Singapore has become the 47th jurisdiction to adapt and implement the Creative Commons licenses. Congratulations from the Swedish CC Team to the CC Singapore team, led by Associate Professor Samtani Anil & Assistant Professor Giorgios Chelioti at the Centre for Asia Pacific Technology Law & Policy.
license
Censorship on Flickr
Since I put many of my photo’s on Flickr I was disturbed to read the following story. The more I thought about it the more I realised that it was obvious that Flickr would have the same types of rules as all the other social networking sites but it is still a reason for concern.
Photographer Maarten Dors (his Flickr Profile) received the following email from Flickr concerning a picture if a young boy smoking (Would like put it online here if I had permission… hint hint).
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case354736@support.flickr.comHi Maarten Dors,
Images of children under the age of 18 who are smoking
tobacco is prohibited across all of Yahoo’s properties.
I’ve gone ahead and deleted the image “The Romanian Way”
from your photostream.
We appreciate your understanding.-Terrence
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According to Reason Magazine, Dors argued that the photo was not a glorification of smoking but a documentation of living condition in less prosperous countries. This somehow was motivation enough for Flickr to return the photo online. Then, apparently, another employee who was unfamiliar with the exception took it down again. Which was followed by someone else from Flickr returning the image again.
Even though I know better I sometimes get fooled into thinking that sites and services on the Internet are public “goods” services which we all can use and abuse on an equal and fair footing. Naturally this isn’t so. Flickr is, like all other online businesses, online for profit. They have no interest in protecting user rights – in fact if user rights conflict with profits they have a duty towards the shareholders to maximize profits and damn the users.
Naturally we as users have legally agreed to the rights of companies such as Flickr to behave in this way when we clicked on the “I Agree” button.
But, and this is a big but, the legal status of these agreements can be questioned.
I have commented the inequality, injustice and the ways in which we could argue against such agreements in my research but it can all be summed up in the with the idea that the agreements we sign cannot be binding if they are the product of a mix of encouraged misunderstanding and misdirection. By creating an environment of openness the companies should not be allowed to impose draconian user terms on their own customers.
However this is an argument from a human rights perspective and no matter how much we like them, most courts still prefer the security and predictability of contract law. So until the courts develop a sense of courage they tend to praise but not emulate the users of all technology are at risk through the licensing agreements they are forced to sign.
Open Access Guide
The Oak Law project has produced an Open Access guide.
The book Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors by Kylie Pappalardo (with the assistance of Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Professor Anne Fitzgerald, Scott Kiel-Chisholm, Jenny Georgiades and Anthony Austin) aims to provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in making their work more openly accessible to readers and other researchers.
The guide provides authors with an overview of the concept of and rationale for open access to research outputs and how they may be involved in its implementation and with what effect. In doing so it considers the central role of copyright law and publishing agreements in structuring an open access framework as well as the increasing involvement of funders and academic institutions.
The guide also explains different methods available to authors for making their outputs openly accessible, such as publishing in an open access journal or depositing work into an open access repository. Importantly, the guide addresses how open access goals can affect an author’s relationship with their commercial publisher and provides guidance on how to negotiate a proper allocation of copyright interests between an author and publisher. A Copyright Toolkit is provided to further assist authors in managing their copyright.
The work is licensed under an Australian Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
2.5 License.
Museum Mohican
Photo Museum Mohican by Wrote (licensed under CC by)
The cultural significance of Free Software
Finding new books is always exiting and I am looking forward to reading Two Bits: The cultural significance of Free Software by Christopher M. Kelty
Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty shows how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge after the arrival of the Internet. Two Bits also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public” public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.
My only concern so far was that in the beginning of the book I found the sentence: This is a book about Free Software, also known as Open Source Software, and is meant for anyone who wants to understand the cultural significance of Free Software.
It is always disconcerting when people mix up free and open source software – to many the difference may not be important but when someone writes a book about the subject they should know that these are not synonymous terms. Despite this after browsing through the book – it looks very promising.
The book is available under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-sa) and can be downloaded from the book website.
The importance of failure
Via Boing Boing I came across J.K. Rowling’s Commencement Address at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. Her address was entitled The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination (online with video here).
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
We focus much too often on success, believing that it will teach us something we study success. Unfortunately we are too quick to ignore failure, despite the fact that failure would probably teach us more. Even on a personal level failure teaches us more than success. We learn more from unpleasantness.
Photo: band – failure is not an option by Leo Reynolds (CC by-nc-sa)
Creative Commons Norway
Norway has launched its Creative Commons (CC Norway) licenses – Congratulations Norway!
The CC Norway team is headed by Project Leads Gisle Hannemyr and Peter Lenda, who with Haakon Flage Bratsberg, Thomas Gramstad, Tore Hoel, and Vebjørn Søndersrød, coordinated the license porting process with Creative Commons International and conducted public discussion with local and international legal experts. Check out the press release (in English and Norwegian).
The launch of the licenses will be celebrated on Friday, June 6th – which happens to be Sweden’s national day!
Examination Today
Today I am examining three masters thesis’
Painful work – but at least I am not a penguin…
Photo: Examination by Hyberbolation (CC by-nc-nd)
The fashion commons
Intellectual property and fashion – now there is a minefield. To those who are fashion oriented the look and feel of favorite labels goes beyond the property debate and enters into the realm of defining personality. People who wear Nike are…, Paul Smith is…, Billabong shorts are…
You get the idea. Never really thought too much about the connection between Creative Commons and fashion copyright but I read on the CC blog that the Berlin-based fashion label Pamoyo have decided to release the designs for their clothes under a CC BY-NC-SA license, allowing people to recreate Pamoyo’s styles at home as long as they don’t sell their creations. Similarly, someone can build upon one of Pamoyo’s existing designs – if they release the new design publicly they must do so under the same license, continuing the process of reuse and creativity.
What is the correct attribution on a swimsuit?
Ingelfinger rule
The policy of considering a manuscript for publication only if its substance has not been submitted or reported elsewhere. This policy was promulgated in 1969 by Franz J. Ingelfinger, then the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. The aim of the Ingelfinger rule was to protect the Journal from publishing material that had already been published and thus had lost its originality.
I knew about the practice but not that it had a name. You learn something new every day – even on Fridays…
Photo Absolutely Nothing is Allowed Here by Vicki & Chuck Rogers (CC by-nc-sa)