Upcoming conferences, including CC for Television and CC for the Arts.
“Hold the rights to it” sounds less appealing but would be more accurate. 🙂
A copyleft record company that gives you extra stuff on DVD. Notably a commentary on the music (like you get on movie DVDs) and better than CD quality versions of the tracks. Yes, rather than the low-quality, ephemeral, part-owned downloads that you rent from iTMS for as long as the record labels will let you use them, better than CD quality versions of the tracks. Computers aren’t limited by space or technology constraints like CDs were, so you can get the best audio ever from them, if only someone will sell it to you. And here’s that someone:
via the ever reliable Boing Boing.
This is the kind of use of technology that overly restrictive licensing will prevent people who want to make money making money from. 🙂
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5075
Thanks guys.
The CC weblog is an amazing resource. Well worth a place in your RSS reader:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog
And if you can spare any money at all, do help support CC. They are doing an excellent job, and their t-shirts are cool 🙂 :
The rumour grapevine has it that Apple will allow the next version of “Garage band” to publish tracks via iTMS. It would be great if they would let you CC-license work to be sold. There are already CC-licensed music repositories (opsound) and record labels (loca, opsound). If iTunes allowed you to search iTMS by CC license type and metadata, that would take it even further.
Since Apple really don’t really make any money on iTMS sales, they should allow CC-licensed work to be sold. Indeed they should encourage it, as it will drive sales of garageband and iPods, which is the whole point of iTMS.
iTMS, garage Band and iTunes could provide a user-friendly GUI for buying, creating, hosting and listening to CC-licensed content, searchable and manageable by CC metadata. Since iTMS is a legal fig-leaf for selling iPods, it doesn’t matter what kind of content iTMS sells as long as it doesn’t upset the record labels. CC-licensed content is still copyrighted and doesn’t challenge anyone’s rights, so how could they object? 😉
The only problem is iTMS’s DRM, which breaks the CC licenses. Whether Apple or the record labels would accept that artists who license their work CC are within their rights to request no DRM is another matter entirely.
Let’s not divide culture up into little content ghettos around strangely similar yet strangely incompatible licenses.
A Hacker Manifesto
Eyebeam ask how you can write a manifesto for a movement you’re not part of, and whether Eric Raymond hasn’t already said everything on the subject.
The book is an outsider’s application of the hacker ethic to broader social and economic concerns than just writing software. It is not addressed to the existing hacker crowd. So it’s not a manifesto for a movement the writer is not part of, rather it’s someone bringing that movement’s content to the attention of a wider audience. That is to be applauded.
Eric Raymond’s main contribution to hacker culture has been watering down the ideology of Free Software to appeal to incumbent corporate interests. He doesn’t understand how cathedrals were built (as multi-generational, iterative realisations of a vision rather than as micro-managed waterfall projects), and the problems he has with current “””open source””” are a product of the flaws in his own arguments.
I’ll be scanning in the preparatory sketches and releasing those as well soon.