October 2005 Archives

This is exactly the sort of thing we've been talking about on fc-uk-discuss at the moment. Copyright being used to prevent criticism that you don't agree with. Or to prevent misrepresentation. Or to prevent downright lies by fanatical idiots:

Cory says Science shouldn't use copyright to silence Creationists

But what about using copyright to stop personal claims, or misrepresentation of personal opinion? Is there a line beyond which not using copyright to stop others ascribing opinions to people that they don't actually hold becomes morally unacceptable? And can it be described quantitively?

Technorati Tags: free culture

Click on the alien for Lisp logos by Conrad Barski.

Technorati Tags: lisp

Joining the flock of blogs reporting this, here's a cool flickr group of drawings from photos:

eyehand

Technorati Tags: drawing

A beautiful and entertaining board game to download from Remix Reading:

Monster Mash Board Game

Best of all it's Free, being under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike licence.

Games are a classic example for "open sourcing": people can improve the rules & add their own counters. An open version of a card game like "Magic" would be great.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Review of Data Browser

These books look good, but I can't read them because Autonomedia didn't complete my order and haven't answered any emails on the subject.

So don't try to buy them from Autonomedia if you can possibly help it.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Reports and photos for dorkbotlondon 32:

dorkbot

Chris O'Shea

barrapunto (Spanish)

I've ordered a copy of this wonderful-looking book and CD of drawing programs by John F. Simon:

Mobility Agents

Technorati Tags: art, generative art

"I don't mind other people using my work but if they make money off it I want my cut."

Let's say that Linkin Park sample your ShareAlike music. I can't see their record label saying "sure, make the track ShareAlike, heck, the video and the album should be SA too!". So they'll come back to negotiate proprietary licencing.

But let's imagine for a moment that hell freezes over and they do make the single ShareAlike. You can sell your own copies of that single with the angle that you are the "original author", and given the ridiculous pricing on CD singles and downloads you can undercut the record label and still make a profit. Or do what Dido did with "Thank You" and push your track on the success of the track that sampled it.

Either way you get more exposure and more money, and do more harm to the major label model, than sticking NC on your work.

If you think Linkin Park's track just succeeds because of the marketing, SA is a better way of critiquing or tapping into this. If you think their track succeeds because it's better art than your track, why do you want to stop better art being produced with NC?

Technorati Tags: free culture

Ultimately via DataIsNature:

The Logic Alphabet

I'll explain later.

Technorati Tags: free culture

My copy of "The Company Of Wolves" DVD came from Amazon. Good film (90% of reviewers miss the point of it entirely, so ignore IMDB), terrible package.

The tacky metal cover (easy to scratch?) and the dearth of extras (no 'making of' despite the fact that one exists) are as nothing compared to what awaits the innocent viewer when they make the mistake of actually trying to watch their fifteen quid's worth of media.

For what seems like an eternity, a terrible sub-flash animation warns you NOT TO PIRATE FILMS BECAUSE IT IS STEEEAAAALLLLIIINGGGG!

Imagine, for a moment, what it would be like if you punished your paying customers in this way (reminiscent of a teacher who tells off the children present in class for the number of absences) in other media.

Mobile phones that announce in a breathless recorded message that you mustn't steal mobile phones. Every time you go to make a call.

Cars that have vinyl lettering on the inside of their windows telling you not to steal cars. That you're not allowed to peel off.

Books with "DON'T STEAL BOOKS" watermarked on the page. On the first page of every chapter.

You get the idea.

I've never wanted to copy a DVD before. But if there was an easy way of copying this particular DVD to strip this amateurish mood-breaker off of the beginning I'd be sorely tempted.

So well done Granada (extremely self-congratulatory publisher of this DVD), your hard work against piracy is certainly having an effect.

I spoke at dorkbotlondon last night.

There were thirty five people in the audience. They listened and then asked questions (not all of them) and had good suggestions to make about draw-something and paintr.

