ICANN just held a board retreat in Bulgaria. (See here and here for accounts from board members.) While there, ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey and board member Joichi Ito met with Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin. Bulgaria is really making a push for an open Internet as it prepares to enter the EU in January. It has recently been a hot destination for outsourcing, and is viewed as an exciting emerging market.
But among the recent measures Bulgaria has taken, one of the most exciting is the decision to license all Foreign Ministry content under a Creative Commons license.
Though not the first ministry to use a CreativeCommons license–the Brazilian Cultural Ministry uses one as well–the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry’s deed (Attribution 2.5) is even less restrictive than the Brazalian Cultural Ministry’s (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0).
In describing the importance of governments adopting such licenses, Lawrence Lessig said in 2003, “code produced and funded by the people should be made available to the
people, and it has pioneered a tool that provides the best of both the
Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons.”
