commons

ccPublisher & Internet Archive

ccPublisher is out in a new version. ccPublisher is an application that helps you select a CC license for your audio and video files. It then helps you tag your files and upload them to the Internet Archive for permanent free hosting. If you prefer to host elsewhere ccPublisher will generate some HTML for you that lets others validate the license it embeds in the file.

By the way – If you haven’t done so already then you should take a nostalgia trip on the Internet Archive’s wayback machine. Here are some examples of what the web used to be like in the olden days…

Chalmers Technical University 1996

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Göteborg University from 1997

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Finally, this is my website in 2001 thankfully my earlier aesthetic experiments seem not to have been saved for the afterworld…

Posted on by mklang

Commons Bibliography

OK – so this really should be a wiki. But consider this to be a quick and dirty version. I am collecting a bibliography on litterature on the commons. Both theoretical contributions on the commons in general and applications (such as) Creative Commons.

The current list is here and a non-english version is here. To add to it please leave a comment to this post.

Posted on by mklang

People & technology

The concept of technological determinism can be explained with the quote from Homer (unconfirmed) â??The blade itself incites to violenceâ??. When I try to explain technological determinism to my students I usually ask them to think about their iPods. What are the people who build and sell a device which fits 10 000 songs saying about intellectual property?

Another cool application of technology is flickr.com. I like the work of the graffiti artist Banksy so here are a few images taken from the Banksy pool.
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wyn gilley

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Marble Arch. Nolifebeforecoffee.
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Near Drayton Park Train Station, N7 London. atomic shed.

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Hocker Street, Shoreditch. distantbombs.
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Corner of Noel Street and Poland Street, London, 2001. Simon Crubellier.

The point (not of Banksy but of technology application) is that in a cool interconnected way I can follow Banksyâ??s work. Since he is a graffiti artist it is not going to be displayed for too long. Flickr provides both the storage medium but also a searchable area where interests can gather. Not only can I find images from all over the world I can also follow them by theme (e.g. Banksy) and see the work of different photographers. The development of the social organisation of photography via sites like this is very cool.

The point is not simply mindless technology optimism but rather that given a technological base people will find social uses for it. It is not about developing a business model but rather that by applying technology in an unorthodox way people will develop and organise their interactions with the help of technology. But we still need to develop the technology and make it more available, cheaper and free to manipulate.

Part of the problem is (naturally) that there is not enough political will to fulfill this vision. As soon as we approach anything like this someone starts talking about the need to ensure that business can profit from technology. Profiting from technology is ok – but not if it stops the development of a better socio-technical organisation. The development of a new socio-technical organisation began the dissemination of the web but has faltered with the demands of business to make profit and the inevitable crash of a market based upon words & greed…

Posted on by mklang

Pearl Jam & CC

The video for Pearl Jamâ??s new single â??Life Wastedâ?? is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs license, so that the people around the world can legally copy, distribute, and share the clip.

This is the first music video by Pearl Jam in eight years that Pearl Jam and also the first time that the band has licensed work under one of Creative Commonsâ?? copyright licenses.

Pearl Jam and J Records are offering the video as a free download at Google Video and Pearl Jamâ??s website from May 19th, through May 24th. After May 24th, the clip will be made available for sale.

Posted on by mklang

Elephants Dream

Licensed under the Creative Commons license and created by using open source tools the animated short “Elephants Dream” is now ready for download. The movie and production files are licensed under “Creative Commons Attribution 2.5”, which only requires a proper crediting for public screening, re-using and distribution.

 

 

“Elephants Dream” is the result of almost a year of work, a project initiated and coordinated by the Blender Foundation. Six people from the Blender user/development community were selected to come over to Amsterdam to work together on an animated short movie, utilizing Open Source tools only.

More information about the film here.

(via Free the Mind)

Posted on by mklang

CC to version 3

At present the state-of-the-art Creative Commons licenses are at version 2.5 and now we begin the public process of making the transition to version 3. There are four main reasons for this move:

(a) Incorporate MIT negotiated amendments to all licenses (incl. Sampling) to enable MIT to switch over to using a standard CC BY-NC-SA license.
(b) Incorporate Debian negotiated amendments in the hope that they will declare some of our licenses (those without the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives license elements) â??freeâ?? according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
(c) Spin off the current â??genericâ?? license to be the US license & (hopefully) create a real generic license.
(d) For those jurisdictions that protect the moral right of integrity, (i) incorporate an icon signifying the retention of this important right in the Commons Deed and, (ii) to ensure that the Legal Code for all of these jurisdictions expressly retains the right of integrity.

These are all important reasons but I am particularly interested in the moral rights (d) issue (maybe becuase I am from a jurisdiction which has moral rights) and the chance of being recognised as “free” according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (b) because it is important to interact with the Free Software movement in a deeper way. The Free Software movement not only predates CC it remains the most stringent among the movements which most people carelessly lump together as Open Source. For a longer discussion on this and the meaning of free software look here.

Do you want to participate in the process? Here is how…

Getting to Version 3.0

It’s that fun time again when we start contemplating versioning up the licenses. An outline of why we’re thinking about doing this and how CC proposes to do this has just been posted to the cc-licenses list. Please participate in the discussions on the cc-licenses list – you can sign up here.

Submitted by Mia Garlick on 2006-05-17 04:07 PM.
Posted on by mklang