works licensed under cc.

People from Music Copyright Society of China, Central Conservatory of Music, Hoodong.com, China Education Net, Sun Microsystems(China) also expressed their great interest in CC.

At the birthday party, attendants also watched the animation,and documentary introducing and explaining about CC. the live shoot in LA sent us the CC founder, Prof. Laurence Lessig’s impressive talks and the fever that people were enjoying at the CC b-day celebration. Attendants also interacted though the second-life. Eric Eldred, a member of CC Committee, also celebrated CC’s birthday with people at the party via Internet. A student from China University of Political Science and Law brought us a vivid joyful tone. People drank warm tea, enjoyed snacks and talked. The birthday party lasted for more than two hours in a wonderful atmosphere. At last, Li Xu from Law School of Tsinghua University, a member of ccChina, expressed his appreciation of attendants and his wish that the party would be open to everybody interested in CC.

Video: http://www.6rooms.com/watch/323775.html

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ccbday-beijing

Creative Commons China Mainland conducted a survey with the aim of gathering knowledge about how well Creative Commons licenses are known and used by the Chinese Community. The special focus of this survey was on Chinese bloggers and on the non-commercial use aspect of CC. The survey was carried out both online and offline from October 28 through November 15, 2006.

We received a total of 122 valid responses to our questionnaire. Of this total, 9 were received online and 113 were received offline.

The survey shows that 90.1% of the people questioned have their own blogs, 78.7% have an account with social network websites such as Flickr, Myspace, or Facebook, and 28.7% create their own podcasts. The high percentages largely resulted from the fact that most participants in the survey were attendees at the Chinese Bloggers Conference held in Hangzhou from Oct. 28 to 29, 2006.

(Chart 1) Respondents’ Web Activities

The survey asked about the kinds of content incorporated in the online activities engaged in by the respondents. The results showed that 87.7% use texts, 53.3% use still photographs, 13.4% used video files, and 10.0% use audio files.

(Chart 2) Main Types of Web Content

Most of the people surveyed had limited knowledge of CC and CC China Mainland licenses and they indicated that they wanted to know more about them and were interested in adopting CC licenses for their works. The survey showed that 41.8% of the respondents indicated they “knew a little” about CC, 27.0% said they “have no idea” of CC, 23.8% reported they “know more than a little ”, and only 7.4% of the respondents indicated that they “know very well” about CC licenses.

(Chart 3) Awareness of CC

The survey further shows that 32.8% of participants have already adopted CC, 34.4% say they plan to adopt CC, and 86.8% say they want to know more about CC and CC China Mainland. Among all those surveyed, of those who indicated that they have adopted or planned to adopt CC, 71.2% said they would like to adopt the ported CC China Mainland licenses.

Regarding the “non-commercial use” aspect of CC, 69.7% of those surveyed said they would use a CC license that restricted usage of their content to non-commercial use, 58.0% said they were not clear on what the “non-commercial use” restriction meant, and 39.2% of those surveyed said they did understand what ”non-commercial use” meant.

The majority of respondents indicated that they understood “non-commercial use” to mean the utilization of the works without the aim of making any profit. More specifically, 61.3% of those surveyed said the use of creative works on web pages where advertisements were posted by the web site provider would not be considered as a “non commercial use” and 59.4% said the same would be true if the ads were provided by Google or some advertising provider.

Finally, a majority of respondents offered suggestions about the use of CC and CC China Mainland and indicated they hoped to strengthen the promotion of CC and make more people aware of the option of adopting CC licenses.

From October 28 to 29, the Second Chinese Blogger Conference was held in Hangzhou. More than 300 Chinese bloggers as well as the people who are interested in Chinese blogs got together and discussed many issues on the development of Chinese blogs. WANG Chunyan, the project lead of CC China Mainland, together with her two assistants, ZHENG Yi and XIN Xingzhi, attended the conference and introduced CC and CC China Mainland Project to the audience.

