Copyright means, above all, the right of the author to define the terms and conditions for use of his/her work, while the license is a legal document used by the author to express those terms and conditions in a legally acceptable form. Therefore, each author can, in principle, decide that his/her work can be freely distributed or even used as public domain good. On the other hand, the contemporary practice is such that, unless the author explicitly defines the terms and conditions for use of his/her work, it is assumed that the terms would be: “All unauthorized copying, reproduction and public performance is strictly forbidden. All rights reserved”.

Creative Commons is an all-encompassing solution for licensing of works as publicly accessible and open contents. It simplifies the procedure for the author to legally define greater freedoms for the users, different from those restrictive invoked authomatically if the author doesn’t explicitly declare his will, having in mind taht such expression of will by the author, if done on one’s own, would demand a legally complicated procedure. The website creativecommons.org offers the authors possibility to chose which rights he/she wants to transfer and get a legally valid license that expresses the chosen terms and conditions in legally appropriate manner. It is also possible to enter the work into a registry or store it in a public archive on the internet, which makes it more accessible to users searching for free contents.

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15.04.2008 The much-debated and disputed open document standard Office Open XML (OOXML) has been approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The result of the voting showed 24 supporting votes by participating national standards bodies allowed to vote, known as “p-members,” versus eight opposing votes.

01.04.2008 Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) launched, on March 30, its Access to Knowledge (A2K) electronic platform which has been developed over several months to become the leading source of information on Access to Knowledge in the Arab region and the world.

04.05.2006 Bosnia and Herzegovina was notorious, during the last decade, as a country in which the most ruthless copyrights violations took place. You could see, for example, the latest Holiwood production on local television stations even before they were available at American cinemas. According to the information presented by DANI magazine (December 10, 1999), only 10 percent of the total sale of recorded music was legal, while the remaining sales were made on the black market.

17.05.2007 The Creative Commons Australia and the Open Channel Screen Resource Centre present the Open Channel Video Slam, a collaborative film project CCau took part in over last weekend (May 13-14).