commons

License Validity – again

TechnoLlama wrote about a Spanish Creative Commons case:

A Spanish court in Pontevedra has ruled in favour of the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) against a café named Direccion000. SGAE initiated action against the cafe to claim royalties for de public performance of music in the locale, while the owners claimed that they did not have to pay because they were only using â??free musicâ?? under Creative Commons licences.

The SGAE could show that the cafe was not entirely truthful in their claims. The music they were playing included that of members of the SGAE.

What is more interesting is that the court apparently commented on the CC licenses in the decision â??â?¦it is worth to point out that the document presented by the defendants-appellants as a licence for free use of music does not constitute anything other than a mere informative leaflet about its own content, lacking any form of signature, and therefore bereft of legal value whatsoeverâ??.

OK – let me come clean from the beginning: I am not a Spanish lawyer. But I find it incredibly hard to believe that the Spanish legal position on licenses & contracts is such that they need to be completed with the formality of the signature to be valid.

Additionally I would also like the court to explain what the value of a “informative leaflet” is under contract law.

OH NOT AGAIN… Where did these people go to law school?
The Creative Commons licensing system does not really require the status of a license to be able to survive. Under legal principles the fact that the creator has stated in an “informative leaflet” that she will not enforce her rights under copyright law is enough for me to follow the permissions and conditions stated in the Creative Commons documentation.

If I follow the documentation and the creator attempts to sue me for copyright violation (therefore  claiming that the Creative Commons is not a license) the courts would naturally understand my actions as being carried out with permission.

An analogy. Supposing a theme park which charges admission puts up a sign that admission on 1 January 2007 is free. If they (despite their previous idea) attempted to sue all visitors who did not pay admission on this date for trespassing the courts would hardly support the claims of the theme park.

Go and read:

Charles Fried Contract as Promise (We enforce contracts because they are promises â?? and we have a moral obligation to keep our promises).

Posted on by mklang

Creative Commons Photo Contest on Flickr

Creative Commons announced the first CC Swag Photo Contest on Flickr. The contest runs through December 18, 2006 (see information and rules).

The CC Swag photo contest challenges people to creatively photograph CC T-shirts, buttons, stickers, and other promotional items (all available at CCâ??s online store). and enter their photos by uploading them to the Flickr group CCSwagcontest06.

Two winners, as chosen by CC staff, will have their photos used on CC’ informational postcards, which will be distributed internationally to promote CC and the winning photographers. Winners will receive 100 copies of the postcard that features their photo. The winners will also be able to choose a CC board member to record a personalized outgoing voicemail announcement. List of Creative Commons board members.

Posted on by mklang

Late News From Rome: CC is OK

So I am late, again! But in going through some old mails this was particularly interesting. It is relevant to a post I wrote (4 Sept – Call for Copyright Activists):

Rome, August 7th 2006.

For the first time in Italy, Siae (the Italian collecting society), with a non-expiring resolution active from July 25th 2006, (documento protocollato presso l’Ufficio Multimedialità al nr. 1/290/06/FDP) recognizes the opportunity and right for the public playing of ambient music inside a commercial space, without compensation to be paid, thanks to the adoption of copyleft licensing schemes (like CC, Art Libre, Copyzero x, Clausola Copyleft) or in the public domain.

Inside the ice cream shop Fiordiluna, in the heart of the Trastevere district in Rome, there is a multimedia space (32″ lcd monitor and Bose speaker system) managed by a Linux pc with free software on it, through which audio, video and literary works with copyleft-like licenses or in the public domain are publicly played.

This major historical achievement has been made possible by the work of Ermanno Pandoli (Giapster and Quindicino) who is a member of the Liberius digital window of the FrontiereDigitali network and who has represented the Fiordiluna ice-creamery to Siae.

Those interested in exposing their works inside the ice-creamery may inform the relevant groups inside the FrontiereDigitali network. To obtain more information on the legal and logitical procedures to follow it is also possible to contact the Liberius digital window.

English translation by Luigi Canali De Rossi, Master New Media Association.

This is an excellent way of bringing about change in the present copyright regime. By enabling businesses to avoid paying the collecting societies and (as in the case above) making a name for themselves we can see how creativity can make a difference. And how it can work outside the narrowly defined conventional music models.

Posted on by mklang

Editable Free Film

The Brazilian film Cafuné has been simultaneously released both in the cinemas and on the Internet. It uses a Creative Commons license which allows users to create different story ends.

There are two versions of Cafuné are available for downloading at the Overmundo website: one 91 minutes long and one 73 minutes long. More info available here.

The license allows users to both watch the film – but wait there is more! With this license you can edit the film on your own. Why not add sub-titles in the langauge of your choice? Or adapt the language to your local dialect. Don’t like the ending – well edit the movie!

This license empowers the movie-watcher to go beyond the passive experience and become part of the creative process. Great work.

Now all I need is a translator…

Posted on by mklang

Wanna make a rock video?

The dream of the 80’s was to make a rock video. Maybe it still is, maybe I am just old. Never mind the wandering mind of an old man. Now it’s time to dust of the camera and create a video…

CC Netherlands held a music contest and had a distinguished panel of judges select 13 tracks of 130 submissions. They want to release a DVD … so they need video. That’s where you come in. Read about the video contest on iCommons.org and creativecommons.nl.

