Cyberlaw

Swedish Public Domain

Sweden, Swedish law and Swedes have a low understanding of the public domain (basically the time after copyright protection when the public is free to copy, use and adapt works, see for example Wikipedia) especially if one compares with the US approach.

One of the problems is that Swedish law does not have the concept of public domain but only the time after copyright. Americans have always been able to put things into the public domain, the closest Swedish version is extremely weak and involves releasing work anonymously (but this is NOT the same).

This â??lack of conceptâ?? makes the public domain more abstract and incomprehensible. The question is how can one increase the understanding of the public domain?

One way of not improving this concept is when the national public service radio & television begin to open up their archives but require users to have RealPlayer which is a closed standard. The whole concept is very much â??look-but-donâ??t-touchâ??

On the positive side one of the more inciteful writers on the topic is the Swedish scholar Eva Hemmungs-Wirtén her excellent 2004 book â??No Trespassingâ?? was published by Toronto University Press and in 2007 her work â??On Common Ground: a Cultural History of the Public Domainâ?? (working title) will be out.

Posted on by mklang

Free Films Online

While the main discussion on online films revolves (rightly or wrongly) on pirates downloading material. This discussion sometimes forgets that we have now reached a period when a number of films are being released into the public domain. Here is a selection of films available at the Internet Archive. Browsing their collection is lots of fun and may seriously threaten thesis work.

Things to Come (1936), William Cameron Menzies (dir.), The metropolis of Everytown is a city threatened by world war. Pacifist intellectuals try to turn the tide but efforts go unheeded by the self-interested classes, and war arrives with tanks and aeroplanes and gas bombs. The war continues for thirty years, its original purpose forgotten. Everytown is destroyed by air raids and civilization degenerates… (imdb) (Public Domain).

Le Voyage Dans La Lune (dir. George Meiles), an old 1902 film from france about a small group of scientists that travel to space on a rocket to get to the moon. (Licensed via CC Att-NC-SA).

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943) (dir. Roy William Neill) Based on the Sir Authur Conan Doyle story “The Dancing Men”, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are placed in WWII europe to help protect a scientist and his invention from the Nazis. (Licensed via CC Att).

The Kid (1921) (dir. Charlie Chaplin) The Kid was Charlie Chaplin’s first full-length movie. It, more than anything else to that date, made Chaplin a living legend. It took over a year to produce, and was an incredible success for Chaplin. (Public Domain).

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) (dir. Alfred Hitchcock) While travelling in Switzerland, the child of a well-off couple is kidnapped. She is held to ensure that her father does not reveal what he knows about a planned assassination. Since they can’t talk to the authorities, the parents plan to begin the search for their daughter on their own. This is the original, British-made movie from 1934 and is now in the Public Domain.

Mechanical Monsters (1941) A ten minute Superman cartoon where he battles a criminal mastermind and his robot army (imdb) (Public Domain).

Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) (dir. Charles Reisner, Buster Keaton) the story of a naive, college-educated dandy who must prove himself to his working-class father, a hot-headed riverboat captain, while courting the daughter of his father’s rival, who threatens to put Steamboat Bill, Sr. and his paddle-wheeler out of business. (Public Domain).

The New Adventures of Tarzan. (1935) (dir. Edward Kull) Not many realize this feature, along with ‘Tarzan and the Green Goddess’, were produced by E.R. Burroughs, himself. He wanted a screen portrayal of Tarzan as he had written him, a noble intelligent Ape Man/Lord Greystoke, not as Hollywood had made him (“Me Tarzan, you Jane”). And NO Cheetah.

Three Stooges – Color Craziness (1965) “The New Three Stooges” featured the animated adventures of Moe, Larry, & Curly Joe. The cartoons were introduced by live-action inserts with the real Stooges. These inserts were some of the only Stooges material ever filmed in color, and they also feature long-time Stooge collaberator Emil Sitka. (Public Domain).

Posted on by mklang

Bloggers & Law

While in the USA the Sixth District Court of Appeals on Friday defended (.pdf, via Wired) blogger rights to protect their sources. The case concerned Apple who claimed that the bloggers were not acting as journalists when they posted internal documents on future Apple products online. The court writes that the law is “…intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news…” and therefore it is not necessary to attempt to define the border between journalists and bloggers.

