World Aids Day
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CC Press Release
This press release is available from here
Silicon Valley-based NGO introduces its innovative copyright licenses in Sweden
San Francisco, CA, USA and Berlin, GERMANY â?? November 30, 2005 â?? Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative work free to share and build upon, today unveils a localized version of its innovative licensing system in Sweden.
Creative Commons copyright licenses are available free of charge from the groupâ??s website (http://creativecommons.org). The licenses allow authors and artists to mark their works as free to copy or transform under certain conditionsâ??to declare â??some rights reserved,â?? in contrast to the traditional â??all rights reservedâ??â??thereby enabling others to access a growing pool of raw materials with minimal legal friction.
Staff at Creative Commonsâ?? offices in San Francisco and Berlin worked with Project Lead Mathias Klang and Karl Jonsson of the Creative Commons Sweden team to adapt the standardized licenses to Swedish law. Creative Commons Sweden is hosted and supported by the IT University of the University of Göteborg.
Today the Swedish versions of Creative Commons licenses are being launched and will be available at http://creativecommons.org/ worldwide/se.As a first official use of the Swedish Creative Commons licenses, the Swedish band Auto-Auto will be releasing their new EP â??Totemâ?? on December 13, 2005 under a Creative Commons license. â??Totemâ?? will contain five tracks and will be available for download at http:// www.auto-auto.se/. Together with the release, the record company and Internet community Substream are making a remix-kit freely available and will be announcing a competition for the best remix of â??Totem.”
About Göteborg University and IT University
IT University is a faculty within Göteborg University. It is a new addition to the centre for IT research, education and development in the west of Sweden. This venture offers excellent scope for cooperation between researchers within different areas of expertise and specializations. The programs offered are based on advanced research and are in a constant state of development.
Göteborg University offers the most comprehensive range of courses and degree programs in Sweden. Göteborg University has about 40 000 students, a staff of well over four thousand, and almost as many part- time teachers spread over approx. 70 departments.
For general information, visit http://www.gu.se/ & http://www.ituniv.se
About Creative Commons
A nonprofit corporation founded in 2001, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic worksâ??whether owned or in the public domainâ??by empowering authors and audiences. It is sustained by the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Omidyar Network Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation.
For general information, visit http://creativecommons.org/
Contact
Christiane Asschenfeldt
Executive Director CC International, Creative Commons
christiane@creativecommons.org
+49.30.280.93.909Mia Garlick
General Counsel & COO,
Creative Commons
mia@creativecommons.org
+ 1 415 946 3073Mathias Klang
Project Lead Sweden
klang@creativecommons.se
+46705432213Karl Jonsson
License coordinator Sweden
jonsson@creativecommons.se
+46707454211Press Kit
Boys, girls & computers
Ada Lovelace was an expert on the Babbage analytical engine. Her “Notes” on the engine contained the first published computer program – instructions on how to calculate the Bernoulli numbers.
Grand Text Auto report that Hanna Wallach presented preliminary results from FLOSS-POLS survey. Part of the data shows that while boys have their own computer by the age of 15 most girls have to wait until they are over 20.
In a report on IT related Crime (Lars Emanuelsson Korsell och Krister Söderman) from The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention from the year 2000 we find the wierd and wonderful quote:
â??Män misstänks för dataintrÃ¥ng, de manipulerar, raderar och stjäl program, filer eller data. När kvinnor misstänks som gärningsmän handlar det mestadels om interna dataintrÃ¥ng â?? obehörig registerupplysning och radering av filer, program eller data. Endast tre kvinnor misstänks för databedrägeri.â??
Källa: IT-relaterad brottslighet, BR�-rapport 2000:2
Loosely translated: Men are suspected of breaking into computer systems, they manipulate, erase and steal programs, files or data. When women are suspected it is mostly internally accessing computer systems – unauthorised looking at files and erasing files, programs or data. Only three women are suspected of computer fraud.
The authors therefore state that men are actively carrying out manly tasks of destruction while women are driven by curiousity to peek into files. Men “break, manipulate, erase and steal” while women look and erase. Even to the most untrained this is a joke. Men are doers who do macho stuff while women are either driven by curiousity or erase (by incompetence?).
I realise that the report is from 2000 but… come on!! Can they have written this with a straight face?
Canadian Lego & Lacie Hardisks
In the case of Kirkbi AG v. Ritvik Holdings Inc. (aka Lego v Mega Blocks) focus was on Lego bricks. The Lego patent has expired and the bricks are in the public domain. The company however is attempting to stop others from manufacturing similar bricks by claiming trademark infringement.
