commons

Wanna make a rock video?

The dream of the 80’s was to make a rock video. Maybe it still is, maybe I am just old. Never mind the wandering mind of an old man. Now it’s time to dust of the camera and create a video…

CC Netherlands held a music contest and had a distinguished panel of judges select 13 tracks of 130 submissions. They want to release a DVD … so they need video. That’s where you come in. Read about the video contest on iCommons.org and creativecommons.nl.

If you can’t or don’t feel like making a video – why not just download the music to the 13 tracks that made the cut?

1: Electric Seaweed (bandsite) – So Far Away (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
2: Elstar (bandsite) – Monsters (download mp3) (Att-NC-ND)
3: Hazy Jane (bandsite) – A Birds Eye View (download mp3) (Att-ND)
4: JIVA (bandsite) – Right Now (download mp3) (Attr-NC-ND)
5: Marco Raaphorst ft. Lisa DeBenedictis (bandsite) – Cuckoo (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
6: Messier 84 (no site) – Ransack (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
7: Monokai (bandsite) – Mier (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
8: Pourquoi Me Reveiller (bandsite) – All I Want (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)
9: Quallofill (bandsite) – Her Private Playground (download mp3) (Att-NC)
10: Sickboys and Lowmen (bandsite) – Sunny Days (download mp3) (Att-NC-ND)
11: Solaire (bandsite) – I am not sad (download mp3) (Att-NC-ND)
12: The Longing (nog geen site) – Forbidden Love (download mp3) (Att-ND)
13: We Vs Death (bandsite) – Thomas Corner And The Valleyhouses.mp3 (download mp3) (Att-NC-SA)

The abreviation at the end of each line is the license terms – click for more detailed information.

Posted on by mklang

Creative Commons Launch Colombia

If you happen to be in Colombia on the 22 August then you are invited to go to the Creative Commons launch party in Bogota.

There will be two separate events, in the morning at the Polictecnico Grancolombiano University we will present several speakers that will include: Proffesor Laurence Lessig, the ccColombia team, SIB (Colombian Biodiversity Information System), Eltiempo.com (an important nationwide newspaper that will begin to offer their citizen journalists the opportunity to use Creative Commons licenses in its online portal) and The Free Software Community.

This venue will be webcast here and here at 14:30 GMT.

In the afternoon we will be having an open content session in one of Bogota’s most vibrant public space: The Biblioteca Publica Virgilio Barco with a live performance by Silvia O and several DJs, VJs and Bloggers that will be displaying their CC work. This venue will be webcast here at 23:00 GMT.

Be sure the check the visual memories of the launch by searching the tag: cccolanzamiento on flickr.

If you do go please say Hi from CC-Sweden to your host – Jaime Rojas

Posted on by mklang

Creating the Information Commons

Who created the term Information Commons? Today we use it and expect most people to understand what it means – even if it is a term used in a relatively specific group discussion.

In part the term owes a lot to those who did not even use it. Writers such as Hardin (Tragedy of Commons 1968), Rose (Comedy of Commons 1986) and Ostrom (Governing the Commons 1990) have all created the term commons and formed the discussion to what it is today. The act of adding their term to the concept of information was, in reality, an obvious step. But who took this step?

Here are a few candidates to the early use of information or informational commons – please let me know if someone is missing…

Felsenstein, Lee. “The Commons of Information.” Dr. Dobbs Journal, (May 1993): 18-24. http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/commons.html

Peter Jaszi & Martha Woodmansee, The Construction of Authorship 11 (1994) includes the quote: â??creeping enclosure of the informational commonsâ??

Alok Gupta, Dale O. Stahl & Andrew B. Whinston, The Internet: A Future Tragedy of the Commons?, Paper Presented at the Conference on Interoperability and the Economics of Information Infrastructure July 6-7, 1995

Andrews, William. “Nurturing the Global Information Commons: Public Access, Public Infrastructure.” Presentation at the 4th Annual B.C. Information Policy Conference Vancouver, B.C., October 28, 1995. http://www.wcel.org/wcelpub/present/ipc95t.html

Scott R. Lundgren â??A Tragedy in the Information Commons?â?? Fall 1997 http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~humae105/fall97/slund01.htm

Onsrud, H.J., “The Tragedy of the Information Commons” in Policy Issues in Modern Cartography (Elsevier Science) 1998, pp. 141-158. Online draft http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~onsrud/pubs/tragedy42.pdf

Brin, David. “The Internet as a Commons.” in Milton T. Wolf, et. al. Information Imagineering: Meeting at the Interface. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1998: 240-245.

Halbert, M (1999) ‘Lessons from the information commons frontier’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp.

Beagle, D (1999) ‘Conceptualizing an information commons’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 82-89.

Posted on by mklang

CC Books Wiki

Looking for books distributed under a CC license? Then here is a wiki for you. Actually these kinds of pages are really good unless they become too popular and all of a sudden they implode because of their own success â?? information overload, too many books make the search for the book you want impossible.

