Someone *Did* Tell Them About CC Licences

Last month I was whingeing about the inability to share pix from the wonderful "Someone Once Told Me" site. Good news, now you can:

All Images subject to Creative Commons

Thanks, chaps, I'm sure it will prove a good move.

Someone Once Told Me...About CC Licences

I'm a big fan of black and white photography. Without the distraction of colours, it seems to me that you look more deeply at the image. Anyway, any site predicated on black and white photos is good; this one, called "Someone Once Told Me", is even better, not least because most images were shot in London:

Black and white photographs

A new one every day

Each person writes a message

Of something that someone once told them

What did someone tell you?

The short, untethered messages are positively surreal.

Just one problem: all the images are

copyright SOTM ©2008

This is a site crying out to be shared freely. Perhaps someone should tell its creator about Creative Commons licences... (Via Londonist.)

Surely Shome Mishtake?

People seem a little confused here:

Please note: this article is password protected and only available for IP-Watch Subscribers.

...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. All of the news articles and features on Intellectual Property Watch are also subject to a Creative Commons License which makes them available for widescale, free, non-commercial reproduction and translation.

Or maybe they mean the statement that the article is password protected is under a CC licence...

Anyhow, this confusion about intellectual monopolies is highly appropriate, given the subject-matter of the article:

Intellectual property and financial stakeholders, representatives from developing and developed countries, and nongovernmental organisations are in Vienna this week to work on a global guide on how to use intellectual property as collateral in commerce.

Got that? After one of the worst economic crises in recent history, caused by pyramids of non-existent wealth being constructed on totally fictitious financial instruments, they now want to use "intellectual property" as "collateral" in commerce - that is, more totally fictitious financial istruments to create another pyramid of non-existent wealth.

Open Fashion

There is a theoretical framework (at least) around the fashion industry that supports the argument that nothing is an original idea. The fashion industry makes an excellent exemplar microcosm of this concept in action. Fashion trends gain popularity and then wane and over time different trends are re-appropriated (think the come back of fluro right now). When new ideas or concepts emerge if may become the next big trend if other designers analyse it, take influence from it and incorporate elements into their own works. Pretty soon this becomes a trend, and eventually a fashion convention.

But what if designers explicitly allowed this reuse and adaption? What if these kinds of activities and norms were formalised using the law as an instrument? What would this mean for the fashion industry?

Discuss....

Kudos to OpenMoko

OpenMoko opens up even more:

OpenMoko, makers of the first true open source phone (previously blogged here), have recently expanded the meaning of ‘open source design’ by licensing the CAD (computer-aided design) files for their flagship model, the Neo1973, under a CC BY-SA license. In doing so, OpenMoko not only allow industrial designers a peek inside the Neo1973 to see how it works, but also show a keen understanding of the power community efforts can have in creating a better end-user experience.

Microsoft Slouches Towards Bethlehem

On Open Enterprise blog.

What Planet Are They On?

First there were RSS feeds, but that soon became too messy. So people have bundled up similar feeds into planets - clever. Here's one of the latest: Planet Creative Commons

This page aggregates blogs from Creative Commons, CC jurisdiction projects, and the CC community.

If nothing else, it will give you a chance to practise your Slovenian.

The Problems of the Public Domain

Here's an interesting exploration of the perils of putting your stuff into the public domain:

Countries with moral rights protections, the right of the artist to be attributed for their work among other elements, often make those rights inalienable, meaning they can not be given away under any circumstance.

Therefore, in these countries attribution rights still rest with the respective authors and these dedications are little more than a promise not to sue if those rights are infringed. That is a promise that can be revoked at any time.

Second, there are some theories that hold that putting a work in the public domain might be seen as a gift and not a legal agreement. If such a gift were found to be an “unenforceable promise”, it could be retracted at a later date.

Third, the posts themselves were not written by attorneys and are very informal in nature. Though Creative Commons has a public domain dedication system, they both chose not to use it. It remains to be seen how these dedications would hold up in court if ever they were challenged.

Finally, the dedications only extend to existing works. The authors reserve the right in the future to reserve some or all rights in newer works. This could be seen as a block on activities such as scraping that are ongoing and automatic.

So while the dedications certainly are intended to forfeit all copyright protections on their work, they do not do so completely because it is impossible to do so.

Copyright law resists the public domain and favors automatic protection. This frustrates many in the field, but it is the nature of the beast.

The whole post is quite long, but it's well worth a read for the interesting perspective it puts on the public domain. (Via P2P Foundation.)

Citizendium Goes CC-BY-SA

Good news:

In a much-awaited move, the non-profit Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) encyclopedia project announced that it has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-sa) as the license for its own original collaborative content. The license permits anyone to copy and redevelop the thousands of articles that the Citizendium has created within its successful first year.

