Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig's organization building a new model for a more flexible, public-friendly form of copyright, just announced its iCommons initiative. iCommons intends to take the precepts underlying the Creative Commons and "port" it to a variety of other legal systems. Issues specific to a given nation can be dealt with while still providing a consistent, comprehensible set of intellectual property laws.

The first set of countries embraced by iCommons include open-source-friendly Brazil and Finland, both China and Taiwan, and Ireland, Italy, and Japan.