In the thematic discussion on “Free Culture and Open Society” presided by CC China Mainland project team, WANG gave a speech named “Creating Creative Commons for Culture “, introducing the possible problems related to copyright in blog creation and the significance of CC licenses in promoting the development of “free culture”—a balance between full control of copyright and no rights reserved. “According to the present copyright law, works are protected once completed and nobody is permitted to release and copy it without the permission of the right holder, which to a certain extent restricts the spread of works, since most bloggers have no intention to make profit out of their works, only hoping their works can be widely spread,” said WANG, “what’s more, the restriction of using works has greatly limited the recreating activities based on the existing works, since the cost of the traditional mode of being licensed through one-to-one negotiation is pretty high.” CC licenses provide a set of standard copyright licenses for the public. The right holders can choose from the licenses with different license terms according to their own needs, which will greatly save the cost of negotiation for the copyright licenses and play an important role in promoting the spread of works and in encouraging recreating activities.

In the thematic discussion, WANG also answered some questions put forward by attendants and had a passionate discussion with them.

WANG Chunyan was exchanging ideas with bloggers form HongKong

CC China Mainland conducted a questionnaire survey during the conference to find out how well Chinese bloggers know about CC and the China Mainland version of CC licenses, and to gather their opinions and suggestions on the terms of CC licenses. More than 100 valid questionnaires were collected. These first-hand data will undoubtedly play an important role in promoting the development of CC on the Chinese Mainland.

The project assistants ZHENG Yi and XIN Xingzhi also communicated with many bloggers during the conference, introducing the development of CC in Mainland China.

The project assistant was conducting a survey

On June 15, 2006, CC China Mainland organized its first “CC Salon Beijing” in Thinker Coffee House of Wansheng Bookstore in Beijing.

people attending the salon

People from CC, WikiChina, the National Library of China and some well-known websites such as sina.com, baidu.com, people.com.cn, together with those who are interested in CC and open access took part in the event.

Jon Phillips, a member of CC headquarters, made a special trip to Beijing to take part in the activity. He is also one of the important organizers and hosts of CC Salons held in San Francisco. Jon first presented the purpose of organizing CC Salons as well as their worldwide progress. He said when the first CC Salon was held in San Francisco, the aim was to provide a platform for creators and scholars, who showed great interests in CC and the idea of open access, to exchange their thoughts and ideas. At present, CC Salons have been held in many cities, such as San Francisco, Toronto and Berlin. Besides Beijing, CC Salon in Warsaw is going to take place soon. These activities will provide regular opportunities for creators all over the country and the people who are interested in CC to get together to communicate with each other, inspiring them for creation. Jon also discussed with people on the issues like open source and Free software.

Dr. JI Yanjiang from qiji.cn referred to how well CC was used in qiji.cn and in the field of scientific research. He put forward some questions related to the open access to the information and results in the scientific research field.

Professor Hal Abelson from MIT, also a member of CC Board, introduced Scholar’s Copyright Project lately initiated by CC under the Science Commons (SC), a project in the scientific research field. It is a new project launched by SC, aiming at promoting the idea of sharing and opening in the scientific research field. According to him, MIT was recommending MIT Amendment to Publication Agreement to its researching staff, which allows them to reserve the rights to release and spread their articles in digitalized forms before and after the dissertations are published. This is going to be the policy of MIT, in the hope of promoting the sharing of scientific research papers and making more people access to the latest research results, which will promote the development of technology.

After several keynote speeches, the attendants had a wide and passionate discussion about the issues that they are interested in.

Jon Phillips was giving a speech（ by shizhao ）

Hal Abelson was talking at the dinner table （ by shizhao ）

Brainstorming（by Zoom.Quiet ）

Brainstorming

For more pictures, please visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/shizhao/tags/ccsalon/   and  http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoomq/tags/ccsalon/

For further information, please visit shizhao’s blog and report from zoom.quiet (both in Chinese)