commons

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

CC future obstacles

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?

photo: adamhenning (CC by-nc-sa)

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.

Posted on by mklang

ccPublisher & Internet Archive

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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GÜteborg 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…

Posted on by mklang

Commons Bibliography

OK – so this really should be a wiki. But consider this to be a quick and dirty version. I am collecting a bibliography on litterature on the commons. Both theoretical contributions on the commons in general and applications (such as) Creative Commons.

The current list is here and a non-english version is here. To add to it please leave a comment to this post.

Posted on by mklang

Pearl Jam & CC

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.

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

Flickr & CC

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.

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

Stockholm Challenge

Yesterday I was in Stockholm representing Creative Commons as a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge awards. The dinner was held at the Stockholm City Hall which also houses the Nobel Prize dinner. I was determined not to be impressed but I must admit it is a very impressive building.

First we had champaigne in the Golden Hall which is a room covered with a gold and glass mosaic made of over 18 million pieces.

The Golden Hall

This was followed by dinner in the Blue Hall and the winners in each category were announced. For my category (Culture) the project Biblioredes from Chile was the winner.

The Blue Hall

The whole event was very impressive and the range of projects participating made for a very interesting evening.

Posted on by mklang

The sod-off day

Since I am approaching the date for my PhD defence the question of what I intend to do afterwards is being asked more often. I dont really understand the problem – the lists of stuff I want to complete once this project is finished is seemingly endless.

For example today I came across (I know I’m late!) the Creative Commons “Podcasting Legal Guide: Rules for the Revolution” wiki. Its a great idea except for the fact that it is based on US law so simply translating it and adapting it to Swedish conditions would be a worthwhile project.

Since I have a faculty position the US (?) problem of post-PhD tenure chasing is not an issue. While speaking to a colleague in Stockholm yesterday we both agreed that under the Swedish system the PhD defence is the big â??sod-offâ?? day, since once the PhD is accepted the shiny new PhD is no longer dependent upon currying favour among senior faculty.

After PhD you can say â??sod-offâ?? to many of the unpleasant tasks that you have been carrying out due to office politics and political correctness.

Which of course reminds me of a quote from Blackadder III where Backadder has promised to fight a duel for Prince George:

Prince George : Ah Blackadder. It has been a wild afternoon full of strange omens. I dreamt that a large eagle circled the room three times and then got into bed with me and took all the blankets. And then I saw that it wasn’t an eagle at all but a large black snake. And also Duncan’s horses did turn up and eat each other. As usual. Good portents for your duel do you think.
Blackadder : Not very good sir. I’m afraid the duel is off.
Prince George : OFF?
Blackadder : As in sod. I’m not doing it.

Posted on by mklang