Author: mklang

Dawkins replies

The pope lands in Scotland and makes some strange claims

The Pope also praised Britain’s fight against Hitler’s “atheist extremism”, saying that “Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live”.

Richard Dawkins promptly replies (via Humanistbloggen):

This statement by the pope, on his arrival in Edinburgh, is a despicable outrage. Even if Hitler had been an atheist, his political philosophy was not based upon atheism and had no connection with atheism. Hitler was arguably (and by his own account) a Roman Catholic. In any case he enjoyed the open support of many of the most senior catholic clergy in Germany and the less demonstrative support of Pope Pius XII. Even if Hitler had been an atheist (he certainly was not), the rank and file Germans who carried out the attempted extermination of the Jews were Christians, almost to a man: either Catholic or Lutheran, primed to their anti-Semitism by centuries of Catholic propaganda about ‘Christ-killers’ and by Martin Luther’s own seething hatred of the Jews. To mention Ratzinger’s membership of the Hitler Youth might be thought to be fighting dirty, but my feeling is that the gloves are off after this disgraceful paragraph by the pope.

I am incandescent with rage at the sycophantic BBC coverage, and the sight of British toadies bowing and scraping to this odious man. I thought he was bad before. This puts the lid on it.

Richard

Posted on by mklang

A worthy cause

A worthy cause is worth spreading!

To promote music published under a Creative Commons license and the artists that stand behind the music Musikpiraten (Musicpirates) e.V. in 2010 organized the Free! Music! Contest for the second time. While mainly German bands and musicians competed last year, it is a truly international competition this year: 130 artists from more than 30 countries entered their pieces! Since [date] a sampler put together by a jury is available for download. [1] The finale of the Contest will be a party on October 2nd at the Kreativfabrik in Wiesbaden with five live bands. [2]

“This enormous increase in participants was only possible because of the support of many bloggers, online magazines, free radios and internet radios who all covered the contest.” says Christian Hufgard, president of Musikpiraten e.V. “Special mention has to be given to Cory Doctorow who acted as patron of the Contest” he added. [3]

The Musikpiraten’s server now yields two CDs packed to the brim with 36 legally shareable Creative Commongs songs. For those who like it particularly free there is version in OGG-format to download while a “classic” MP3 version is available, too. Both versions can be loaded via via BitTorrent, eDonkey2000 or directly through the browser. All download possibilities can be found on the website with the Contest’s results. [1]

The scope of musical styles of “Freeloaded” – that’s the sampler’s name – is as wide as that of it’s predecessor. German punk by “Das frivole Burgfräulein” – “Bonn’s best beach punk band of the world” – rock from Berlin by Shearer, synthpop by the upcoming Zoe. Leela (also from Berlin) are joined in harmony with the folk of the well known singer songwriter David Rovics (USA) and the metal from Spain (Cautiva). Also there is alternative metal by Umbra Summi Nobis (Venezuela), chiptunes from Norway (Binärpilot), Austrian acoustic rock (Amitiy in Fame), Argentinian 80s-style pop (The Kyoto Connection) and a lot more.

These two CDs display the wide variety that Crative Commons music has in the maintstream and also contains genres that hardly ever get any airplay on the radio.

There is a public voting that is open until September 30. [4] 10 t-shirts sponsored by 3DSupply are given away to the bands present on the CD. Three more prizes (sponsored by GetDigital) a music pillow, an equalizer-t-shirt and a working bongo drum t-shirt were given away using the random number generating function of OpenOffice.org. They go out to Reboot from Spain, the Sanchez Band (also Spain) and Tetania from Belarus.

October 2nd will be the climax and the end of the Contest: Das frivole Burgfräulein (Bonn), Shearer (Berlin), lax-o-mat (Chemnitz), oliversebastian.cc (Butzbach) and the Fuzzy Tunes (Darmstadt) will rock Kreativfabrik [5] in Wiesbaden with live music. Admission will be 5 and the doors open at 8pm. If at least 27 people register with kopfüber [6] there will even be a bus from Leipzig/Dresden to Wiesbaden.

At this date the sampler will be available as CD. With a pressing of 1,000 copies it will be hand numbered and sold for 2,50? (plus shipping and handling). Reservations can be made through the Musikpiraten’s website. [7]

Organizer
=========
The recognized non-profit organization Musikpiraten e.V. has the purpose of promoting free culture with a focus on music as means of artistic expression. Musikpiraten e.V. accomplishes this through the organization and sponsoring of events and competitions, supporting artists and running the internet portal http://musik.klarmachen-zum-aendern.de as a central meeting point for artists and art consumers.

