Creative Commons Japan was involved in two of the important events related to free culture and free knowledge. During the Open Access Week, we co-organized a symposium exploring the concept of open access beyond the simple access to academic journals online free of charge. Speakers included scholars of open access and open courseware, and an engineer implementing open access. Yuko Noguchi, CC Japan's Legal Lead, spoke about licensing and copyright related aspects of open access and joined the panel. Will Banks of Science Commons contributed to the event by via a video message. The network of interested people cultivated throughout the preparation spawned a project to translate Science Commons' blog entries, to inform the Japanese people. About a month later, Japanese Wikimedians and Tokyo University's Center for Knowledge Structuring organized Wikimedia Conference Japan 2009. Makoto Nagao, The 14th Librarian of National Diet Library (i.e. the chief librarian), and Jay Walsh, Communication Head of Wikimedia Foundation gave keynote speeches. Three of Creative Commons members appeared on a panel with two Wikimedians introducing and discussing copyright and licensing issues related to Wikimedia projects.
At both events, the issue of license compatibility was one of CC Japan's main concerns. We are seeing some successful and high-potential projects in Japan, latest of which is NHK's Creative Library where video clips are offered online free of charge for reuse and redistribution. These projects often devise its own license. This practice will potentially create many common pools of free resources that could not easily be combined to create a new work.
