Copyright

Important changes to license

In what is in the “sounds boring but is incredibly important and influential” category of news: The Free Software Foundation has released the GNU Free Document License version 1.3.

One of the main important changes is in Section 11 which now enables wikis to be relicensed under the from the earlier GNU Free Document License to the more flexible Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (v3.0) license. The condition is that such relicensing is completed by August 1, 2009.

That means, the Wikipedia community now has the choice to relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license. Check out the FAQ for this change to the license.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of this change to the Free Culture community. A fundamental flaw in the Free Culture Movement to date is that its most important element — Wikipedia — is licensed in a way that makes it incompatible with an enormous range of other content in the Free Culture Movement. One solution to this, of course, would be for everything to move to the FDL. But that license was crafted initially for manuals, and there were a number of technical reasons why it would not work well (and in some cases, at all) for certain important kinds of culture.

This change would now permit interoperability among Free Culture projects, just as the dominance of the GNU GPL enables interoperability among Free Software projects. It thus eliminates an unnecessary and unproductive hinderance to the spread and growth of Free Culture.

Posted on by mklang

Positive Procrastination

While procrastination is often seen as a negative act it does have a positive side. Of course if the procastination we enjoy turns out to be positive and leads to a result – is this really procrastination at all? Hmm an academic Zen koan… but I digress and possibly procrastinate.

Since returning to Göteborg from my Open Access project in Lund there has appeared a small window of opportunity to begin doing something more substantial and long term. So based upon this premise I happily ignore a bunch of more pressing, but smaller, tasks in order to create a meaningful long term project.

Thus far I have located and area, a vague plan of action, a whole bunch of related work and now I am formulating a thesis to be presented, argued and defended. So with the risk of jinxing the project by talking about it at this early stage my idea is to write a book (not very original since I am an academic) on the connection between copyright, culture and innovation.

There! It’s out now. So all I need to do now is to fine tune the thesis and begin purposely bashing the keyboard. Who said that procrastination is all bad?

From Bizzaro by Piraro

Posted on by mklang

More than a commodity

While browsing around for a starting point on my next project I came across an article I had forgotten. The article “Copying Kill Bill” is written by Laikwan Pang (Social Text 2005) and is an exploration of the connections between copyright and cultural borrowing, or stealing depending on the perspective I suppose.

A film is not only a commodity but also a complex system of cultural representation, in which cultural exchanges are so complex that today’s copyright discourse can never clearly differentiate between copyright infringement and cultural appropriations, as clearly shown in Kill Bill.

This was just the type of article I was looking for to inspire me to move forward. We have to take a step back and look seriously at the larger picture which is infinately more complex and much more interesting.

Posted on by mklang

Three more trains before FSCONS

Sitting on a train on my way home from Malmö. Tomorrow is going to be back and forth to Stockholm before the cool weekend conference FSCONS. For those of you who have not been paying attention this a bit of their blurb:

FSCONS 2008 is the first among many Free Society conferences that bridges the gap between free software and cultural freedom. Co-arranged by Free Software Foundation Europe, Creative Commons and Wikimedia Sverige, FSCONS 2008 is already a landmark event in bringing the different movements working for digital freedom together.

But seriously check out the schedule – the speakers promise to make this a special event. If you are in the area you should seriously consider showing up.

Posted on by mklang

Dibley, terrorism, dvds & other annoyances

Recently I bought the a box collection of BBC comedy The Vicar of Dibley after enjoying the content I did not turn off the DVD in time and I caught the advert against piracy which included the amazing news that “piracy supports organized crime” and “piracy supports terrorism”

This type of false propaganda annoys me on several levels. So ok I can accept that there may be a link between organized crime and piracy but terrorism???

So what between planning to fly an airplane into a building and bombing innocent civilians, terrorists sitting in caves mass pirate dvds and upload films on the Internet? What a load of bull!

Actually another thing that annoys me about dvd’s is the compulsory and very annoying copyright and piracy infomercials in the begining. It almost makes you want to be a pirate – at least they cut away that crap. If I buy a dvd I actually think it should be my right to be able to jump past the annoying useless stuff in the begining.

Posted on by mklang

Open Access & Scientific Publication in Malmö

Tomorrow I am off to Malmö to give a copyright & Creative Commons presentation at a seminar on Open Access and Scientific Publication. This should be an interesting event (not because I am there) because the speakers are an interesting group concerned with increasing accessiblity to scientific publication. Judging from the amount of registered participants it should be a good meeting. I am looking forward to the trip.

Posted on by mklang

Case studies

One thing that often surprises me is the fascination with big numbers. I think I first noticed this when I began working with Creative Commons and reporters wanted to have numbers: in particular they wanted to know how many “things” were licensed under a Creative Commons license. For several years I answered “more than 50 million” copyrightable items were licensed and the reporters were happy – they had a big quote. Actually 50 million is nothing, peanuts and it’s also irrelevant.

Big numbers are of no practical use. They are mental popcorn, in the end unfulfilling.

That’s why I was happy to see that CC launched a case study wiki some time ago:

The Case Study Wiki chronicles past, present and future success stories of CC. The goal is to create a community-powered system for qualitatively measuring the impact of Creative Commons around the world. All are encouraged to add interesting, innovative, or noteworthy uses of Creative Commons licenses.

Simply the list of CC licensed books made bookmarking the site worthwile. Like all book browsing I ended downloading:

Philipp Lenssen 55 ways to have fun with google

Christian Siefkes From Exchange to Contributions

Marleen Wynants & Jan Cornelis (eds) How Open is the Future? Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios
inspired by Free & Open-Source Software

Gustavo Cardoso The Media in the Network Society

It’s free and gratis: What’s not to like?

Posted on by mklang

CC photos of Göteborg on Flickr

Flickr has over 2 billion images – that’s a lot. If you type in the search term ”Göteborg” – my home town – suddenly you have the more manageable number of 66 804 hits. Of these 13 820 images are available under one of the six Creative Commons licenses which allow others to reuse the images.

The reason I know these numbers is that I have been doing some preparatory work for a project. I have looked through the 13 820 images and chosen 279 of them.

Posted on by mklang

Rowlings v Harry Potter Lexicon

The Harry Potter Lexicon case has been decided in favor of JK Rowling. In the Sydney Morning Herald report on the case Rowling stated that:

“The (Lexicon) took an enormous amount of my work and added virtually no original commentary of its own. Now the court has ordered that it must not be published”…

“Many books have been published which offer original insights into the world of Harry Potter. The Lexicon just is not one of them.”

The problem was that the Harry Potter Lexicon failed to show fair use (more on this aspect).

(via The House of Commons)

Technollama has written a much better review of the whole affair so hop on your broom and wiz over and read it…. This is a hot issue online right now check out the article Fans and Copyright Issues on Plagiarism Today and JKR/WB vs. RDR Books Trial: Findings of Fact & Conclusions of Law (pt 1) and the trial transcripts at the Leaky Cauldron.

Posted on by mklang