DinoSafe first comic in greek

Mario Pena

Thanks to our friend Dealsend we have our first comic translated to greek language:

Thanks a lot for your translation. Hope to see more of this!

Add comment November 28th, 2008

Safe Creative’s workshop in FICOD 2008

Mario Pena

Day 27th will be a very active one for us in Madrid. We are going to the presentation of the new book by Javier Celaya and in the afternoon will be at a brief workshop in FICOD.

The place: Berlín Lounge at the  Municipal Conference Centre in Madrid

Day November the 27th at 15:30.

Thanks a lot to the team of NetworkingActivo for their invaluable help.

Add comment November 24th, 2008

Copyright scope: moral and economic rights

Andy Ramos

Copyright protects original and creative works of art, and other kind of contents that surround creation, like phonograms, audiovisual recordings, performances, etc. The legal protection for this protection differ worldwide; however, we are able to categorize it in two basic rights: exploitation rights and moral rights.

Exploitation rights are those that provide incomes to an author by granting her the exclusive control on her works, who has the right to prevent the reproduction, distribution, public performance, or transmission of her works of authorship. Those rights are granted by law often to the author or creator of the work (in an employer-employee relationship, the owner might be the employer, depending on the jurisdiction), with a term of protection which differs from one country to another (the life of the author and fifty years after his death, according to the Berne Convention, although most countries have adopted the life plus seventy years formula), although these rights can be assigned to others by license or transferred by contract.

However, legislators around the globe have introduced certain exceptions to those exclusive rights, limitation that diverge from one country to another. In the U.S., the Copyright Act establishes some exceptions, including for libraries, archives and schools that allows them to reproduce certain works in specific conditions, or other that permits the parody of the work, while most countries in Europe have accepted other exceptions for reporting current events, citing or private copying.

In some countries, specially in Europe, there are also the so called remuneration rights, which guarantee authors some revenues for the actual exploitation of the works. Some examples are the “droit de suite”, which is the right of the author to receive a fee from the resale of an artwork by a dealer or another buyer and is valid almost worldwide, or the infamous “private copying levy”, that is specially popular in central Europe.

The second category of rights are the moral rights or “droit moral”, whose nature and scope differ in each country, that the Berne Convention (the international treaty that has regulated intellectual property rights for over 100 years) defines as follows: “the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation”.

Accordingly, and thanks to these moral rights, certain rightholders (especially individual creators) can oblige others to respect the authorship of a work, and stop its distortion, mutilation and any other modification that affects its integrity. But, why does this right exist? Many European countries consider that when an author creates, she fixes her personality in the work, and that fixation of her spirit should be protected against any external intromission.

Berne Convention’ contracting parties, however, do not cover these rights in the same fashion, with countries like France, Germany or Spain, where moral rights are strongly protected, and other like the U.S. whose protection is minimal and only covers certain type of works. The U.S. scheme is frequently used as an example of a country where moral rights does not exist, which is not totally correct because certain moral rights are recognized to visual artists (painting, drawings, prints, sculptures and still photographic images) according to 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act. Notwithstanding this, waiver is allowed.

The duration of these moral rights is not the same in every country; in some nations like Spain, they are unlimited on time, while others like the U.S. protects them only during the natural life of the author. However, most of the countries prohibit the transfer of these rights because they affect the personality of the creator, and that cannot be claimed by any third party.

Safe Creative, as a global copyright registry, is potentially compatible with every legal system, allowing authors to register and protect their works. In this scenario, authors will retain their moral rights according to the applicable law and, for economic rights, their will is granted by the corresponding license.

By Andy Ramos and Javier Prenafeta

Add comment November 19th, 2008

Newsletter 11-17-2008

Mario Pena

newsletter 11-17-2008

Hi all

It’s a pleasure to get in touch you with our first newsletter; something we owed you since the beginning of this project, more than one year ago.

I’d like to start telling you that, since July 2008, Safe Creative is part of Communia, an organization founded by the European Commission, in order to create a network of organizations to become a point of reference for theoretical analysis and strategic policy discussion of issues concerning the public domain in the digital environment.

Now a few numbers: We have more than 9.000 users and 40.000 registered works! Thanks a lot for your trust!

¿Do you want to know about the things we are doing or going to do?

First Dinosafe’s comic explaining advantages of Safe Creative (go the comic)

Future improvements

We are gathering and analyzing all the proposals you have sent us to improve the usability of our web. Thanks to everybody for your collaboration and we encourage you to go on sending suggestions.

Also we are developing an open API to be able to create integrations with all kinds of projects in the future.

To end with the novelties just let you know that since a few months ago, we are integrating the ccREL standard based in RDFa approved by W3C in our tag’s and registry page’s html. This way we are getting reado for the semantic web or 3.0 web.

Events

First Technological Summit of Creative Commons in Mountain View, hosted by Google

First Part
Second Part
Our presentation

Announcement in Communia, Amsterdam

We have proposed a standarization initiative called OSCRI (Open Standars for Copyright Registry Interoperability) together with Mike Linksvayer, vicepresident of Creative Commons. On December the 12th we’ll make an official presentation during the Creative Commons Technology Summit in Boston.

Projects we are working together to improve and add value

At present we are working with several projects that have shown interest in the service we provide: Laventanaliteraria.com,  a recent Spanish startup with all kinds of services for writers (text selling, text corrections, etc…), Jamendo.com, the most important copyleft music web in the world, Bubok.com, a great auto publishing project, Spoonch.com, and many more!

Some links you just shouldn’t miss

Articles, tutorials and social networks addresses. We are waiting you!

* Guide to bulk registry feature
* Safe Creative’s Twitter. Follow us live!
* Safe Creative’s group on Facebook
* Safe Creative’s page on Facebook
* Our pool on Flickr. Join us and share your registered pictures with us
* Percentage of “all” and “some” rights reserved
* Getting the Registry Label
* Registering posts from Blogger and WordPress

We will be waiting you at Safe Creative and will tell you more news in following newsletters

» info (at) safecreative.org

Add comment November 17th, 2008

First Dinosafe Comic: Easy to use

Mario Pena

Let me introduce Dinosafe, our mascot that will explain to you some of the advantages of Safe Creative. Here’s the first comic by Ramon Redondo:

6 comments November 10th, 2008