opencontentlawyer.com

The Society for Computers and the Law (SCL) is having a conference on 1 May on information governance:

Information Governance Conference 2008

Information governance has rapidly become an integral part of organisational strategy in both the public and private sector. Organisations of all types and size are generating ever greater volumes of sensitive data and that data must be handled lawfully to avoid damaged reputations and unnecessary costs. Breaches of the law can result in enforcement notices, fines and even criminal convictions for directors and managers.

The SCL Information Governance Conference tackles this fastmoving subject to provide authoritative, practical advice for advisers and their clients. The panel of expert speakers will give an insider’s view of the challenges facing organisations and distil that collective experience into practical know how on information governance.

Of particular interest to readers (and myself) is a session on Creative Commons concepts and personal data:

15:55 – 16:35
Application of DRM/Creative Commons Concepts to Confidential/Personal Information
Roger Bickerstaff, Bird & Bird

* The need for individual control over data usage
* How can DRM work for non-corporate information?
* Can the Creative Commons concept be applied to non-copyright information?
* Enforcement/jurisdiction/monitoring

Several people have either approached me directly or mentioned on various sites the application of the tools we are developing for open data at Open Data Commons to be applied in the personal data space. I think that there are some distinctly different issues involved as privacy issues have a different set of rules than straight IP issues, as well as of course a distinct set of different concerns (privacy). It will be great to get such a distinguished perspective on some of the issues. More of course, after the event.

I am back and plowing through email, and wanted to flag up some follow up OKCon details:

### Post-Event Information

We’re pleased to announce that audio, images and slides from OKCon 2008 are now available at the Post-Event Information page:

http://okfn.org/okcon/2008/after

If you’ve blogged the event or have pictures or the like, please let us know and we’ll link to it. We are also able to host any further documentation in our repository.

### Open Knowledge Local Groups

We’ve now set up a wiki page for local Open Knowledge groups - to arrange meetups, forums and other activities:

http://okfn.org/wiki/LocalGroups/

In addition to the Cambridge group, which has been around for a few years, we are in the process of creating groups in London and Oxford. If you’d like to get involved in any of these, or you’d like to set up your own local group - don’t hesitate to get in touch!

And of course your participation is needed to make everything happen:

### Get Involved

If you’d like to get involved in any of the OKF’s projects or
activities, please see our participate page:

http://okfn.org/participate

Our projects rely on volunteers for their development - from CKAN and KForge to Open Shakespeare, Open Economics and Open Text Book. Whether you’re interested in research, communications or technical work, whether you have a few minutes or a few hours to spare, we’d love to hear from you!

While OKF projects may be available without financial cost to you, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have any costs:

### Support the Open Knowledge Foundation

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation. All our services and software are provided openly and for free. Running and developing projects costs both time and money (for example, our hosting costs alone run to around a €1000 (£700/$1500) a year). Your support
helps the Foundation to continue and expand its work. For more information, please see:

http://okfn.org/support/

Just a quick note that the Copyright History conference and launch event of the new online resource will take place tomorrow at Stationers’ Hall. More events up on the site - copyrighthistory. I’ll be there tomorrow, but not Thursday — feel free to grab me for a chat if you are attending.

Just to highlight for opencontentlawyer.com readers, that we released the final version of the Public Domain Dedication and Licence over at Open Data Commons this past weekend. I will post more about the process and the final result when I return to full posting strength in April.

Quick note — the COMMUNIA project is having an academic conference on the public domain from 30 June to 1 July in Belgium. The call for papers is up and proposals are due on 30 March.

Conference homepage: COMMUNIA conference on Public Domain in the Digital Age.

Call for papers.

I’m a little late in posting this, but the Open Definition now has an advisory council, and at Rufus Pollock’s very kind suggestion, I’ve accepted the role of Chair of the Council.

The members are:

Paul Jacobson, iCommons
Paul Miller, Talis
Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge University
Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation & Cambridge University
Rob Styles, Talis
Peter Suber, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) & Earlham College
Luis Villa, Columbia Law School, GNOME Foundation & Open Source Initiative
Jo Walsh, Open Knowledge Foundation & Open Source Geo-Spatial Foundation
John Wilbanks, Science Commons

Peter Murray-Rust’s announcement | OKFN announcement

Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons project - Oxford Internet Institute Crossposted at Open Data Commons.

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS. This event is open to the public. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk

Perhaps surprisingly for some, data and databases are not a ‘rights free’ area where no intellectual property rights apply. Open Data Commons was started to provided free and open source software and Creative Commons style licensing solutions for data — open data. The legal tools being developed have implications both in terms of open access to scientific research and in enabling the semantic web. This talk will discuss the Open Data Commons legal tool — the Public Domain Dedication & Licence — and place this work within the greater context of open access and new generations of web tools.

About the speaker

Jordan Hatcher is a lawyer and researcher with a focus on intellectual property and Internet law, especially issues surrounding open licensing solutions such as Creative Commons and open data. He has a JD in law from the University of Texas, and a, LLM in IP and IT law from the University of Edinburgh. Jordan is also the author, together with Dr Charlotte Waelde, of the Open Data Commons set of legal tools.

Hi everyone — I’m going to have a reduced posting schedule for the month of March due to personal getting married and professional commitments having to get all my work done before I leave to get married, but I will return in April to a regular posting schedule.

OCLN — Open content legal news, a worldwide selection of news and events about open content with a focus on the legal side of things from Jordan Hatcher, legal consultant.

iCommons received core grant funding:

2008 also marks the start of a five-year grant by two new trusts: Kusuma Trust and IETSI (International Electronic Trade and Services Initiative) that have made an endowment to iCommons of $1 million over a period of five years. The power of this core grant cannot be overemphasised. Anyone working in the non-profit field will recognise how difficult it is to raise core funds, and as a young organisation based in the developing world, iCommons is extremely grateful for this opportunity to consolidate and build an organisation that will have considerable impact into the future.

[Creative Commons » CC News] LugRadio to switch to CC-BY-SA:

Incidentally, the LugRadio podcast has been working to effect a switch from the most restrictive CC license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) to one of the most liberal (Attribution-ShareAlike) and this month made the announcement in the form of an essay, well worth reading.

[Creative Commons » CC News] ACLU Embraces CC Licensing

The ACLU has begun its first foray into CC licensing, releasing all the content from their new website, marijuanaconversation.org, under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

Oh and Lessig isn’t going to run for Congress, in case you missed it…

OCLN is a regular feature here at opencontentlawyer.

Anything I missed that you think should be here? Let me know!

FYI, IMPACT has posted a legal guide to CC licences.