===

[1] http://musik.klarmachen-zum-aendern.de/nachrichten/free_music_contest_2010_-_der_sampler-533
[2] http://musik.klarmachen-zum-aendern.de/nachrichten/free_music_party_2010-520
[3]http://musik.klarmachen-zum-aendern.de/nachrichten/cory_doctorow_schirmherr_des_free_music_contests-488
[4]http://musik.klarmachen-zum-aendern.de/content/welcher_act_vom_sampler_039freeloaded039_soll_den_t-shirt-preis_von_3dsupply_bekommen-530
[5] http://www.kreativfabrik-wiesbaden.de/programm/2010/10/43
[6] http://kopfueber.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/denn-wiesbaden-ist-ibiza/
[7] http://musik.klarmachen-zum-aendern.de/content/fmc-sampler-bestellung

Posted on by mklang

Open is nothing new

At times I feel that I am forever discussing openness. Mainly – but not exclusively – Creative Commons, Free Software & Open Source. Often I am arguing the basics of the idea with people unfamiliar with the concept and I need to overcome a great deal of skepticism. The skeptics argue that now way can it be a good idea to give away material and they are rarely convinced with the growth of modern examples. They lean back as if to say: just you wait, it will go terribly wrong.

This is why it is nice to present the skeptics with established, old examples. And recently I came across an excellent new old example.

Can you name an eighteenth century furniture designer? Most of us cannot, but all the same many of us are familiar with the name of Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779) and not because of the dancers. Thomas Chippendale was the first furniture designer to become famous – before Chippendale furniture was known by styles, monarchs or famous buyers, but not the designers.

So what did he do?

After working as a journeyman cabinet maker in London he became the first cabinet-maker to publish a book of his designs. The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director is still available in print today. The amazing thing about the publication was that it created open source furniture and allowed other furniture makers to make copies of his designs. Of course he may have lost a few commissions but going open source ensured that his fame lasted long after his death. Which is more than can be said of his contemporaries.

Sharing is caring – sharing is good business.

Posted on by mklang

Now the monks are doin' it!

SPAM just reached a new level. This just in from a Capuchin monk

I’m a Capuchin monk of the Holy House of Loreto in Marche in the centre of Italy.

Through the site www.santafamigliatv.it we are committed via Internet for the new evangelization.

To this  aim,  we ask you for one of your film footage. (any format DVD, VHS, minicassette) you have already realized, so as to include in our Schedules and our Archives.

The topic could be the presentation of your institute, your busisness vocation, your missions, ….
The movie will be offered for a year (once a week) and permanently in our archive always freely available.
In support of this activity religion we ask you for your contribution of 100€.

We invite you to know the meantime visitors to our site.

Blessing,
in SS Hearts of Jesus and Mary
P. Giovanni Maria Leonardi

Posted on by mklang

Bertrand Russell's Decalogue

In 1951 Bertrand Russell “The Best Answer to Fanaticism: Liberalism” in New York Times Magazine. The article included a “Liberal Decalogue”:

  1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
  2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
  3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
  4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
  5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
  6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
  7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
  8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
  9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
  10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
Posted on by mklang

Originals, copies and confusions

The word originality has never had a peaceful existence. In its early history it coincided with the issue of plagiarism where an author attempts to claim the works of another as his own. The Roman poet Martial (ca 41 – 104) accused one Fidentinus of repeating works he had not created in the Plagiarism cycle:

Fame has it that you, Fidentinus, recite my books to the crowd as if none other than your own.
If you’re willing that they be called mine, I’ll send you the poems for free.
If you want them to be called yours, buy this one, so that they won’t be mine.

It is from this argument that the author creates the term plagiarist which at the time referred to someone who kidnapped slaves. Read an interesting analysis: Martial 1.29: Appearance and Authorship by Peter Anderson.

According to the myth of creativity in the Middle Ages originality was not a valuable trait the author was supposed to repeat the perfect forms created by the ancients rather than attempt to meddle with perfection. In the film The Name of the Rose (1986) the reactionary character known as Venerable Jorge lays out this position

Preservation, I say, and not search, because it is a property of knowledge as a human thing, that it has been defined and completed over the course of the centuries, from the preaching of the prophets to the interpretations of the fathers of the church. There is no progress, no revolution of ages, in the history of knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime recapitulation.

With the development of the machinery of reproduction the question of original and copy began to become more interesting. The first printed books attempted to emulate the look and feel of hand-written manuscripts “…because in scholarly circles printed were regarded as vulgar and inferior products…” (Bernard Knox introduction to The Iliad p 5). The copy/original discussion was explored by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). In this essay he noted that that the work of art (the original) had a special aura which the copy doesn’t. From Introducing the Frankfurt School

Benjamin here attempts to mark something specific about the modern age; of the effects of modernity on the work of art in particular. Film and photography point to this movement. Benjamin writes of the loss of the aura through the mechanical reproduction of art itself. The aura for Benjamin represents the originality and authenticity of a work of art that has not been reproduced. A painting as an aura while a photograph does not; the photograph is an image of an image while the painting remains utterly original.

But what happens in the world where the copy becomes art? Where the ready made works of such as Duchamp’s Fountain become works of art through their contact and intentions with the artist? Well they seem to regain their aura. There is even an interesting issue of the copy of the ready mades discussed in Sam Leith’s article in The Guardian A plague of pissoirs is upon us! And there could be thousands more. This re-aura-fication also seems to happen to “everyday” objects with connections to the lives of the rich and famous. Recently Marilyn Monroe’s chest x-ray was sold for $45 000. And this week I read that you could buy J.D. Salinger’s old, uncleaned toilet for $1 000 000 on eBay!

