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Fitzgerald, Brian --- "Foreword" [2007] SydUPLawBk 28; in Fitzgerald, Brian; Coates, Jessica and Lewis, Suzanne (eds), "Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons" (Sydney University Press, 2007) 1

Foreword

PROFESSOR BRIAN FITZGERALD

In late 2003 I became involved with the Australian implementation of the Creative Commons (CC) Project along with Tom Cochrane (DVC TILS QUT) and Ian Oi (then of Blakes Lawyers now a Partner at Corrs Lawyers). We were excited by the possibilities that CC might provide. QUT became an Institutional Affiliate and an Australian version of the Creative Commons licence was completed (creativecommons.org.au).

In order to celebrate and launch the Australian version of the Creative Commons licence and inform people about the project more generally we decided to run a conference here in Brisbane in January 2005 on Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons. The chapters that appear in this volume are a result of that conference.

The conference would not have been possible without the generous support of QUT Vice Chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake. Amongst other things Peter sponsored the visit by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University Law School, the leader of the Creative Commons movement.

The speakers and participants made this conference a truly memorable event and put Creative Commons on the map in Australia. It brought many of the key thinkers of the open content movement in Australia and internationally together for the first time, and provided an opportunity for them to exchange views and research on this increasingly important topic. I am particularly indebted to Justice Sackville, former Qld Attorney General Linda Lavarch, Richard Neville, Barry Conyngham, Tom Cochrane, Stuart Cunningham, Michael Lavarch and of course Lawrence Lessig for providing their support.

Since the conference QUT has been awarded an ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (www.cci.edu.au) under the leadership of Professor Stuart Cunningham, for which I am Chief Investigator and leader of the Law Program. A Creative Commons Clinic and Creative Commons research program feature heavily in the agenda of this new Centre. The Department of Education Science and Training (DEST) has also sponsored a project – known as the Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project (www.oaklaw.qut.edu.au) – of which I am Project Leader. The ‘OAK Law Project’ will develop copyright management protocols for Open Access that can be employed by Australian research repositories.

Jessica Coates and Suzanne Lewis have done an enormous amount of work with the 2005 conference contributors to edit the papers provided by them during and following the conference into polished book chapters. Thank you also to Amy Barker, Susan Hedge and Kylie Pappalardo who assisted us with the process. Keith Done and Sian Haigh gave us tremendous support in organising the conference as did conference assistants Nic Suzor, Damien O’Brien, Amy Barker, Michael May, Amanda Campion-Steele, Cher Bartlett and Elliott Bledsoe.

I hope you enjoy reading these papers as much as we enjoyed hearing them. A video archive of the conference is available at: http://creativecommons.org.au/materials

.

- February 2007


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