Building Commons and Community

Cameron Parkins, May 9th, 2008

Building Commons and Community, a book written by the late Karl Linn on his experience “creating neighborhood spaces for communities and by communities”, has been released under a CC BY-NC-ND license. From New Village Press:

Landscape architect and child psychologist Karl Linn (1923-2005) was a beloved, down-to-earth, visionary leader of grassroots community building, who brought life to economically disenfranchised neighborhoods in cities from Boston to Berkeley. His book documents the creativity and ingenuity of working-class citizens, students and volunteer professionals who transformed derelict vacant lots and drab institutional settings into colorful and lively community commons in Boston, New York, Newark, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Louisville KY, Pittsburgh, Columbus OH, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco and Berkeley.

It seems quite fitting that someone who was noted for “leadership in the field of grassroots community building” would have their final work released under terms that allow for the free redistribution of ideas and information. You can purchase Building Commons and Community at New Village Press and Amazon.

CC-Licensed Twitter Music Project

Cameron Parkins, May 9th, 2008

The Twitter Compilation Album is the end result of 34 different people meeting over Twitter and coming together to produce a CC-licensed album of unique and interesting music, all without meeting en masse in the same physical space. Most of those involved made music while others created pictures and provided server hosting. The end product has been released under a CC BY-NC-SA license and is absolute cat nip for those who are interested in online collaboration through new media tools.

Neuro Net Recordings

Cameron Parkins, May 9th, 2008

Neuro Net Recordings is an online techno-music distribution project based out of Japan that houses over 80 pieces of CC BY-NC-ND licensed music at Archive.org. Founded in 1994, NNR has been pushing free and open licences in some form since before CC was even a blip of an idea and represents an interesting case study in regards to CC-licensed music distribution online. From jj1bdx:

NNR had the free online distribution policy from the beginning: NNR had the non-exclusive distibution rights of the music files in the various available formats on the Internet. It was quite similar to the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, which means preserving the author’s credit, non-profit use only, and changes not allowed during redistribution.

[...]

In the age of iTunes and Amazon.com MP3, no professional musician can survive without distributing their music online. Streaming music radio stations like Soma FM are doing competitive business. Many people in the so-called music industry, however, still do not accept online media, and I feel quite sad about it. I’ve already been fed up with the stagnated copyright issues in Japanese music scene either. So I decided to quit distributing NNR files on my own in 2004. Fortunately, archive.org generously provides the storage space and other goodies to the free-music distributors, so I decided to put NNR and my music pieces there in 2007.

You can read more about NNR history here - it is fascinating to read about a group that has been working with new methods of distribution for so long while many in the music industry are still discussing a return to DRM.

Apture

Cameron Parkins, May 9th, 2008

Apture is a new tool for bloggers that allows “content creators the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items directly into their pages” by adding links and small navigator windows to pages and posts automatically. Better understood in practice (see screenshot below), Apture seems poised to add incredible functionality to web pages that, while incorporating linking, remain relatively static. From The Washington Post (who have integrated Aprture’s technology into two of their blogs, The Fix and Celebrtitology):

When readers hover over an Apture linked term in an article, an elegant floating box emerges with a menu of related material chosen by the site’s editors. This technology gives readers the ability to quickly access relevant, in–depth coverage that caters to individual interests. Clicking an item in the floating box menu opens a small window where readers can view an article, video or photo gallery, while continuing to stay on the original page.

Apture is noteworthy due to its effort to increase interactivity online, but it is equally important to note that it does so through the use of open source tools and CC-licensed media. By default, Apture searches Flickr for images tagged with CC-licenses and Wikipedia content with a GFDL license. When an author links to Wikipedia images, Apture parses over a thousand Wikipedia licenses which it displays in the UI before a link is created. This reliance on free and open media in conjunction with an enhanced end-user experience bodes well for the spread of CC-licensed media and is phenomenal news for creators and consumers of web based text.

The (potential) U.S. copyright czar and you

Mike Linksvayer, May 9th, 2008

Yesterday the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “PRO-IP Act” 410 to 11. The bill, if also passed by the U.S. Senate and made law, could create a “copyright czar” office and greatly expand copyright enforcement in and outside of the U.S.

Slashdot is of course running the story. A comment by Slashdot user analog_line lays out (with a brashness to be expected in a Slashdot comment thread) voluntary responses to increasingly onerous copyright restrictions — responses which you can participate in:

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is insane, and I hope it goes the way of similar bills before it, but the tighter the so-called “content cartels” grip on their copyright, the more persuasive the arguments for Creative Commons, GPL (v2 or v3), and other similar copyright-related social movements become. The same laws that protect the iron grip of Disney on Mickey Mouse for as long as they can legislate it, also protect those who participate in the Creative Commons (like Nine Inch Nails to take a totally non-random example) from the Disneys, the Time Warners, and the Sonys of the world. They can only be the gatekeepers of “the culture” if YOU choose to pay the entry fee. There’s plenty enough out there that they don’t control, that they CAN’T control anymore. All this sound and fury is trying to make people focus on them instead of looking for alternatives. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, and all that.

The onus is on those who claim that art should be for love and not money to put up or shut up. If you’re an artist, go make some art under something like Creative Commons that both allows you to make money off it when someone else is making money off it (and sue the pants off them if they don’t pay you for it), and allows people who aren’t making money off it to spend as much money as they want spreading the word about how awesome you are. If you’re not an artist, don’t forget that artists need to eat as much as you do. Actually reach into that wallet and give money to artists that take a chance and produce work that you like under a Creative Commons license (or some other license with terms that aren’t crazy) and be as generous as you can afford. Every Tom, Dick, and Sally that releases something under Creative Commons isn’t worth supporting just because they’re releasing as Creative Commons. There is a TON of freely distributable junk out there. However there ARE people out there that every one of us reading this story would feel comfortable supporting, and rather than shovel money on a monthly basis into Comcast’s, or Sirius’, or Time Warner’s or whomever’s bank account for content that isn’t worth using as toilet paper, a small fraction of that money could make a world of difference for one of the people that IS taking a risk and releasing good content under terms that are reasonable.

Where the hell is the Creative Commons Foundation of the Arts, taking donations and patronizing quality artists that release work under the Creative Commons like the foundations supporting free software? Do you think this stuff grows on trees?

Regarding analog_line’s last paragraph, there are many experiments with “crowd funding” of art, now mostly still small experiments. While those are exciting, and I hope to see much more innovation in this area, there is a vast infrastructure for patronage of the arts (more private in some jurisdictions, more state-run in others). Perhaps some of these patrons will encourage funded artists to release work under CC licenses — what is the point of funding creation (where the funding is publicly spirited) if that creation is not legally accessible to the public without a copyright czar watching over their shoulders?