Registries and the public domain at the 3rd COMMUNIA Workshop

The 3rd COMMUNIA Workshop on Marking the Public Domain: Relinquishment and Certification was perfectly hosted by Kennisland and IvIR in Amsterdam. The workshop report is online now.

There were major updates on Creative Commons Zero by CC Counsel Diane Peters and a panel discussion between IVIR’s Bernt Hugenholtz and Duke Law School’s James Boyle.  Also included was a panel on marking and tagging public domain works, featuring presentations by Safe Creative’s Mario Pena (Safe Creative’s apprach to registering public domain works), Patrick Peiffer (CC Luxembourg), Jonathan Gray (OKF), and Mike Linksvayer  (Creative Commons)  on certifying public domain works.

All presentations from the workshop are available for download.

GNU FDL and Creative Commons

Big news: The Free Software Foundation has released GNU FDL (Free Documentation Licence) version 1.3, a minor update, but a big step towards legal interoperability of free and open licences. This interoperability had been requested by the Wikimedia Foundation a while ago.

It allows FDL licensed Wikis, like Wikipedia, under certain conditions, to republish their content under a Creative Commons licence, namely the CC BY-SA version 3.0.

More info on the Creative Commons blog and a good FAQ over at GNU/Free Software Foundation. Btw, have you seen Stephen Fry explain Free Software?