public

Ten Important Stories

Concerned that some issues continue not to receive sustained media attention or slip off the radar screen, the United Nations Department of Public Information (DPI) has unveiled a new list of “Ten Stories the World Should Hear More About.”

2006 is the third year that the “top” ten unreported stories have been presented. If you are like me then you have probably never heard of this list or many of the stories. Read them and help publish them. So how can this happen? Well if the mainstream media doesn’t cover it then it should be blogged…

Liberia: Development challenges top agenda as the nation recovers from years of civil strife

Lost in migration: Asylum seekers face challenges amid efforts to stem flows of illegal migrants

DR of Congo: As the country moves boldly towards historic vote, humanitarian concerns continue to demand attention

Nepal’s hidden tragedy: Children caught in the conflict

Somalia: Security vacuum compounding effects of drought

Protracted refugee situations: Millions caught in limbo, with no solutions in sight

South Asian earthquake: Relief effort saves lives, stems losses, but reconstruction tasks loom large

Behind bars, beyond justice: An untold story of children in conflict with the law

From water wars to bridges of cooperation: Exploring the peace-building potential of a shared resource

Côte d’Ivoire: A strike away from igniting violence amidst a faltering peace process

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

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

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

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

Powerbook Engraving

I have been interested in engraving my Powerbook since I saw this it has taken a while but now I am on the way. In much the same way as choosing a tattoo should be done with careful consideration the choice of image was not a simple one. Where to begin?

My search began online â?? where else. After looking at tons of Chinese and Japanese woodcuts I even picked up a couple of Dover image books but I still could not find anything I wanted. So it was back online for more Chinese and Japanese woodcuts, on to medieval artworks and a long digression into the history of anatomy and in particular the works of Galen and Vesalius.

The question was (and is) one of symbolism and technology. Symbolism: Do I want a skeleton, samurai, tidal wave or dragon engraved on my computer? Technology: The image has to be good and clear so as not to mess up when engraved. This last part is what got me stuck on the monochrome illustrations but I could not find the right motif.

So then I began scouring the pictures I have collected over my computer user years and I came across a wonderful drawing of Don Quixote called â??Reflectionsâ?? by Gene Colan from 1998.

Since I want to accentuate the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza I removed the background and their reflections in the water. What is left is the two riders.

The next step was permission. I realise that this is not a question of copyright law but I still would like to have permission from the artist. So an email later permission arrived. No problem. On Monday morning I am going to the engravers…

The revolution will not be televised (Gil Scott-Heron), but it will be blogged…

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

Digital solidarity

Tomorrow its back to Stockholm for the third time in two weeks. Itâ??s a good thing that I like trains! I shall be giving a talk about Free Information in Practice. It is part of a half day seminar on Digital Solidarity and Waking Public Opinion.

Also participating are Rasmus Fleischer from the Pirate Bureau presenting a talk on â??Shared Information, effective informationâ?? and Lars Ilshammar who will be talking about the global effort to free information.

So if you are in Stockholm and have the time drop in for what looks like an exciting seminar (and its free)

Starts 12.30 ends 16.45

Place: Solidaritetshuset, Tegelviksgatan 40, Stockholm

Information online

Posted on by mklang

Portable Anonymous Surfing

When I travel I am sometimes forced to use public terminals to communicate. While doing this I often consider how insecure this method is. It does not stop me from using public terminals but it does concern me.

Now a great little application has been developed to help in situations such as these. It is a combination between Tor routing and the portable Firefox browser called TorPark.

Installation is easy: All you do is download the software. Expand it. Drag and drop the folder onto your memory stick.

Then when you have to use Internet on a public terminal simply insert the memory stick, start the TorPark which then connects to the Tor network and launches the portable Firefox browser.

Tor is about anonymous Internet use and it makes you virtually untraceable online. In addition it also protects you from local snooping as well (more documentation here). TorPark allows you to do this on public machines.

The downside is that it slows down browsing and that it only works under Windows.

(Via Suburbia)

Posted on by mklang