Marco Fioretti has written an excellent overview of all the issues raised by the success of the Creative Commons license, and it has an especially interesting section of the possibly perverse effect it may have in an Asian context.

Here’s is an excerpt of that section.

Marco Fioretti:

“We also got several confirmations of how weird and potentially risky it can be to preach CC outside western countries when we spoke to Carolina Botero and Lila Pagola, two members of the CC communities in Colombia and Argentina.

Carolina told us that that “countries like Colombia have international commitments that oblige us to follow international IP laws, and our official institutions are highly dependant on this influence. In this context, proposing CC licences is a good idea, especially within educational, scientific or artistic institutions. There is already a national repository for educational resources, and CC is used by our Biodiversity Information System (www.siac.net.co). Social practices, however, are an entirely different matter (even ignoring, for simplicity, indigenous communities, which have an altogether different concept of property). Initially, many authors and artists just don’t understand why they would need something like CC. However, when we explain the legal concept, most of the time those people realise what they can do about control and making money and eventually go for full copyright, instead of the ‘open’ solution.

Lila told us almost the same things about Argentina: “Around here, advocating CC implies explaining how copyright should work to teachers whose monthly salary [is equivalent to] just one licence of Adobe Photoshop. In such a context, CC and copyleft really look like artificial problems, to say the least. Maybe for institutions it’s different, since they are easily accountable, but for students and teachers photocopying work is so widespread as to be completely natural.

Asian attitudes

Anh Hung Nguyen, who’s currently developing an e-learning program for disadvantaged children (http://n-hero. blogspot.com), told us:

“Here in Vietnam, books are almost exclusively published by state publishers and don’t adopt CC. Most Vietnamese don’t pay attention to licences, since they can get most things for free and are willing to violate them should they become an obstacle. In general, I haven’t heard of any local projects or people that use CC, except for a few people who use CC for their photos on Flickr or Picasa. It seems that, CC or not, we don’t have a lot of content to share over the internet”.

Sasi Kumar, of FSF India, noted that in his country,

“Education was historically confined to the upper castes. Where permitted, however, all works could be studied and used by anyone. The idea of copyright came from the west. Restricting knowledge is not part of our culture. As a result, people don’t feel that it is wrong to take photocopies, for instance, of material they need, even if it is copyrighted. Thinking otherwise is, again, a result of western influence”.

Indian journalist Frederick Noronha (http://fn.goa-india. org) basically agrees with Sasi:

“There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn’t called ‘Creative Commons’. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there… I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn’t fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?”