Research by IIT students to be available to all

Projects are being released under a Creative Commons license to mark the organisation?s India launch, reports Neha Dara.

The Creative Commons, an international non-profit organisation that promotes a license that is an alternate to full copyright, will launch its India chapter at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai on Friday at 4pm.

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The Creative Commons license allows copyright owners to make their work available to others to "share, reuse and remix – legally", while reserving only limited rights.

To mark the launch of CC India, the cutting edge projects of final year B Tech students will be made available on the Internet, free of cost.

According to Professor Shishir K Jha, project lead for Creative Commons, IIT students do a lot of pioneering work that normally languishes on university shelves. But Project Eklavya seeks to change that by making this work available to others to use and build upon, under the Creative Commons license.

The first of these projects will be released on Friday by Professor Deepak Phatak, who heads the Eklavya team. The foremost among these is a virtual classroom project that was funded by Intel, and connects teachers and administrators to students, allowing them to stream video lectures, set assignments, and grade students. A whole set of other software (web applications, P2P networks, audio/video applications) will also be made available free of cost.

Creative Commons was founded in 2002 by Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University. The India chapter will be launched by the organisation’s current chairman, Joichi Ito, a Japanese born, America-educated businessman.