New Zealand is a little closer towards having its own Creative Commons Licences. Keep an eye on the brand spanking new Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand website.

As yet New Zealand does not have specific Creative Commons Licences so for those of us who choose to licence our work in this way we are using licences which are based on US rights and laws. From the Worldwide CC website:

Our generic licenses are jurisdiction-agnostic: they do not mention any particular jurisdiction’s laws or statutes or contain any sort of choice-of-law provision. The licenses are, however, based on the U.S. Copyright Act in many respects. This means that, though we have no reason to believe that the licenses would not function in legal systems across the world, it is at least conceivable that some aspect of our licenses does not jibe with a particular jurisdiction’s laws.

And from the Creative Commons New Zealand FAQ:

You may well feel that you don’t need to take the trouble; both sets of licences are designed to give the same bundle of rights as the generic licences, so that they can be used worldwide. However, CC feels that there are advantages to switching to a New Zealand licence if you live in New Zealand. These licences have been designed to be fully compatible with national contract and copyright law. Some benefits from using a New Zealand licence would be:

• their plain English language; easier to understand than the American legal language of the generic licences;
• because they follow national contract and copyright law, they offer explicit protection of your ‘moral rights’;
• the support offered by the New Zealand project, [and its helpful joint mailing list??];
• in the very unlikely event of any dispute over the terms of the licence, they provide that this should be heard in the courts of your own country;