According to the website Metrics

Chile leads Latin America in the use of Creative Commons licenses

Chilean creators are increasingly using the system of free licenses, especially with regard to digital contents, thus fostering creativity and collaboration.

Monday, March 29, 2010  

Chileans are the ones making the most extensive per capita use of CC licenses in Latin America

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Internet is much more than piracy. As the eternal controversies rage over the use of intellectual property rights on the web, entrepreneurs from all over the world nave formed a great community of independent developers who seek a new way to share information.

 

One of these initiatives that has managed to achieve the greatest scope is Creative Commons (CC), an organization that has developed a kind of license intended to protect intellectual creative rights on the Internet without restricting their free use. The system is characterized by its simplicity and flexibility, which has led close to 350 million creations to adopt it.

 

Chile has not lagged behind in taking up its use. In fact, according to a study by the same company, Chileans are the ones making the most extensive per capita use of CC licenses in Latin America. “We are seeing change in Chile; the Internet is an increasingly important part of our lives,” explains Álvaro Olivares, an attorney and a member of the Ubuntu-cl Council, a Chilean community of users of the free operating system based on Linux.

 

Olivares affirms that currently in Chile, on the one hand “people demand contents, while on the other content providers are seeking the way to protect their rights and to create business models around them. If they want to copy models that are similar to foreign ones then they will come up against something that is very much part of the way we Chileans are: we like and trust what is free. It’s not like that everywhere in the world,” he says.  

 

The exponential growth in the use of CC licenses represents a promising step toward fostering a culture without bureaucratic or corporate barriers. On a global level, these licenses are most used in Europe (led by Spain) and Asia, while in Latin America Chile is followed by Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

 

In Chile the use of this system of licenses and other initiatives related to the movement of free software has developed alongside growth in internet use in the country. In fact, over the last four years there was an 82% increase in the number of Chilean homes with Internet, rising to over 2.2 million, while a quarter of broadband connections are mobile.

 

“There are currently thousands of cases where CC has been used in Chile successfully. You just have to browse Chilean websites and blogs to see that there is a tremendous amount of content licensed through CC,” he says. One example of this is the over 20 Chilean artists who publish their music using this system on the global website Jamendo, which promotes the use of CC licenses for music.

 

There are even examples in the media: the electronic newspaper El Mostrador has licensed all of its news and articles with Creative Commons, including text, graphic items, and images. That way the website allows you to copy, distribute, and publish its contents, though without commercial ends.