A Swedish case in 2001 (“Ramsbro” B 293-00) arrived at a similar conclusion (in Swedish). Here (pdf) is an unofficial translation of judgement by Bertil Wennergren, former justice of the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court (via Swedish Helsinki Committee for Human Rights). In this case it was an “ordinary” web page and not a blog but the conclusion was that the activity of informing the public was what defined journalism and not whether or not this activity was conducted by accredited journalists or newspapers.

This is naturally an important step on the way to defining the legal position of bloggers but it remains a small step on a long road…

Posted on by mklang

Web 2.0

Apparently O’Reilly claims that they own the term Web 2.0 so without their permission academic conferences cannot use this term. Cory Doctorow writes:

O’Reilly Media have taken a ton of criticism for attempting to enforce a service mark against a nonprofit group in Ireland that wanted to have “Web 2.0” conference. O’Reilly exec Dale Dougherty coined the term Web 2.0, and O’Reilly used it for a line of very successful conferences chaired by Boing Boing’s business manager, John Battelle (I’ve been a speaker at Web 2.0 as well, and found the con to be an amazing, eye-opening experience).

The dispute seems to have been resolved amicably. O’Reilly has apologized for sending in lawyers against the con before speaking to them, and has granted the con permission to use “Web 2.0” in its name.

I am probably not alone when I say that I like much of the stuff which comes from O’Reilly but attempts to create value in this way show that even organisations which on the surface “get” the effects of the web and have been involved in defining (Not owning or creating) web 2.0 still do some amazingly stupid things…

O’Reilly writes about this story here and includes the following from their VP of communications:

Donagh Kiernan of IT@Cork (to whom the letter was addressed) graciously talked with me late in the work day on a Friday (Irish time), and we’ve resolved the service mark issue. O’Reilly and CMP are fine with IT@Cork using “Web 2.0” in the name of their June 8 conference. And I apologized again to Donagh for the tone of our letter, and for that fact that we didn’t contact IT@Cork before sending it. That’s not the way we want to do business, and as a few of you (OK, more than a few) have noted, it was a mistake.

I’d also like to reiterate that, as Web 2.0 Conference co-chair John Battelle noted, “Remember, Web 2.0 is also about having a business that works. And not protecting your trademarks is simply bad business practice.” We’re not claiming exclusive use of “Web 2.0” in all contexts. Our service mark applies only to “Web 2.0” when used in the *title* of “live events” such as conferences and tradeshows.

Posted on by mklang

More dates

Phd silence is not the same as inactivity.

The problem has been that the examination board were not available on the 15 September. Apparently they seem to have better things to do! Anyway there are some new suggested dates on the table: 25, 26 or 27 September.

The next deadline is involves handing in the penultimate version of my thesis to my supervisor on the 5 June. Penultimate means, in this case, that it should be finished but there are a few typos.

If you do not read phdcomics then its time you began…

Posted on by mklang

CC future obstacles

Sometimes when I present Creative Commons people nod and say that its great that the project exists and I must be happy that its all over. So they are partly right. Of course I am happy that we have brought the licenses to Sweden but its not over.

I dont mean that we have to cope with improvements and updates and attempts to remove all the little bugs that tend to follow all projects. Nor do I mean the time spent presenting and discussing CC.

What I mean is that CC is just in its infancy the potential for development and growth is just amazing. Did you know that we are trying to develop lots of applications to help others use CC?

photo: adamhenning (CC by-nc-sa)

Are you a developer with time on your hands? No, I didn’t think so 🙂 but take a look at the CC developers section and become inspired to help.

Posted on by mklang

German Copyright

The German Bundesrat on the 19th May voted to change German copyright law (The Bundesrat position) which was implemented in 2003 and has received heavy criticism. (Press release)

The Bundesrat recommends a copyright legislation which is more positive towards teaching, research and education in an effort to promote scientific information and public access to such information. The public right to information has been laid out in the government plan â??Informationsgesellschaft Deutschland 2006â??

Unfortunately my German is too weak to understand this more fully. Anyone seen any translations/comments?

Posted on by mklang

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