The Canadian Supreme Court, titled “the court that gets it” by Micheal Geist found the right balance in the case and wrote in its decision:
“In the end, the appellant seems to complain about the existence of competition based on a product, which is now in the public domain. As â??LEGOâ?? and LEGO-style building blocks have come close to merging in the eyes of the public, it is not satisfied with distinctive packaging or names in the marketing operations of Ritvik. It seems that, in order to satisfy the appellant, the respondent would have to actively disclaim that it manufactures and sells LEGO bricks and that its wares are LEGO toys. The fact is, though, that the monopoly on the bricks is over, and MEGA BLOKS and LEGO bricks may be interchangeable in the bins of the playrooms of the nation â?? dragons, castles and knights may be designed with them, without any distinction. “
Ouch! Excellent reasoning. I agree with Micheal any court that spells it out in this way is definately a court that gets it! While I sympathise with Lego for nostaligic reasons it is not enough to give them trademark rights over the shape of every little brick.
While on the topic of bricks take a look at the new stackable Lacie hard drives. In their own words “Professional storage is now easy and fun”. The image above shows the Lacie harddrives. Something about toys for boys springs to mind.
Psst! Sneak preview! CC Sweden
The official launch of the Swedish Creative Commons licenses is 30 November, however for the readers of this blog (and of Kalle’s Cyberlaw blog) we are offering a sneak preview!
The CC licenses for Sweden are live already! The first site to ever use a Swedish CC license is the Cyberlaw blog. A place in history for Kalle.
To start using the licenses go to creativecommons.org.
Art is garbage
Not for the first time someone is using Garbage as art. Even if this does not qualify as art it is, at least, a very weird souvenir.
The artist picks up bits of New York garbage (subway tickets, fast-food wrappers, broadway tickets) and arranges them in numbered, dated and signed plastic cubes (they dont smell!). Apparently over 700 cubes sold around the world.
Weird souvenir, but at the same time very apt. Stange Swedish souvenirs I have seen are canned/tinned air! and moose dung in a jar!
Found Magazine
Found Magazine is based upon a simple but fascinating idea. The magazine is made up of other peoples debris. It could be small notes, doodles or pictures which other people have lost, dropped, thrown away or forgotten. This is simple social commentary at its best.
BookCrossing
This belongs to the things I should have blogged about ages ago but keep forgetting. The idea for BookCrossing is to take a book and “release” it into the wild. The book is marked with the label below and the idea is that the book will travel around and if the original releaser is lucky then he/she will get email reports on were the book is.
Never heard of bookcrossing? It has even made the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as a new word.
A similar project is Phototag which periodically releases a series of disposable cameras into the wild. The cameras are labeled and have instructions for unwary PhotoTaggers to take one picture and pass the camera on. Postage and a return address are included on the camera so that it may simply be dropped into the mail to get back home when all the film is used up.
Quote
“Let us return to what was and ever should be the office of this Abbey: the preservation of knowledgeâ??â??preservationâ?? I say, not â??search for;â?? because there is no progress in the history of knowledge, merely a continuous and sublime recapitulation.”
Said by “Venerable Jorge” in the film “The Name of the Rose” – I cannot remember if it is the same in the book.
Blogging revisited
In a previous entry I reported reasons why a blogger (especially academic) should blog. Naturally these views are not unanimous. Here is an anonymous submission to the Chronicle of Higher Education signed by the pseudonym Ivan Tribble. Remember the Tribbles from original star trek fame? Small furry, soft, gentle animals whose cute appearance and soothing purring endears them to every sentient race which encounters themâ??with one notable exception: Klingons.
Anyway Ivan Tribble writes about blogs:
â??The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one’s unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It’s not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it’s also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.
A blog easily becomes a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent petty gripes and frustrations stemming from congested traffic, rude sales clerks, or unpleasant national news. It becomes an open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.
Worst of all, for professional academics, it’s a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation.â??
The more positive approach to blogging mentioned above (Alex Soojung-Kim Pangâ??s If you’ve got a day job…) focused on four reasons to blog: Practice of the skill of writing, gain readers fame & credibility, participate in a discourse and finally market yourself. All these four are important to the academic (and to the blogger).
Tribbleâ??s argument against the blog concern the situation where you are a job applicant and the stuff which you have written online can be used against you. Both when the committee looked at the applicants online appearance â??…it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck.â?? Another aspect which causes blogging concern is the very existence of the blog… â??Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.â??
Captain Kirk with Tribbles
So basically the blog is like the Tribble – cute, furry and soothing to all (except the Klingons) but remember the problem with Tribbles? The crew of the Starship Enterprise spent so much time cuddling with, and being cuddled by, the Tribbles that they no longer functioned as a crew. In a sense the blog can become like Tribbles. Surrounded by both our own and others we exist in a quasi world of our own creation which is not a bad thing unless we replace the â??realâ?? world with the blogged one.