With a lot of curiosity I travelled to Shuzou: a city of which I had never heard before. It’s close to Shanghai and has 4 million inhabitants (that’s actually only the city centre, in total it’s 10 million…). When I arrived, the view was limited by heavy smog (or 'fog' according to the Chinese newspapers). The city is very modern, but has an amazing history of more than 2500 years, and mostly famous because of it’s original Chinese gardens (of which I saw a glimpse during my taxi ride to the Renmin University).
Professor Chunyan Wang of Renmin University and project lead of Creative Commons China Mainland invited me to give a talk on Open Design and Creative Commons. Creative Commons is an active global movement and China is no exception. Within China our Creative Commons counterparts do some excellent work with enthusiastic volunteers. Recently they were involved in a large Maker Carnival and organised the second “Focus on China” exhibition of CC Licensed Photographs. I received the book of the exhibition, which presents a dazzling visual record of the major social transformations in China.
At Suzhou Campus of Renmin University I was given a very warm welcome by the professor and her masters’ students in Intellectual Property Law. We talked about the future of sharing creative works and more specific on the new emerging areas of Open Design, Open Data and bio engineering. What are the implications and how could CC licences help to share and innovate in these areas? The need for clear and simple rules will help to share, reuse and remix creative works, not only in China or in the Netherlands, but in the rest of the world as well.
