Dr. Shashi Tharoor Relaunches Creative Commons India

Dr Shashi Tharoor launched the Creative Commons India chapter at the India islamic Cultural Centre. Dedicated to building a body of creative work that is free to share and build upon, Creative Commons India is being spearheaded by Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society and Acharya Narendra Dev College (University of Delhi). While Centre for Internet and Society would be responsible for looking after the legal aspects, Wikimedia India would take care of outreach. Acharya Narendra Dev College would continue to do advocacy work of Open Educational Resources, that is under a CC BY SA license.

Dr. Shashi Tharoor has acknowledged the fact that open source knowledge is the key to the future - educational content has to be freely available to ensure access to educational to all in the country. He was instrumental in implementing the CC-BY-SA license for National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER) - for educational content created by NCERT. CC licences are used for educational content but these very licences are useful in disseminating music, art, images and other creative works. Moksh Juneja, President, Wikimedia India states, "Using Creative Commons India license for all original content creators will boost and enhance the quality of content. As a dedicated team of Wikipedia volunteers we would be championing and reaching out to education institutes, libraries and government bodies to release the information under a CC license."

Dr Savithri Singh, Principal, Acharya Narendra Dev College (University of Delhi) is strongly of the opinion that any content created out of public funds should not be put under copyright - they have to be available to the public - hence open CC licences. ANDC has been committed to Open Educational Resources (OER) movement in India since last 7 years and has been at the forefront of advocacy of OER among educational institutions since then. Sunil Abraham, Executive Director will be leading the CIS efforts in helping the community in understanding the legal implications of adoption of CC licences in India.