The idea of the publisher In Pictures is to provide basic computer litterature with plenty of pictures. Their primary audience is the beginner in the area.
They have now released 22 computer books under a Creative Commons Att-NC-ND 2.5 license.
The library includes books on software such as Windows XP, Mac OS X Tiger, Microsoft office, Openoffice.org, Dreamweaver 8 and Photoshop. In addition to programming basics such as MySQL, PHP and PERL.
Música Lliure II contains some great jazz played by (mainly) Catalan artists is online for download. It is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. Here is the blurb from the CC log:
Música Lliure II is a terrific new CD of Creative Commons-licensed jazz music by Catalan artists like Elisabet Raspall, Karion, Ismael Duenas, Joan Diaz, and La Orquesta de la Muerte (with a bonus contribution from Brazilâ??s Gilberto Gil). Produced by FOBSIC and Enderrock, the disc is available for free with the current issue of blues and jazz magazine Jaç. As with its predecessor, Música Lliure, the songs on Música Lliure II are available for free download at culturalliure.cat. Check it out!
What is The Pirate Bay (TPB) supposed to have done?
TPB is the site of a BitTorrent tracker. In other words it helps users to locate BitTorrent files. BitTorrent is a variant (some would say development) of the Peer-to-Peer networks. It (the BitTorrent protocol) is a method for advertising and sharing files over a network.
Basically users looking for files (this can be films, music, texts, software etc) go to the search engine (TPB) and conduct a search. If they find what they are looking for they can download a â??.torrentâ?? file. This is not the actual end file they are looking for. It is a file which contains meta data about the file which they are looking for.
This data contains two sections. One that specifies the URL of the tracker and the other that contains the filename, fragment size, key length and a pass. The torrent file can contain information about many end files.
By activating the torrent file one begins the download of the end file or files. These are downloaded from several computers where the file is stored. As soon as part of the file is downloaded the downloader also becomes a source where others may download this part of the file. Once the download is complete the downloader may decide to keep this file available to others or remove it from the swarm.
Torrents are used to coordinate file sharing of copyrighted material both with and without the copyright holders consent. The technology cannot define whether the actions are legal or illegal. At present I have two complete files which I have been sharing for some time via BitTorrent. Since I am sharing complete files I am called a Seeder.
I have the most recent version of UBUNTU which is a Linux operating system licensed under the GPL license where sharing (and more) it is allowed. I have a film called Elephants Dream which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License and it is therefore permissible to share. In both these cases I am providing a service and helping the legal distribution of material.
OK â?? so that was the technical side. What does TPB do?
TPB is a search engine which helps people find the small tracker (.torrent) files. In other words the small files which contain information about where the end files are within the network. These tracker (.torrent) files are possibly not even capable of being copyrightable. If they are protected by copyright then they are the property of the author â?? in other words their creator. Not the creator of the end files that they track.
TPB case is going to be exciting to watch because the people in control of TPB are well aware of their legal position and of what they are doing. They will not have made the newbie mistake of having copyrighted material on their servers without permission.
Is it illegal to do what TPB does? If I tell you that you can buy a Gucci wallet knockoff at a well known marketplace am I guilty of the crime of â??facilitating copyright infringementâ??? Better still if I tell you how to make your own Gucci wallet am I still innocent? If I could sow and I create a copy of a fashionable suit for my own use is this copyright violation? If I instruct someone else is this â??facilitating copyright infringementâ???
If TPB are â??facilitating copyright infringementâ?? then what about Google? or Flickr? Google helps me find images and texts of masses of copyrighted material. Flickr not only helps me find it but also helps me store it?
What about the local library? They help me find and copy the material I needed to write this postâ?¦
The next step is obviously the question of the police action. The police have removed property from TPB. Removing property is a serious step and the question is whether the alleged crime motivates such action. In the case of computer equipment the question of surplus information must also be taken into consideration. In other words have the police taken too much?
TPB website today states that even servers containing material from organisations not connected with TPB were taken â?? in this case this amounts to a serious violation of an organisations ability to communicate. Can this amount of force justified â?? is the police action proportional to the alleged crime? Especially when other non-accused organisations are affected by police action.
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).
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?
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.
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…
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.
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)
Flickr has included new features in its advanced search function. You now can filter the results to search for material which has been licensed under specific Creative Commons terms.
This means that you can search the approximately 12,753,778 CC-licensed photos on Flickr across all CC licenses or only those that allow commercial use or derivative works.
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…
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.