The China Vortex

I’m in Hong Kong on business, and have had the opportunity to participate in the activities related to the launch of the Creative Commons Hong Kong. Rebecca MacKinnon has done an excellent job, along with some other faculty members from Hong Kong University, in making this a very informative and interesting event. At the event, I met with Angus Lau, who is another twitterer, and has done a lot to keep the Internet a lively topic in the SAR. Most recently, Angus has been active in organizing the recent Open Web Asia event in Korea.

Creative Commons Hong Kong

My takeaway from the Creative Commons Hong Kong event is that Hong Kong is in an excellent position to promote CC in Asia. It’s press is relatively open and free, and it really should be an excellent publishing center, especially for those connecting China and the west. In my opinion, it has not yet realized its full potential. Surprisingly, there are relatively few bridge people, who understand both the west and China as one would think. People fall into their own groups of Hong Kong people, who are interested in local gossip, westerners working for multinationals, and some Chinese from China. To a large extent, they don’t mix with each other as much as they could. This is unfortunate.

In spite of this, there are things I like about Hong Kong:

• Clean safe food
• Clean public toilets
• Real broadband of at least 200K up and down
• MOS Burger

The first three things, I’m sure you can understand.

But, what’s MOS Burger? Put simply, it’s a Japanese hamburger chain. Its hamburgers are delicious, and in true Japanese fashion, they have an eye to detail, taste and preparation which is better than McDonalds. It has stores in Hong Kong, but none in China.

If you are a computer nerd (if you read this blog regularly, you probably are more or less), then MOS burgers are to MacDonalds what Macintosh is to Windows. It’s just better, and it costs more. And I mean tastier, and sits more comfortable on your stomach after eating.

If you order a set meal, you can get a garden fresh salad as part of the C meal. (Maybe that’s why they don’t have the chain in China. Garden fresh salad in China? Ummm, I don’t know…) So, when I get to Hong Kong and after I have had my meetings, my job is to find out where the nearest MOS Burger outlet is.

BTW, if you don’t believe that it tastes better than MacDonald’s, I’d be happy to take you for a taste test.

On Sunday November 4 I had the opportunity to attend the first Creative Commons Photo Awards ever held worldwide at the National Library in Beijing. I was invited, and there was a wide range of overseas guests, including Joichi Ito, president of Creative Commons and Dr. Catharina Maracke, director. The whole event was put together by Prof. Wang Chunyan, who is the project lead for the Creative Commons Mainland China. She also serves as assistant professor of law at Renmin University of China.

There were some 4,000 photographers who submitted their photos for judging. The judging panel was made up of independent photographers and photo editors at Xinhua News Agency. There were some excellent speeches in Chinese about the development of Chinese photography. Joichi Ito spoke about Creative Commons licenses and about how to select them, while Dr. Maracke made an introduction to the CC licensing model, and how it has been implemented in some 80 countries, giving content creators some level of control over the degree of licensing they wanted to give.

Stewart Cheifet, who serves on the board of Creative Commons Mainland China, discussed how there are now new software programs which help content creators easily choose the license they want to grant.

Overall, the exhibition reached a perfect balance between photo appreciation/education and legal licensing. Photos were judged and voted on online which was made available through a Chinese language website for this event.

The whole event was covered by Sohu, the leading media sponsor, one of China’s leading news portals. Here is the Sohu article (in Chinese).

In the evening, I had dinner with Joichi Ito and the Sohu correspondent, Cherry Cheng, about how Creative Commons licensing lowers the costs of marketing for new content creators. By making low-resolution photos available for free, they can lower the very considerable costs of marketing their works. He told about how a new musician from Colombia released her vocals on the Internet, and found it incorporated into the music of other musicians, giving it far wider coverage than she would have had under traditional licensing methods.

Most who are new to the CC licensing model grant very limited rights, but when they become more comfortable with it, they grant more generous licensing terms, including commercial uses of their works. This is a strong trend.

Later on, we discussed some of the continuing misunderstandings between Japan and China, and how both sides needed to do more to build trust with each other. Aside from his involvement in the Creative Commons, Joichi also offered excellent insights into understanding Japanese politics, a subject which he covered very well in an article published by the New York Times.

Creative Commons is becoming more active in China, which is a very good thing. The Chinese are used to getting beaten over the head by the US congress about IP violations; now it is apparent that even many Americans feel that the US copyright law, which is largely dictated by larger traditional media companies, is broken and needs to be fixed. Earlier on, I posted about Cory Doctorow’s visit to Beijing in September, which was very well received.

It is Monday morning in Beijing as I write this, and I see that Joi has already posted about the event on his blog.

Amazing!