Something about the Culture of Sharing

The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but because our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized.
Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That someone is Creative Commons.

Arab Countries & the Culture of Sharing

The 3rd Creative Commons Arab regional meeting is the annual gathering of the Creative Commons communities operating from the Arab world where the grassroot communities made up by youth and civil society members coming from different fields (education, law, art, music, etc) that are actively spreading through their works values as openness, sharing, peer-production, collaboration & innovation.

The 3rd Creative Commons Arab regional meeting - by CC and Nawaat- was a celebration of these communities and these values  and Tunis has been chosen as a symbolic location, the place where, in December 2010, the Arab youth started to re-shape the Region and gave a new burst to creativity and cooperation as the basis of a better future for the new Arab generations.

Creativity, peer-production and “sharism”were at the basis of this meeting, which featured a set of workshops given by the Creative Commons Arab communities to youth and civil society participants in Tunis.

During the music Workshop two songs were created by arab musicians together and performed at the Nejma Ezzahra concert 2nd July at the occasion of the Third Regional Arab meeting Creative Commons. These songs will be released soon in January 2012 under CC licensed CD.

Both the concert and the CD will try to boost the idea of open-source music and legal sharing in the Region, encouraging the Arab youth to share music legally but also to produce their own, through peer-collaboration and remix which is allowed by the CC license itself.
Kerim Bouzouita, Tunisia (source Nawaat)