But letâ??s not get carried away with early Sunday morning pessimism. If you know of a book which belongs on this wiki â?? add it. If the concept of book confuses you (which all concepts have done since the great Plato/Aristotle disagreement on the theory of forms) then you might be helped by the wiki definition.

By “book” we generally mean works over 35,000 words that are or have been commercially available in hardcopy and have an ISBN. We’ve expanded the definition in two added sections below, however, to include the most popular books published through do-it-yourself press Lulu, and “books” published on websites of established organizations or notable blogs.

(via Open Access News)

Posted on by mklang

Offline in London

If you have noticed that it has been quite from this corner of the Internet its because I have been offline in London. Partly I was there lecturing about Copyleft, Free Software and Creative Commons on an intellectual property course organised by Andrew Murray at the LSE. I naturally found time for shopping and culture.

The main cultural event was the Victoria and Albert Museum in general and the Che Guevara exhibition in particular. In addition to graffiti spotting (results will be online on flickr soon).

The shopping was mainly books (I really should try to cut down a little). I frequented mainly second hand stores and ended up with a dozen booksâ?¦ here are some highlights: Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom, Loretta Napoleoni’s Terror Inc, Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite â?? Information Feudalism. Two books by Paul Virilio (The Information Bomb and Negative Horizon) and Val Dusekâ??s The Philosophy of Technology.

Posted on by mklang

Copyleft@LSE

On Thursday I will be lecturing at the London School of Economics (LSE) on a course entitled Intellectual Property Law and Policy. The focus of my 1,5 hour talk will be on

1.    Peer-to-Peer Systems and Copyright Infringement
2.    The Rise of Copyleft, the Free Software Foundation and The Creative Commons Project

Even though I did not pick the topics, these are subjects close to my heart and the broad sweep of topics should make the lecture an interesting discussion rather than just getting stuck in the individual details.

Point 1 is the development of technology while point 2 refers to the development of social systems to ensure that the technology does not deprive users of basic freedoms enjoyed prior to the advent of the technology.

Posted on by mklang

Firefly – the documentary

It has been called “possibly the best Creative Commons-licensed content yet”…hmm maybe you have to be a fan to say this! But whatever I am downloading it now and looking forward to seeing it (and finding out what the fuss is all about).

What is it? It’s the documentary Done The Impossible – The Fans’ Tale of Firefly & Serenity. This is the story of the rise and fall and rebirth of the cult TV show “Firefly,”
as told from the perspective of the fans who helped save it. It was first released on DVD – and the fans loved it. So the creators went a step further – they released a Creative Comons by-nc-sa this means that it’s free to download edit and spread. As the post on P2P blog wrote: “For free, and for the right reasons”.

Read more about the projecy from the release notes:

We philosophically agree with the concepts of Creative Commons. In our opinion, the modern state of copyright is counter productive to creativity and free culture. It puts unnatural restraints on “fair use”, hinders the creative process and has fundamentally destroyed an entire industry before it was even born. Just think of the amazing products, enhancements, embellishments and re-mixes to creative works that could be built with today’s technology and talents. But because modern copyrights are so restrictive, nobody dares do anything that *might* infringe on somebody’s oh so holy copyright. Thus, we have chosen to not go down that road with our documentary. Enjoy it, share it, re-mix it all you like, just be sure to follow the license below.

Done the Impossible Torrent (hosted by Legaltorrents.com)

(via P2P blog)

Posted on by mklang

Summer progress

It’s a hot summer. Brains are melting and work is sluggish. Despite this deadlines loom over us the unrelenting sunshine. My PhD thesis defence is on the 2 October. The book goes to the publishers in the last week of August.

The title of the work is “Disruptive Technology – Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy” and it will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. The blurb on the back cover will have this text:

Social interaction is partly shaped by technology being used. Therefore technological innovation affects modes of social interaction. While gradual technological innovation is often assimilated, some changes can be more disruptive. This research examines the democratic impact of attempts to control disruptive technology through regulation. This is done by studying attempts to regulate the phenomena of online civil disobedience, viruses, spyware, online games, software standards and Internet censorship â?? in particular the affect of these regulatory attempts on the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy. By studying the attempts to regulate the disruptive effects of Internet technology and the consequences of these regulatory attempts on the IT-based participatory democracy this work shows that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy.

If anyone wants to read an advance version it’s available here. If you send me comments before end of August then I can make changes in the text.

Other facts about the book:

It’s 272 pages long
It’s 103027 words long
It will have a cover design by Jähling.

Posted on by mklang

La Stampa goes (partly) CC

In an act which is begins to show that some mainstream media is begining to get it! La Stampa, a leading Italien daily has just released its two cultural supplements, TuttoScienze (science) and TuttoLibri (books), under a Creative Commons license (Att-NC-ND 2.5).

Ok so the license is one of the less permissable, but at least it shows that they are thinking and acting with an awareness of what is really happinging rather than attempting to fight against the current legal-technical developments online.

Posted on by mklang