The license allows the Citizendium to join the large informal club of free resources associated especially with Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation. Wikipedia uses the FSF’s GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which is expected to be made fully compatible with CC-by-sa in coming months. Therefore, Wikipedia and the Citizendium will be able to exchange content easily. A minority of Citizendium articles started life on Wikipedia and so have been available under the GFDL.

Avoiding a Balkanisation of the digital content commons through incompatible licences is critically important.

*The* e-Primer on Open Content

Independently of the fact that it's probably the best single intro to open content currently available, how could anyone resist a publication that has a gnu and penguin sitting together on its front cover?

If you *do* need more, try this:

This e-Primer introduces the idea of Open Content by locating it within the larger historical context of copyright’s relation to the public domain. It examines the foundational premises of copyright and argues that a number of these premises have to be tested on the basis of the public interest that they purport to serve. It then looks at the ways in which content owners are increasingly using copyright as a tool to create monopolies, and how an alternative paradigm like Open Content can facilitate a democratization of knowledge and culture.This e-Primer focuses on some of the implications for policy makers thinking about information policies, and the advantages that the Open Content model may offer, especially for developing countries.

(Via Open Access News.)

MPAA: The Biter Bit

Although I am a frequent critic of the more outrageous excesses of copyright, I don't deny it has its place, in moderation. For example, this blog is licensed thanks to copyright, and the whole of the GNU GPL is based on it. So it seems only right that the free software world should be able to avail itself of the really horrible DMCA to slap down violations of the GPL:

The MPAA's "University Toolkit" (a piece of monitoring software that universities are being asked to install on their networks to spy on students' communications) has been taken down, due to copyright violations. The Toolkit is based on the GPL-licensed Xubuntu operating system (a flavor of Linux). The GPL requires anyone who makes a program based on GPL'ed code has to release the source code for their program and license it under the GPL. The MPAA refused multiple requests to provide the sources for their spyware, so an Ubuntu developer sent a DMCA notice to the MPAA's ISP and demanded that the material be taken down as infringing.

A hit, a palpable hit.

What's also deeply ironic is that the MPAA choose to use Xubuntu in the first place, rather than intellectual monopoly-friendly Windows. When even your brothers-in-shame shun you, you know you've got problems.

Closing the Open Content Schism

Nowadays we are used to content being released under a Creative Commons licence, which has become the kind of de facto free licence for content. So it's rather curious that the biggest free content project of them all - Wikipedia - does not use such licences, but one from the FSF. The explanation is simple: at the time that Wikipedia got going, the only licence that was practical was the GNU Free Documentation Licence.

Hitherto, it's been impossible to reconcile these two, but that looks like it might finally be changing:

It is hereby resolved that:

* The [Wikimedia] Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License be modified in the fashion proposed by the FSF to allow migration by mass collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license;
* Upon the announcement of that relicensing, the Foundation will initiate a process of community discussion and voting before making a final decision on relicensing.

Just What We Wanted to Hear...

...that releasing a film under a Creative Commons licence does not harm its prospects; on the contrary:

Lo que tú Quieras Oír, the phenomenal Spanish short film we talked about earlier here, has recentlly broken into the “All Time Most Viewed” list on YouTube with upwards of 38,000,000 views! Lo que tú Quieras Oír is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

Some major kudos are in order for the everyone involved in creating Lo que tú Quieras Oír and making it the success it is today. We can only hope that part of the short’s online success has been enhanced by this decision to utilize CC licensing, which allows its viewers to not only freely distribute the film, but also remix it as long as they give credit, do so with non-commercial intent, and share their new works under the same license.

Feel Free to Squeak

I don't know much about the open source programming language Squeak, but it does sound rather cool:

Squeak is a highly portable, open-source Smalltalk with powerful multimedia facilities. Squeak is the vehicle for a wide range of projects from educational platforms to commercial web application development.

...

Squeak stands alone as a practical environment in which a developer, researcher, professor, or motivated student can examine source code for every part of the system, including graphics primitives and the virtual machine itself. One can make changes immediately and without needing to see or deal with any language other than Smalltalk.

Our diverse and very active community includes teachers, students, business application developers, researchers, music performers, interactive media artists, web developers and many others. Those individuals use Squeak for a wide variety of computing tasks, ranging from child education to innovative research in computer science, or the creation of advanced dynamic web sites using the highly acclaimed continuation based Seaside framework.

Squeak runs bit-identical images across its entire portability base, greatly facilitating collaboration in diverse environments. Any image file will run on any interpreter even if it was saved on completely different hardware, with a completely different OS (or no OS at all!).

