More than 120 visitors attended the presentation held in the Holiday Inn hotel; opening statements were made by the translator of the licenses and the coordinator of this process - Mr. Nikolche Mickoski from the Metamorphosis Foundation, Mrs. Neda Zdraveva from the Faculty of Law - the expert for adapting the licenses to the Macedonian legislation, as well as Mrs. Desi Pefeva, representative of the Internet Society Bulgaria, who shared the experiences of using the Creative Commons licenses in her country.

Mr. Ito held an inspirational presentation regarding the main aspects of free culture which enables the sharing of knowledge and benefits of creative work via the Internet. He emphasized that the Creative Commons system is part of the copyright protection system, with which the communication of the authors with their public is facilitated, as well as the communication with other authors that want to use their work as a basis for their own work.

Rejecting the classification of the free culture movement as an effort of idealistically liberal students and law professors, he presented several examples of Creative Commons acceptation by commercial systems interested in providing better services to their clients. He outlined that the extensions in Flicker - photo database owned by Yahoo, and in Microsoft Office, enable their clients to easily integrate and use the licenses. The preparation of a similar extension for OpenOffice is ongoing, and the diversity of all the stakeholders indicates the preparedness of Creative Commons to be an incentive for the promotion of new approaches – for the benefit of everyone. According to him, companies such as Apple - with its iTunes and iPod, realizing that users who share content, such as music over the internet, are not a threat but actually a new market, are rapidly becoming world leaders in this market.
 
Mr. Mickoski and Mrs. Zdraveva outlined some of the specifics during the process of licenses localization, such as the differences in the legal terminology; for instance, the American term “license” means “Agreement for Non-exclusive Transfer of part of the Copyrights” in Macedonian.

Mrs. Pefeva outlined that the main reason for the success of Creative Commons in Bulgaria, which holds the second position in the world with the number of licensed content, is the great support from the authors provided by setting up platforms for their mutual communication. The Government’s decision to license the texts of the laws and publish them in an electronic version was particularly positive, since they were made available to the wider public.

Aside from localizing the appropriate section for issuing licenses at the central Creative Commons website, the Metamorphosis Foundation published the opening of the Macedonian portal intended for encouraging e-content development and their promotion – www.cc.org.mk. All e-content authors will be able to learn more about the licenses through the portal, and they will be able to set links to their licensed works. The portal also provides hosting to the authors that cannot publish their work on their own websites.

Photographs, audio and video recordings licensed by Creative Commons will soon be made available at the portal.