After more than two years’ work, the francophone member countries of the Creative Commons network (Luxembourg, Belgium, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Canada, France and Switzerland) can now access the official translation of the 4.0 licences.
Unlike the 3.0 version of the licenses, which necessitated transposition into the different national legal frameworks, the version 4.0 licenses are all identical from a contractual point of view, the only difference being of a linguistic nature. All the Creative Commons tools are now available in French; a translation of the CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license, enabling data and works to be transferred into the public domain, was produced back in 2014.
In Luxembourg, those tools are used in particular by the National Research Fund in the implementation of its policy of allowing free access to scientific publications (Open Access) by means of the CC-BY license; by the Open Data portal, which focuses on the CC Zero tool (transfer of data into the public domain); and by the National Library, which makes its catalogue available using the same CC Zero tool. Those policies allow the data to be used in an optimal way and provide added value by using text and data mining – a process which is essential for the digital economy and the development of knowledge.
Luxcommons asbl is the Luxembourg partner of Creative Commons. Its objectives are research into, and the development and promotion of, open content, open data and digital commons. A brief overview of its history has appeared on forum.lu.
Over 1.2 billion contents are disseminated on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses. For a general overview and various concrete examples, see the report entitled "State of the Commons 2016"
