Heather Ford, acting-Director of iCommons has just opened the Rio iSummit in front of approximately 300 people. Also on the panel were Ronaldo Lemos — Director Center for Technology & Society (CTS), Gilberto Gil — Minister of Culture, Brazil, Prof. Lawrence Lessig – Stanford Law School & Creative Commons Founder and Joi Ito – Venture Capitalist & Chairman of iCommons.

Ronaldo Lemos welcomed everybody to Brasil and asked in jest that nobody complain about the series of parties that are scheduled for the next 4 days, one of them being a massive Samba party on Saturday night.

Lessig delivered a very interesting presentation on the current developments of Creative Commons around the world, in over 49 countries, and was especially proud that there are now over 160 million link-backs to Creative Commons Licenses across the Internet (100 million in the last 6 months). He highlighted some of the organisations and innovative web services that are making use of CC licenses, and one of the biggest surprises was Microsoft’s announcement of a new plug-in for its Office suite which allows an end-user to easily license their work under a CC license. Lessig also mentioned the new music video from Pearl Jam which was recently released under a non-commercial CC license and is very popular on BitTorrent as well as Scoopt, a commercial citizen journalism agency, which recently announced that it was introducing a new service called ScooptWords, to help bloggers get their work published by newspapers and magazines.

Gilberto Gil, who is not only a politician, but also a popular Brasilian musician, has just finished speaking about a series of seemingly unconnected things from his daughter on the cover of his latest CD, to the rich heritage of Capoeira, to nostalgic recounts of his childhood in Salvador and Brasilian culture.