In the midst of all this we are struggling to understand and regulate the copy in digital environment where the copy is the dominant norm. No wonder we are confused. The problem is that we believe in the myth that the physical world has a clear distinction between original and copy – and that this distinction can translate into monetary value. As long as we are confused about the physical world we can never expect to resolve the property of copies in the digital world.

Posted on by mklang

The Public Domain Mark

Important news from Creative Commons about the development of a new Public Domain Mark. This whole post is taken from the Creative Commons blog:

Almost 1½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. At the time we published CC0, we made note of a second public domain tool under development — a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.

We are publishing today for comment our new Public Domain Mark, a tool that allows works already in the public domain to be marked and tagged in a way that clearly communicates the work’s PD status, and allows it to be easily discoverable. The PDM is not a legal instrument like CC0 or our licenses — it can only be used to label a work with information about its public domain copyright status, not change a work’s current status under copyright. However, just like CC0 and our licenses, PDM has a metadata-supported deed and is machine readable, allowing works tagged with PDM to be findable on the Internet. (Please note that the example used on the sample deed is purely hypothetical at the moment.)

We are also releasing for public comment general purpose norms — voluntary guidelines or “pleases” that providers and curators of PD materials may request be followed when a PD work they have marked is thereafter used by others. Our PDM deed as well as an upcoming enhanced CC0 deed will support norms in addition to citation metadata, which will allow a user to easily cite the author or provider of the work through copy-paste HTML.

The public comment period will close on Wednesday, August 18th. Why so short? For starters, PDM is not a legal tool in the same sense our licenses and CC0 are legally operative — no legal rights are being surrendered or affected, and there is no accompanying legal code to finesse. Just as importantly, however, we believe that having the mark used soon rather than later will allow early adopters to provide us with invaluable feedback on actual implementations, which will allow us to improve the marking tool in the future.

The primary venue for submitting comments and discussing the tool is the cc-licenses mailing list. We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted on by mklang

Censorship in EU (Malta)

The tiny island of Malta rarely pops up in my rss reader but when it does I usually pay the news more attention than it deserves. Malta is a tiny island with about 400 000 inhabitants and like most islands is fairly big on introspection. What makes Malta special (for me) is the fact that I spent the first 15 years of my life there so I have experienced the narrow mindedness first hand. Don’t get me wrong the Maltese are friendly and welcoming its just when it comes to politics they are positively rooted in the dark ages. Today an article in the Guardian did come up via my rss and it began

What if there were an EU country where abortion, divorce, and blasphemy in public were all still illegal? Where freedom of expression was limited to saying nothing critical of the Catholic church, nothing that the government could call “obscene”, and nothing against the few noble families who all but controlled it? Surely, given Turkey’s problems, Croatia’s lack of membership, and Iceland’s still pending application, such a place would be expelled? Welcome to Malta.

Of course size matters but it is strange that the island is able to maintain these politics within the framework for the European Union – we should not really be surprised as the EU is still fundamentally an economic alliance and not a organisation founded in human rights. But still Malta is pushing the envelope

In the last year, the Maltese government has banned the play Stitching from being performed, has arrested and put students on trial for writing and publishing an “obscene” story, and has prevented the artist Alexander Stankovski from exhibiting paintings which contained nudity. The updated criminal code will make public obscenity or blasphemy in public punishable by up to a year in jail, even if the words or sentiments are part of a work of fiction, theatre, or art.

What if this had been a Muslim country behaving like this? Wouldn’t the criticism be louder? Is the lack of energy spent in combating blasphemy laws  a form of lazy racism? All over Europe countries are going crazy about the Muslim dress. Clothes! At the same time we accept that we have laws against blasphemy! We are concerned about women’s freedoms and the oppression of religion and yet we support certain religions by silencing criticism.

How is it that Malta is the way it is? The historic and geographic isolation of the island has enabled it to maintain its bizarre positions. In the Guardian article on the censorship of a short story O’Mahony writes a paragraph that neatly sums up the situation:

The Maltese press covered the issue, but in a factual tone. A recent interview with another Maltese writer, Frans Sammut, in the Malta Independent, allowed him the space to say he agreed with the ban of the work. However, with editorials that celebrate the Pope’s stance on paedophiles operating within the Catholic church, one cannot expect the media to help artists that write about blasphemy and their perceptions of the church’s misogyny. Self-censorship is rife on an island where everyone knows everyone else, but general opinion seems to suggest that writers were simply not taken seriously enough before the events of last year to ever fear reproach for what they produced.

Posted on by mklang

Australian attempt to abolish software patents

Interesting activities in Australia where:

“Over 500 members of the Australian software industry have have signed an open letter urging their government to abolish software patents. Signatories include free software luminaries Andrew Tridgell and Jonathan Oxer. In 2008 the Australian government began a Review of Patentable Subject Matter. While we missed the 2009 public consultation period, we hope to influence the government’s response to the Review, due in February 2011. The letter will be presented to Minister Kim Carr in early August.”

(via Slashdot)

Posted on by mklang