Creative Common License First Presented In Cambodia

A variety of students are listening about what CC is.

Creative Common License, founded in 2001 in the European blocs, was introduced for the first time in Cambodia during BarCamp Phnom Penh event held in Institute of Technology of Cambodia on Saturday afternoon in October 19, 2013. Creative Common License was presented by KHAD, a media team founded by 9 enthusiastic media students, to around 30 participants, who were keen to know what CC license is, from various institutions.

Introducing CC license to the public is to promote the legalized culture of sharing among Cambodian people, the majority of whom are accustomed to pirating documents, music, software, photos and others. Before commencing the session, participants were divided into two groups, each of which was distributed a paper to draw pictures. Each group members was asked to draw whatever one wanted and passed it to the others to add more.

“Starting with a scratch of number 7, you could end up with a nice piece of drawing with bird and a human. This implies that if you kept your idea exclusively for the individual, a scratch of number 7 would never become a good piece of bird and human,” said Mr. Nhem Piseth,a self-run  KHAD team leader.

Although Cambodia became the 148^th member of World Trade Organization in October 2004, the using of pirated products and violating one’s invention haven’t been taken serious actions against yet because WTO gives Cambodia a limited period of time not to abide strictly copyright standard of WTO.

There are many Cambodian inventors or authors who don’t want to share their achievements in fear that their own products being plagiarized and commercialized. This also frustrated many Cambodians from creating new inventions because their ideas will be easily copied and used with impunity.

 “Under Creative Common license, both creators and users are beneficial because users can utilize any inventions without asking permission from creators, but users have to follow some rights reserved by creators, and creators can make their invention licensed without any charging,” said Mr. Piseth, adding, “ it’s a so-called mutual understanding and respect with ethics among users and creators.” At the end of the session, a number of questions and answers were exchanged among curious participants and KHAD team.

Creative Commons license is a free and easy-to-use copyright licenses providing a simple and standardized way to give the public permission to share and use one’s creative work — on conditions of one’s choice. CC licenses let one easily change one’s copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” Creative Common licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable one’s to modify one’s copyright terms to best suit your needs.