Dorkbot is amazing. Hopefully I'll be able to get to the next one. I may do an opendork about minara .

Technorati Tags: generative art

JibJab fail to share alike:

Do as I Say, Not as I Do

"Barney" the dinosaur teaches you how to sue copyright infringers:

Barney's Temper Tantrum

Pootergeek can't take a photograph:

Suppressing Dissent

"Happy Birthday" is still under copyright, via Boing Boing:

Dear ASCAP: May I sing Happy Birthday for my dad's 75th?

Technorati Tags: free culture

One objection that it might seem to be possible to make to applying Stallmanian freedom to culture is that culture isn't like code. You can't get a team to write a book then release it and let its readers send in bug fixes.

Only you can. Modern films, cartoons, magazines, games, television programmes and albums are made by large teams all revising each other's work. "Plussing", Disney call it.
Historical culture is the same. This is effectively how Homeric verse was written, by a succession of authors improving on previous versions of poems. Or how Shakespeare built on existing stories to make new versions. Brilliant new versions, but 2.0 revisions all the same.

A painting might seem a less obvious example of "plussing". But if you look at a painting of a crucifiction (or another standard scene) it is a derivative work, building on hundreds or thousands of years of "original works".

So there is no historical objection to a Free Culture. Outside of the commercially-inspired nineteenth century romantic myth of the creative genius.

How to make money off of CC-NC music:

1. Record the song under a statutory license and charge for your cover version.
2. Run a p2p or Internet Service Provider company that allows NC music to be moved across your network.
3. Manufacture MP3 players or blank CDs that can hold NC music.
4. Be a nonprofit organisation and argue that you charging for NC content isn't "commercial".
5. Be a musical instrument or software manufacturer who sells equipment to NC musicians.

Any more?

IANAL, but musicians don't need to NC their music. They can SA the recording and then re-record it proprietary later. NC-ing is either cynical and self-defeating, as described above, or idealistic and self-defeating, failing to provide an alternative to capitalism/globalism/whatever.

NC may be CC's most popular license module, but it is time for CC to put NC into maintenance mode and start building a real cultural commons rather than the cultural allotments of NC.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Copyright is traditionally intended to apply to Mass Culture. That is, mass-produced commercial culture. Mass Culture is appropriated Folk Culture, it is kitsch by definition.

Folk Culture is a network externality to Mass Culture. It is a commons, shared and unexploited, built anonymously by individuals as part of their personal and shared experience. It has value, but if you try to measure it you change it.

(There's private culture, private use of culture. We'll collapse that into folk culture to keep to the magic number of three.)

Then there's High Culture. Often drawing on the others, often drawn on by the others. The art of the ruling class, and/or of the avant-garde. Neither mass-produced nor a product of everyday life.

Copyright is spilling over from Mass to Folk (including private, indeed particularly to private) and High culture. It's cutting off its own supply of source material and failing to provide substitutes for what it is trying to displace. Trying to prevent value being taken whilst failing to recognise that it takes value itself.

Technorati Tags: free culture

So culture is a commons, and there is a movement devoted to reclaiming that commons from enclosure and the excesses of law.

In the UK, historically, the Chartists and the Levellers were groups that worked to reclaim the commons. And the allotment movement was an attempt to provide a substitute.

So are "copyfighters" digital Levellers? And are Creative Commons the cultural allotment movement? I hope not. But this comparison may help explain the popularity of the CC NonCommercial license.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Successful free licenses are a result of the Three Cs: Community, (social) Contract, and Crisis.

For the GPL, hackers shared code until intellectual property law and NDAs started preventing this.
For the OGL, gamers wrote and consumed roleplaying game scenarios for Dungeons & Dragons until TSR's impending bankruptcy threatened this.
For the CC Sampling license, musical appropriators transformed music through sampling until the U2 vs. Negativland case threatened this.

In each case, the resulting license restores the social contract and protects the community. Free licenses are a defensive, reformist measure. They seem to work best when used as such.

