Weblog
2004 April
The Metaphysician
I recently ran across Doctor Paradox (a.k.a. Barb). She creates very funky, fun, and creative sample-loop-based music using Ableton Live and other tools for the Mac.
I recently spoke with her about CC licensing, found art in remixes, and music in general. Apparently I caught her in the middle of reading Larry Lessig’s The Future of Ideas, so she had a lot of good things say on the matter, not the least of which is the idea that: “all art is found art to some degree. Ideas have origins and everything is fundamentally connected.”
She sees CC licensing as a part of the re-connecting of art to what it is meant to be, an organic part of everyday lifestyle: “Even as recently as a few decades ago, music was still something people did in their homes to entertain themselves, their families, and friends. Now in the midst of a radical technological revolution, we are starting to have access to the tools we need to craft music in our own vision, according to our own philosophies.”
“For me, the dream and vision of Creative Commons is that by making an enormous amount of high-quality art available to society, our culture’s demand for, and appreciation of art itself is bound to increase.”
Well, we appreciate her artistic contribution — that’s for sure. Her entire album “Frame Independent” is licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. Give it a spin.
1 Comment »MIT and Jack Valenti have a chat
MIT’s The Tech newspaper recently sat down with Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti for an interview about digital rights. The writer, a MIT engineering student, probes (perhaps a bit too tenaciously) the bad side of the DMCA, namely DVD encryption and playback on Linux, which is currently illegal. In the end it’s a nice short piece on two opposing viewpoints coming together and trying to see each other’s point of view, something that’s often lacking in digital rights debates.
No Comments »Audioscrobbler
Audioscrobbler is an amazing community music tracking application that is really starting to gain some steam. The premise is pretty simple, you run a small app on your deskop which sends information about what songs you are playing on your computer’s MP3/CD player. Now that they have thousands of regular users, they aggregate the information and produce weekly charts and allow even record-at-home musicians to see who is listening to their music.
To promote more interesting uses of the data, they also offer it for download (anonymous data — user details are stripped) to developers, under a Creative Commons license. This makes perfect sense, as they don’t want users and developers to have to wait for Audioscrobbler to program new features or views of the data. With the license they can open it up to anyone that is interested in doing cool stuff with it, but they also want to protect the data from being exploited for commercial reasons and resold.
This originally started as a student project for a computer science course and a little over a year later it’s turning into a bustling community that may someday rival things like pop music charts and sales data.
No Comments »Open Clip Art Project
The Open Clip Art Project is a new effort to catalog and encourage the creation of new clip art using the Creative Commons public domain dedication. Providing clipart for open source productivity applications is one of OCAP’s goals. Contribute your clipart creations now, perhaps your work will one day be available to OpenOffice‘s millions of desktop users.
2 Comments »Settimana delle liberta
Last week, the Creative Commons licences were presented by Massimo Travostino at the Settimana delle liberta in Florence, Italy. The week-long conference also featured presentations by Richard Stallman of the FSF and Sergio Amadeu of the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia da Informação. The Italian mailing list – where the local draft licences are currently being discussed under the guidance of Professor Ricolfi- is one of the most active within iCommons.
No Comments »Il Forno
Il Forno is a baking weblog based in Germany that is licensed under Creative Commons. There are many recipes posted, especially in the bread making category and when you consider the way recipes are passed from one generation to the next, it would seem that Creative Commons licenses would be a natural for cooking communities online. Just as my own grandmother “remixed” her mother’s special recipes and passed them on to my mother, aunts, and uncles, where they each modified and perfected them before passing along to me, it’d be cool to see a virtual cookbook form on the web based around CC-licensed works.
The Il Forno blog is licensed under a No Derivatives license, but I’m pretty sure you still make substitutions when baking the bread recipes found there. :)
No Comments »iCommons Progress
In the first quarter of the current year, iCommons has made significant progress in porting the CC licences – based on US-copyright law – to other jurisdictions, thereby internationalizing the movement. By early April, three European countries (Germany, Croatia and the Netherlands) as well as Australia and Jordan had come up with the first drafts of their respective licences. Austria and South Africa are scheduled to be next. In total, some sixteen jurisdictions have now launched their final or preliminary drafts.
No Comments »AGNULA Music Libre
AGNULA Music Libre, a new database of libre music (which includes music licensed under the CC Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses), launched last month.
The site has adopted CC’s license embedding strategy, publishing RDF backing license claims made in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files.
1 Comment »Magnatune on iRATE radio
iRATE radio has placed 3,000 CC-licensed tracks from the non-evil Magnatune label into “rotation.” iRATE is a collaborative filtering system for music. The first song new users have the opportunity to rate is Monsters from Magnatune artist Beth Quist.
A future iRATE skin will include CC license indicators in the main display. Here’s a sneak preview sent to us by iRATE’s creator, Anthony Jones:
Translation license discussion starts soon
Public discussion on the Creative Commons translation license starts this Monday (April 26). The translation license would be used by authors who want to make their works available for others to translate into local languages. The initial idea for the license came from a lecturer at a conference in South Africa in January this year. He said that he found it virtually impossible to get permission from authors to allow him to translate articles into local languages for use by his students.
Go here to join.
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