Now, though, it seems there is no excuse not to find out more:

To help more people get familiar with Squeak's very powerful programming environment, the new book Squeak by Example is now being made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. It's intended for both students and developers and guides readers through the Squeak language and development environment by means of a series of examples and exercises. This is very useful to those who wish to become more familiar with the Croquet programming environment. You can either download the PDF for free, or you can buy a softcover copy from lulu.com.

What a classic combination: CC digital download, or an analogue version from Lulu.com.

Update 1: Alas, it seems you can't squeak freely - see comment below.

Update 2: Or maybe you can - see other comments below.

Larry Sanger's Question

Larry Sanger has a question about Citizendium:

Suppose we grow to Wikipedian size. This is possible, however probable you think it might be.

Suppose, also, that, because we are of that size, we have the participation of a sizable portion of all the leading intellectuals of the world, in every field–and so, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of approved articles. These are all long, complete with many links, bibliography, etc., etc.–all the subpage stuff. It’s reference utopia. Far better than Wikipedia has any hope of becoming.

Here’s the question, then. If we use a license that permits commercial reuse–CC-by-sa or GFDL–then every major media company in the world could, and probably would, use CZ content. Do you favor a license that allows CBS, Fox, the New York Times, English tabloids, Chinese propaganda sheets, Yahoo!, Google, and all sorts of giant new media companies to come, to use our content? Without compensation?

That's the question that Linus faced over a decade ago when he decided to adopt the GNU GPL instead of the earlier one that forbade any kind of money changing hands. And as Linus has said many times, choosing the GNU GPL was one of the best decisions he ever made, because it has widened support for Linux enormously, and as a result has driven its development even faster.

There's your answer, Larry....

Wikimedia Commons Hits Two Million Mark

Hooray for the commons:

Wikimedia Commons, the multilingual free-content media repository managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, reached the milestone of two million uploaded files on October 9, 2007, less than a year after it reached one million. This makes Wikimedia Commons the fastest growing large Wikimedia project. The rapid growth reflects the young age of the project, launched just over three years ago in September 2004. Since March 2007, Wikimedia Commons has routinely had over 100,000 files uploaded every single month. It is now not uncommon for over 5,000 files to be uploaded in a single day. The largest single-day figure so far has been the 9th of September 2007, when a huge 9719 files were uploaded in a mere 24 hours.

(Via DigitalKoans.)

Open Designs

Although Web pages are usually regarded as content, there can be a fair amount of code behind them too in the form of scripting and cascading style sheets (CSS). This means that there is a need for shared code in these areas, and the Open Design community aims to help out on the CSS side.

As an aside, it's interesting to note that the majority of stylesheets there use a Creative Commons licence, rather than the GNU GPL, say: this suggests people think of the code more as a form of content in this context. (Via James Tyrrell.)

The Right to Roam and the Right to Read

Peter Murray-Rust has been coming out with some cracking posts recently. First, there was the charming story of OUP demanding that he pay $48 to use his own paper, whose copyright he holds, and which is CC-licensed, for teaching purposes.

Now he has a wonderful post contrasting the legally-enshrined right of public access to the wilderness to the lack of a right of public access to academic papers.

Live CD + Open Content = LiveContent

And about time too:

LiveContent is an umbrella idea which aims to connect and expand Creative Commons and open source communities. LiveContent works to identify creators and content providers working to share their creations more easily with others. LiveContent works to support developers and others who build better technology to distribute these works. LiveContent is up-to-the-minute creativity, "alive" by being licensed Creative Commons, which allows others to better interact with the content.

LiveContent can be delivered in a variety of ways. The first incarnation of LiveContent will deliver content as a LiveCD. LiveCDs are equivalent to what is called a LiveDistro. LiveCDs have traditionally been a vehicle to test an operating system or applications live. Operating systems and/or applications are directly booted from a CD or other type of media without needing to install the actual software on a machine. LiveContent aims to add value to LiveDistros by providing dynamically-generated content within the distribution.

Let's hope this catches on - we need more synergy in the world of openness.

Rock On, Amarok

Interesting:

Magnatune, a record label that uses a CC BY-NC-SA license for all releases (Magnatune founder John Buckman is also on the CC board), has just hired free software developer Nikolaj Hald Nielsen to work on Amarok, a free software media player.

While software and services companies for years have hired many free software developers to continue to work on their free software projects and employees of open content companies have contributed to free software projects, this may be the first time an open content company has hired a free software developer to work on the developer’s free software project.

I suspect this will be the first of many such hires. Open content companies are growing and often are highly dependent on free software for infrastructure and end user services.

I agree: as open content becomes more of an economic force we can expect the synergy between it and open source to become more explicit.