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Academic Publishing and Copyright

The Science Commons has released three “Author Addenda” which are amendments that authors can attach to the copyright transfer form agreements they receive from publishing companies. The purpose is to ensure that the authors retain enough rights to publish their works online.

Every Science Commons Addendum ensures the freedom to use scholarly articles in teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and professional activities. They differ in the following ways:

Want more information? Read the Background and FAQ.

Posted on by mklang

Hello Denmark

Denmark has launched Creative Commons license! Here is an excerpt from the press release:

On June 10, the Danish versions of the Creative Commons licenses were
launched in Copenhagen at a ceremony held in Politikens Foredragssal. At
the event, hosted by Copenhagen Business School, Professor Lawrence
Lessig (Chairman and CEO of Creative Commons) gave the keynote
address. The ceremony was sponsored by Copenhagen Business School, Bender
von Haller Dragsted law firm (www.bvhd.dk) and IBM Denmark (www.ibm.dk).

Says Dr. Thomas Riis, â??The Creative Commons licenses will benefit the
cultural life in Denmark. Creators and users of everything from music,
weblogs and homepages to paintings and books will profit from the
licenses.â?? Dr. Jan Trzaskowski adds that â??the licenses make it much easier
and faster to exchange creative works, which falls perfectly in line with
the vibrant cultural life in today’s Denmarkâ??.

Creative Commons Denmark.

Posted on by mklang

14th European Conference on Information Systems

Tomorrow the 14th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) begins. This is the biggest annual European IS conference and this time it has the additional bonus of being in my hometown. I have been accepted to the track on â??Open Source, Open Access and the Open Information Societyâ?? with a paper entitled â??Informational Commonsâ??.

The venue: The School of Economics and Law

The conference tracks include: Communities and New Forms of Organizations – eBusiness – eGovernment – Enterprise Systems – Grand Challenges of System Development – Human Computer Interaction – Information and Knowledge Management – IS and Organizational Change – IT in Tourism and Travel – Living in, and Coping with, the society – Mobile Communication, Telematics and Ubiquitous Computing – New Technologies, Innovation and Infrastructure Development – Open Source, Open Access and the Open Information Society – Philosophy and Epistemology of IS Research – Strategic Management of IS and IT – The Economics of IS

A harbour view near the opera

The programme (including a list of all papers) can be found here.

Posted on by mklang

CC Newbie Tech Litt

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.

Posted on by mklang

Wanted: Swedish Activist Wiki

Sweden has had a long reputation for being boring. Many Swedes prefer to think of this not as boring but as safe. Trygghet (security) is very big here. Traditionally most of this security was believed to come from the state which would protect its citizens from the cradle to the grave in the classic welfare state captured in the Swedish term Folkhem (Peoples Home). In part this security comes from a long period of neutrality and lack of war or civil conflict.

The upside with security is trust. Swedes tend to be trusting and can therefore get on with their lives. The downside is that trusting people make easy targets.

Sweden does not have a strong individualistic rights based approach and therefore are very easily caught with their trousers down when official agencies approach them. A good example of this was this weeks police raid on the Pirate Bay where amongst other things:

  1. The police took more servers than they needed â?? thereby disrupting the communication of organisations not connected with the raid.
  2. The Pirate Bayâ??s legal representative was asked (required?) to leave a DNA sample â?? a gross misuse of the purpose of DNA tests and a form of intimidation.
  3. The status of surplus information is unclear at present â?? therefore creating an opening for police fishing expeditions.

How does one move from a position of trust and security to a greater awareness of individual rights, legal requirements and the demands which can be made on the legal system? Education.

To achieve this I think there is a need to create a website (preferably a wiki) on the legal position of online activists containing information about rights and obligations in the case of police actions.

A site such as this would provide information on (amongst other things):

  1. What can the police take (and limitations)?
  2. How much or how little should the activist do to help?
  3. Must the activist hand over encryption keys?
  4. What should the activist think about (ask for receipts etcâ?¦)
  5. What happens in the police station? (rights, obligations and experiences)

So does anyone want to start a wiki?

Examples of sites:

Activist Rights – Australia – Demonstrating and Civil Disobedience – FreeBeagles Legal Advice

Posted on by mklang

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

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

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

Umeå Cool

I have been invited to visit the cool people at Humlab in Umeå in the north of Sweden, on the 28 September.

Amongst other things UmeÃ¥ is involved in workshop for doctoral students with the theme â??Interaction in Digital Environmentsâ?? (21-22 August 2006). This workshop will be arranged by a local doctoral student network (Digital Interaction Research Network â?? DIRN) at UmeÃ¥ University. The network is composed of doctoral students from various departments and faculties with a common interest in the study of interaction in digital environments.

Speakers will be

– Jill Walker, Department of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen
– T.L. Taylor, Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen
РPatrik Hernwall, School of Communication, Technology & Design, Șderțrn University College
РPatrik Svensson, HUMlab, Ume̴ University

The workshop arrangers will pay for traveling participantsâ?? costs for food and accommodations. The number of participants accepted to the workshop will be limited.

Posted on by mklang