Press Release
Versión en español
Loja, Ecuador and San Francisco, CA, USA — April 22, 2008
Ecuador, the forty-fifth jurisdiction worldwide to port the Creative Commons licensing suite, will celebrate its launch today at the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL).
The Creative Commons Ecuador team has coordinated the porting process and public discussion with local and international legal experts under the leadership of Project Leads Dr. Juan José Puertas Ortega and Carlos Correa Loyola, with team members Dra. Patricia Pacheco Montoya, Abg. Verónica Granda González, and Abg. Gabriela Armijos Maurad.
The launch event will be held at University Convention Center at 6:00pm, together with the opening ceremony of university’s open courseware initiative, “Open UTPL.” Open UTPL will offer entire courses, books, study guides, and multimedia content under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Ecuador license, as part of UPTL’s initiatives dedicated to educational resources. Creative Commons Board Member Michael Carroll will join the CC Ecuador’s launch event as a keynote speaker.
The CC Ecuador team explains, “The UTPL is interested in promoting cultural production and research, so we have taken the initiative to launch the Creative Commons licenses as an alternative to ‘all-rights-reserved’ copyright. To achieve this, we have been going through a process of adapting the international license to our legislation, in discussions both public and private, and we have worked together with our community stakeholders and notable representatives in the field of copyright to reach a public presentation of its launch.”
The completion of the localized Ecuadorian Creative Commons licenses, soon available online, will be an important part of the annual Congress for Quality Assurance and Main Challenges in Distance Learning, a 3-day conference focusing on issues in education within Latin America.
About Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja
The Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja was founded by the Ecuadorian Marist Association (AME) on May 3rd, 1971. UTPL was officially recognized by the State of Ecuador under Executive Decree 646, in which it was constituted as an autonomous legal entity on the basis of the “Modus Vivendi” Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Ecuador, following the Church’s regulations in its organization and government.
The UTPL educational model is centered on “Productive Entrepreneurship” in which the students and the professors take part in real projects in the Centers for Research, Technology Transfer, Extension and Service (CITTES). The academic life of UTPL combines all the dimensions of the university: the CITTES, the Schools, their programs in the Traditional and Distance Modalities, and service to society, with a strong humanist perspective. For more information, please visit: http://www.utpl.edu.ec/.
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works, whether owned or in the public domain. Through its free copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, the Omidyar Network, The Rockefeller Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well as members of the public. For more information about Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org/.
Contact
Dr. Catharina Maracke
Director
Creative Commons International, Creative Commons
catharina [at] creativecommons [dot] org
Press Kit
http://creativecommons.org/presskit
http://creativecommons.org/international/ec/
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