Singapore should consider Creative Commons

Recently, in a talk "YouTube and Beyond" by Kevin Lim (see also the post-event coverage by Rambling Librarian), the topic of creative commons has been brought up. If Singapore is seriously pursuing the digital interactive media industry, it is important that the citizens need to find alternatives to the present intellectual property system. Particularly, with the increasing trend in the west to adopt creative commons, if Singapore wants to be an advanced nation, the government should look at the creative commons issue seriously.  Interestingly, if you look at the drafting and eventual adoption of jurisdiction-specific licenses worldwide, Singapore is not in the list of countries (although in the website, the person in Singapore who is working on this is Professor Samtani Anil, Deputy Director Nanyang Business School). In this article, I will provide a short introduction and why Singapore needs to consider Creative Commons seriously.

The Creative Commons project starts off with a solution to resolve the debate over creative control which tends to move towards either extremes. At one end, you got the big corporations who wanted total control and "all rights reserved. In such cases, anybody who starts to modify and innovate upon the creative work owned by these organizations usually get into trouble with the intellectual property law. On the other side, there is the vision of anarchy, where the creators want to enjoy freedom but unfortunately left vulnerable to exploitation. The creative commons is to balance both ends, with bringing in the core values of balance, compromise and moderation. In this perspective,

"(the Creative Commons) use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”
- Creative Commons Site

So, why is it important the Singapore government needs to look at Creative Commons? I have a few reasons to offer:

• Encourages More Innovation and Creativity: Although Singapore is positioning itself to be a hub that champions the protection of intellectual property, we also faced an inherent problem of lacking creativity within our community. There are a few reasons to why this is happening: (i) a hierarchical type of education system where the students are told not to do this or that, although it might be changing in the process as claimed by the Ministry of Education, (ii) people are afraid to tweak the existing content (video, audio or even devices) and start innovating upon it and (iii) the fear of trespassing the law. Actually, in terms of intellectual property legislation, the US is far more stringent than Singapore. So, why are we not seeing creative things happening here? Hence the adoption of an alternative where some rights reserved can help to protect Singaporeans in trying to understand and innovate upon content. This is the phase that Singapore badly needs. In their developing phases, China and Japan started copying ideas from US. If you look at the Japan example, they have copied till the point that they start to take the best practices and drop the bad ones. This is the point where innovation starts to happen. If you ask about mobile phones and consumer electronics, Japan has the most innovative designs in the world.  If Singapore wants to move onto the creative path, we need to look in that direction.
• It's a win-win situation with the establishment: In the Creative Commons world, the establishment does not need to so tied with enforcing stringent intellectual property laws of copyright. In fact, it strengthens the establishment for relaxing on these issues. Of course, it really depends on how the creator does it. Suppose the creator of some video content takes a song from a well-known singer (with permission from the record companies) and do lip-dubbing, it may provide people to experiment new trends and new ideas while not getting caught in trouble with the law. The current legislation in Singapore on intellectual property may be too tight to allow things to happen, particularly in animation and movies.
• Moving towards a Web 2.0 mindset: The issue at the moment is that despite there exist small communities in the web 2.0 world, the majority are not. Most businesses are not embracing online advertising and corporate blogging as new tools to create value with their business. The problem is not with the corporations starting blogging or set up the tools to do videocasts and podcasts, but a paradigm shift in adopting social media. Creative Commons is part of that web 2.0 mindset that helps to build new communities and ideas that might help to create value for businesses here.

In Singapore, there needs to be a bottom up approach to engage the authorities to seriously bring Singapore into the jurisdiction of Creative Commons.

For more information on Creative Commons, please take a look at the FAQ, Opportunities and the different types of licences you can use for your creative content. You can check on the intellectual property laws (for example, copyright and patents) in IPOS.

Comments

[Ivan Chew]

I'd add one more reason -- it promotes awareness and respect of Intellectual Property. The more people create stuff, and share it out, the more they'd realise the impact of the absence of the creative commons, where their work is taken without attribution.