(Previously: Motive, Subject and The Creative Commons Licenses)

Technorati Tags: free culture

paintr was being naughty and using non-CC images.

I have fixed the code and restarted paintr.

You can see paintr at:

http://paintr.robmyers.org/

You can download the source code at:

http://paintr.robmyers.org/paintr_0.2.tar.gz

Technorati Tags: art, artificial intelligence, free software, generative art, hacking, net.art

I think it was David Berry who compared the GPL to a guild rather than a commons.

It is an ironised guild, inclusive rather than exclusive, but it is a good comparison.

I would go further and compare the GPL to a union (a trade union). It represents workers (programmers) and can withdraw their labour (their code) if a dispute arises (if the GPL is broken).

The GPL does not seek any advantage for its members (programmers who use it) other than that they be allowed to continue to work. And to be fair this is all Stallman sought to do. It might be nice if the GPL could "strike" for better conditions or pay, but being able to work is a minimum. And the GPL does keep the direct fruits of programmers labour for them, their code.

In a way it gives the workers the means of production (derivation). But it also destroys the value of their labour. It's this sort of thing that makes leftist or libertarian analyses of the GPL so difficult. :-)

Technorati Tags: free culture, free software

In "Languages of Art", Nelson Goodman distinguishes between allographic and autographic art. Allographic art has a score in some form of notation (such as music, drama, literature and in some cases dance). Autographic art does not have a score or notation (such as painting). It is immediate in a way that allographic work is not.

Stallman's Free Software is based on the availability of source code. Source code is a form of score, so computer programs are allographic. "Open Source" is actually "score disclosure".

This may have some bearing on making visual art copyleft. Paintings are autographic and so have no "source" to open, no code to free, no score to disclose. This does not make Free Art impossible by any means. Paintings may be copied, sampled and derived from. It is important to protect and enable this to continue as it has throughout history.

Although there is no score for a painting, there is the preparatory work. Sketches, maquettes, source material. This is not a score, but it is the preparation of the work. Disclosing it helps to explain the work and enables its reproduction and derivation. This is true for allographic works preparatory materials as well: music may have discarded versions, novels cut chapters and research notes.

The Creative Commons licences do not require that source (the score) be provided. It may be impractical to do so for many media, but it is ethically important to provide source material and preparatory work for autographic cultural works to help make Free Art.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, free culture

Harold Cohen's AARON's images at Bioarte in Lisbon, via Kazushi:

Bioarte

Update: URL changed. Thanks Alex!

Technorati Tags: generative art, graphics

Open Congress was very good. The word "notion" was intoned into oblivion, Deleuze was indeed mentioned, and too many institutional types were confusing cultural openness with organisational openness, but the art ecology was great.

Well, it was great on the Friday. I couldn't be there on the Saturday so I missed Libre and Loca.

All attendees had to sign a CC-BY-NC disclaimer, which was a good idea. I discussed CC and art with people, and contributed a dot to an artwork in the foyer.

I'm still not used to people knowing who I am. In this instance Cory Doctorow and Ken Wark. I now have a copy of "A Hacker Manifesto" signed and inscribed with the line of my review from this blog that Ken didn't like. ;-)

Technorati Tags: free culture

Support Creative Commons with a donation and help them keep their non-profit status in the US:

Support Creative Commons.

Technorati Tags: creative commons

Note that we don't get parody rights or fair use in the UK, just ever-decreasing "fair dealing" provisions:

Who owns Barbie? Copyright owners and artists disagree

New article by Joy Garnett:

Open Source as Culture/Culture as Open Source

Via Boing Boing:

Survey of Reissues of U.S. Recordings

Link

And an emulator is in the works:

MIT Open Sources the LispM Code

Don't like the phrase "Open Content", do like this:

Open Content License.

The omnipresent Jon Phillips has seeded the Open Font Library.

Mmmmm. Fonts. Fonts got me into PostScript, which got me into art programming.