Conclusions after the Registries and Semantic Technologies Conference

Mario Pena

Last May 20th we organized the First Conference about the Role of Copyright Registries in the Global Digital Networks with the participation of prestigious authorities on copyright issues both national (Spain) and international.

General view of the room while Sr. Richard Owens from WIPO speaks

We want to specially thank the presence of Mr. Richard Owens, (Director of Copyright E-Commerce, Technology & Management Division, World Intellectual Property Organization – WIPO), Mr. Leonardo Cervera (Intellectual Property expert, Internal Markets General Management, European Commission) , Mr. Miguel Angel Calle (Central Copyright Registrar, Spanish Minisgtry of Culture), Mr. Ignacio Garrote (Head professor of Civil Law at Universidad Autonoma of Madrid), and Mrs. Asuncion Gomez (Head of department at the Univ. Politécnica de Madrid and director or the OEG at UPM).

We are happy to state the interest and possibilities all of them confirmed through their speeches about the idea Safe Creative is proposing; to foster online digital registries and other organizations beeing the ones to give semantic information about works in an open, standardized and interactive way.

Fom left to right: Ricardo Gómez Cabalier from Institute of Author Rights -SGAE group-, Ani Defunkid López from Lamundial.net, Miguel Ángel Calle from the Central Registry of Spain, Carlos Martí from IESE, David Maeztu lawyer and advisor at Safe Creative and collaborator at Creative Commons Spain, Marc Gauvin from NetPorteditems and member of DMP representing sDae, and Tíscar Lara, researcher and professor of communication studies regards free culture.

Just as many lecturers stated, online copyright registers can add an enormous value and potential to ease the diffusion of the information in the digital networks by linking authors to their works. Today this function is the best guarantee to actually protect copyrighted works and not beeing a mere authorship proofs’ host. During the event we showed a prototype API to explain the way this information might be delivered regardless of the platform. The new version of Safe Creative’s web will be due in about one month and a half.

We want to extend the invitation made at the event also to the ones who for one or other reason did not have the chance to attend but are interested into exploring new ways to deliver copyright information accross the web: We want to invite them to join a free and independent project named semanticcopyright.org; this project will try to establish politics and standards for registries and systems to perform queries and give information about copyrights in an interoperable and coordinated way using semantic technologies. Anyone interested, please contact us through this link.

Add comment May 25th, 2009

Magnatune and Safe Creative reach agreement

Mario Pena

We are very excited to announce serval important agreement we have signed during the last months. Recently we signed an agreement with Magnatune, pioneer online music label, to register all it’s contents with Safe Creative.

Magnatune, with more than 8,000 tracks, is one of the leading projects to achieve new business models involving music and open licenses such as Creative Commons. Thanks to this agreement, Magnatune’s catalog will be incorporated into Safe Creative’s register adding value to this netlabel. Also will find great benefit of the new semantic technologies we are developing for the next version of Safe Creative’s web due in about two months.

Add comment May 19th, 2009

News about Safe Creative and Congress

Mario Pena

In about one month Safe Creative is going to add a communication channel for programs, also called API with semantic web applications: A door through which any program can query us about rights info from a specific file and get a comprehensive answer.

“We are very excited working towards this contribution, as we are convinced that the challenges technology has put on copyright issues have the solution again with technology without the need to undermine the rights of some citizens in favour of the rights of others” explains Juan Palacio, CEO from Safe Creative.

We are working on solutions to lower the barriers some groups want to put against the free distribution of common culture. It’s vital that the new ways to help distribution and communication get not to be closed down for those who use them to liberate their creations, but avoiding at the same time, and as far as possible, injure the rights of the ones who opt not to.

May 20th we are discussing with some of the most relevant actors in this issues about copyright registries, authorship, information, about the possibilities of semantic technologies and will invite all to construct a Web in which contents can live both free and respecting the rights of authors. More information about the event here: http://www.semanticcopyright.org

Add comment May 14th, 2009