We're happy to announce that we have now deployed a version of the Creative Commons license for use across Maneno. While all aspects of www.maneno.org are covered in the license, individual blogs have the choice of using the license or not which is controllable in the blog admin section for users who are logged in.

Let's back up a couple of steps though and talk about why this is important by first asking: What is Creative Commons? Creative Commons (or CC) is born of the "copy left" movement which means that they work to release broad copyright licenses focused more on providing replicable access to works as opposed to shutting them off to replication as previous copyright laws did. Basically, instead of having to write up a legal agreement for everything you do, you can apply a CC license based on how many rights you wish to retain and how many you wish to release. In a nutshell, these are licenses for the digital age where everything is infinitely reproducible.

These licenses are a great thing to come about, but they have a couple of problems which we are working with at Maneno and I talked about at the Creative Commons Salon. The first is the linguistic problem. As you can see, this license exists in a great many languages. We are working to have more translations based on the African languages that Maneno has available. That problem is the easy one and should be dealt with in time.

The bigger problem is that for these licenses to be enforceable, they have to have be legally ported for each country in the world as each country has different laws. Given this map, you can see the problem we face given the geographic focus of Maneno. With the exception of South Africa, there are no other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with a CC agreement in place. So, technically there would seem to be no point in having these licenses on Maneno. Why did we do this then?

We did this to try and spread CC licenses to more languages so that not only do these languages have more traction on the internet, but so that CC also has more traction in these languages. We are hoping that this will then lead to the more important step of these licenses being ported to these countries. It's a chicken and egg problem wherein we're hoping that the more exposure Maneno gets in these countries, the more exposure CC will get, and both will gain a gradual foothold for the blogging communities of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The primary agreement we have deployed with links to the various translations of it is the Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported. We chose this license as it is a very protective one once implemented in a country. Also, as far as we know, specific country licenses supersede the unported version, so even though someone in say Zambia opts to use this license on their Maneno blog, their works are protected in a full legal sense in somewhere like the United States which has ported the license to the country properly. The license we chose is one of many options that CC offers. If people wish to choose others, let us know and we'll see what we can do to make this happen.

In the end, it's all about creating better access for Maneno bloggers to tools which should be shared globally.