If you can’t or don’t feel like making a video – why not just download the music to the 13 tracks that made the cut?

1: Electric Seaweed (bandsite) – So Far Away (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
2: Elstar (bandsite) – Monsters (download mp3) (Att-NC-ND)
3: Hazy Jane (bandsite) – A Birds Eye View (download mp3) (Att-ND)
4: JIVA (bandsite) – Right Now (download mp3) (Attr-NC-ND)
5: Marco Raaphorst ft. Lisa DeBenedictis (bandsite) – Cuckoo (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
6: Messier 84 (no site) – Ransack (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
7: Monokai (bandsite) – Mier (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
8: Pourquoi Me Reveiller (bandsite) – All I Want (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
9: Quallofill (bandsite) – Her Private Playground (download mp3) (Att-NC)
10: Sickboys and Lowmen (bandsite) – Sunny Days (download mp3) (Att-NC-ND)
11: Solaire (bandsite) – I am not sad (download mp3) (Att-NC-ND)
12: The Longing (nog geen site) – Forbidden Love (download mp3) (Att-ND)
13: We Vs Death (bandsite) – Thomas Corner And The Valleyhouses.mp3 (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)

The abreviation at the end of each line is the license terms – click for more detailed information.

Posted on by mklang

Creative Commons Launch Colombia

If you happen to be in Colombia on the 22 August then you are invited to go to the Creative Commons launch party in Bogota.

There will be two separate events, in the morning at the Polictecnico Grancolombiano University we will present several speakers that will include: Proffesor Laurence Lessig, the ccColombia team, SIB (Colombian Biodiversity Information System), Eltiempo.com (an important nationwide newspaper that will begin to offer their citizen journalists the opportunity to use Creative Commons licenses in its online portal) and The Free Software Community.

This venue will be webcast here and here at 14:30 GMT.

In the afternoon we will be having an open content session in one of Bogota’s most vibrant public space: The Biblioteca Publica Virgilio Barco with a live performance by Silvia O and several DJs, VJs and Bloggers that will be displaying their CC work. This venue will be webcast here at 23:00 GMT.

Be sure the check the visual memories of the launch by searching the tag: cccolanzamiento on flickr.

If you do go please say Hi from CC-Sweden to your host – Jaime Rojas

Posted on by mklang

Creating the Information Commons

Who created the term Information Commons? Today we use it and expect most people to understand what it means – even if it is a term used in a relatively specific group discussion.

In part the term owes a lot to those who did not even use it. Writers such as Hardin (Tragedy of Commons 1968), Rose (Comedy of Commons 1986) and Ostrom (Governing the Commons 1990) have all created the term commons and formed the discussion to what it is today. The act of adding their term to the concept of information was, in reality, an obvious step. But who took this step?

Here are a few candidates to the early use of information or informational commons – please let me know if someone is missing…

Felsenstein, Lee. “The Commons of Information.” Dr. Dobbs Journal, (May 1993): 18-24. http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/commons.html

Peter Jaszi & Martha Woodmansee, The Construction of Authorship 11 (1994) includes the quote: â??creeping enclosure of the informational commonsâ??

Alok Gupta, Dale O. Stahl & Andrew B. Whinston, The Internet: A Future Tragedy of the Commons?, Paper Presented at the Conference on Interoperability and the Economics of Information Infrastructure July 6-7, 1995

Andrews, William. “Nurturing the Global Information Commons: Public Access, Public Infrastructure.” Presentation at the 4th Annual B.C. Information Policy Conference Vancouver, B.C., October 28, 1995. http://www.wcel.org/wcelpub/present/ipc95t.html

Scott R. Lundgren â??A Tragedy in the Information Commons?â?? Fall 1997 http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~humae105/fall97/slund01.htm

Onsrud, H.J., “The Tragedy of the Information Commons” in Policy Issues in Modern Cartography (Elsevier Science) 1998, pp. 141-158. Online draft http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~onsrud/pubs/tragedy42.pdf

Brin, David. “The Internet as a Commons.” in Milton T. Wolf, et. al. Information Imagineering: Meeting at the Interface. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1998: 240-245.

Halbert, M (1999) ‘Lessons from the information commons frontier’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp.

Beagle, D (1999) ‘Conceptualizing an information commons’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 82-89.

Posted on by mklang

CC Books Wiki

Looking for books distributed under a CC license? Then here is a wiki for you. Actually these kinds of pages are really good unless they become too popular and all of a sudden they implode because of their own success â?? information overload, too many books make the search for the book you want impossible.

But letâ??s not get carried away with early Sunday morning pessimism. If you know of a book which belongs on this wiki â?? add it. If the concept of book confuses you (which all concepts have done since the great Plato/Aristotle disagreement on the theory of forms) then you might be helped by the wiki definition.

By “book” we generally mean works over 35,000 words that are or have been commercially available in hardcopy and have an ISBN. We’ve expanded the definition in two added sections below, however, to include the most popular books published through do-it-yourself press Lulu, and “books” published on websites of established organizations or notable blogs.

(via Open Access News)

Posted on by mklang