opera | writing notes

My hotel room overlooks the building site of the new Icelandic Opera – well actually its called the Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre but everyone refers to it as the new opera. Its an impressive building that is due to be opened in 82 days. What I find fascinating is the scale of the project. The concert hall will seat 1800 people which seems large considering the population of a Iceland is about 320,000 (Wikipedia). But is this excessive? The population of the capital city is around 120,000 (and over 200,000 in the Greater Reykjavík Area) (Wikipedia).

The new opera house

While digitalization and the Internet have killed (or wounded) some traditional national vanity projects: national encyclopedias and dictionaries have been hit very hard. Buildings remain ever popular methods of attempting to raise the national image (Oslo recently completed a gorgeous new opera house) and this new opera will be a fascinating building.

Recently the Norwegian browser released version 10, a nice slick browser and a good alternative. But I forgot to read the license. Thanks to Olav Torvund for reminding me by presenting the most important section on his blog:

By uploading Content to Opera’s site, you grant Opera an unrestricted, royalty-free, worldwide, irrevocable license to use, reproduce, display, perform, modify, transmit, and distribute such material in any manner, including in connection with Opera’s business, and you also agree that Opera is free to use any ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques that you send Opera for any purpose. For the avoidance of doubt, this clause does not apply to the files you share as an End-User of the Opera Unite, as such files are never uploaded to Opera’s site. Opera will not make a claim to own or use those files.

This is not a totally unusual claim to rights but it should make you think. Any ideas or knowledge shared via Opera belong to Opera 🙂