December 2005 Archives

A Flash version of draw-something for Internet presentation:

Press 'a' to show or hide the skeleton. Update: I fixed that focus problem...

Written in ActionScript using Emacs and compiled with mtasc.

It's more or less a straight port of the Lisp code to ActionScript, with some simplifications that will find their way back into the Lisp code. Rewriting code in a different language always helps. :-)

The image above is the first successful drawing during development. The finished version can now be run online at:

http://draw-something.robmyers.org/

Technorati Tags: art, generative art, hacking

"Front Row", BBC Radio 4, Monday 26th December 2005.

Paul McCartney: ... But from the very earliest days of writing songs we would always think 'wait a minute, that's from West Side Story, we can't have that'. So we'd have to just switch it, and just say, erm, y'know, sort of, whatever the melody was, turn it round, or just do something, just find tricks. Either rewrite it or just change those two notes and it suddenly isn't from whatever it was y'know. So er, I'm - I'm always - I've got like one antenna always looking to see if someone else has written this before.

...

Paul McCartney: ... So I'm just working around that kind of thing, which to me always reminds me of the deep south.

Interviewer: Well it's got echoes of "People Get Ready" the Curtis Mayfield song.

Paul McCartney: Oh, that's probably what it is.

Interviewer: The Impressions.

Paul McCartney: So you mean I nicked it? Well it's too-

Interviewer: Subconsciously, possibly.

Paul McCartney: -late now. Ha ha. No, yeah it has, it has. Well, it's a style.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Happy Christmas!

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, so you can modify it to refer to whichever seasonal holiday you like. The humour-challenged should note that these two sentences make the post substantial and original enough to copyright and that this post therefore can be CC licensed, so there.

Technorati Tags: free culture, humour

I've been trying to hack up a version of draw-something to run in a web page. ABCL is a Java Lisp interpreter that will load and run draw-something more or less unmodified, but it's either too slow or the mathematics handling is too different and I can't debug that.

So I'm going to take a leaf out of Kurzweil's book and do a Java renderer for draw-something's output. I'll generate a number of draw-something drawings and let the renderer draw them. It will look like the screen-based version of draw-something. The only difference will be the de-coupling of the generation and drawing code. It still feels like a big difference, though.

Technorati Tags: generative art

http://www.diylive.net/index.php/2005/12/19/ten-most-needed-circuits-for-the-diyer/

Handy stuff.

Technorati Tags: electronics

The excellent Rhizome have a new site design:

http://www.rhizome.org/

Give it a go.

Technorati Tags: generative art

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/21/more_space_art_at_un.html

I've a number of projects for the ISS if they're interested. :-)

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, space

The hard sell on "compatibility":

http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16073,300,p1.html?trk=nl

CC's response to criticisms of the proposed BY-SA/FDL backdoor:

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5731

Technorati Tags: free culture

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5709

This proposal, to declare multiple licenses "compatible" with the Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-Sharealike license (BY-SA) in a kind of meta-license came out a few weeks after the FDL backdoor was proposed on the license-discuss list.

Again, it is a bad idea for a number of reasons.

These Licenses Have Major Incompatibilities In Intent and Effect.

The proposal mentions BY-SA, the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), the Free Art License (FAL) and the BBC Creative Archive Licence (BBC-CA) as sharing "a common goal". This simply is not true. BY-SA is intended to promote a remix culture and/or prevent "orphan works". The FDL is designed to allow political texts to be attached to computer manuals. The FAL is designed to create collaborative artworks. And the BBC-CA license is designed to enable the public to access work they have paid for.

Even if we accept for a moment that these very different intentions might lead to similar licenses, for the examples under consideration here they have not. BY-SA is a reasonably strong "copyleft" license. The FDL is a mix of copyleft and an immutable license more similar to BY-ND. The FAL is limited to artworks and has legally vague definitions of a work and various licence. requirements. BBC-CA is non-commercial and limited to UK citizens.

These are very, very different practical effects. The only way to make licences with such different practical effects compatible is to rewrite them. If the licenses can be made similar enough to be covered by a single "commons deed" then it would only be egos that would prevent the licenses being combined. But the only justification for this project is that the licenses won't be rewritten and so CC have decided they need to work around this.

Declaring Such Incompatible Licenses Compatible Opens The Door For Vanity Licenses And Shackled Licenses

Once the Free Art License is declared "compatible", any other minor license that is drafted should be declared "compatible" and work will be driven incompatibly to it. Although the FAL pre-dates the CC licenses, it has very few users and is not as general as BY-SA. It should be deprecated, not promoted, and certainly not promoted by CC in the name of solving the problem of "incompatibility". Placing a CC badge over proliferating licenses will simply reproduce the OSI license approval trainwreck with an additional layer of paperwork.

Once CC claim that the FDL and BBC-CA licenses are "compatible" with BY-SA, Microsoft can seek to have a copyleft license that locks content to Windows declared compatible and News Corp. can seek to have a copyleft license that adds advertising and allows some proprietary use declared compatible. These are no less "compatible" than the licenses Lessig discusses, and any refusal will appear politically motivated.

This Mechanism Makes BY-SA Untrustworthy

When any vanity or free-but-shackled license can get itself rubber stamped by CC's "compatibility" board and added to the meta-license, and have a backdoor added to BY-SA to allow derivatives to be placed under it, licensing becomes a mess of unpredictable additional licenses that can change or themselves allow cross licensing at every revision.

This destroys confidence in BY-SA and the meta-license, as they may at any time be altered to give work or derivatives away to a license with features that have negative practical effects for a user, group or company.

Not Every Licensing Problem Has A Licensing Solution

Not every licensing problem has a licensing solution. And CC's solutions to commons fragmentation under the banner of "compatibility" are the wrong solutions to the wrong description of the problem.

If CC are worried about commons fragmentation they should work to reduce the number of licenses, not produce yet another layer of licensing over their already confusing licenses. And they should get rid of their NC license, which is the main cause of incompatibility. Since BY-SA is the best copyleft license for general cultural work, logically they should work to replace other licenses with BY-SA. But if they are unwilling to do this work they should deprecate BY-SA in favour of the FDL. It is not as good as BY-SA, but at least it is a stable target.

Technorati Tags: creative commons, free culture

Arguments Against The BY-SA FDL Backdoor.

Creative Commons will soon be starting the final discussion on version 3.0 of their Attribution-Sharealike (BY-SA) license. This may include a clause that allows derivatives of BY-SA works to be re-licenced under the GNU Free Documentation License as used by Wikipedia.

There is no legal case against CC allowing BY-SA derivatives to be licensed under the FDL rather than under BY-SA. But I still believe that there are very strong reasons why it is a bad idea.

1. It is morally wrong.

• The current BY-SA 2.x licenses allow derivatives to be placed under future versions of the BY-SA license. This would include a BY-SA with the FDL cross-licensing clause. And this would allow derivatives of BY-SA derivatives to be placed under the FDL without the original licenser having given their consent.

• If the original BY-SA licensor wishes to use FDL derivatives of their work as part of a commons, they are forced to use the FDL rather than the licence they have chosen.

• The FDL allows un-editable, un-translateable, un-removable material expressing an opinion on the original work to be added to derivatives. This work does not form part of a "commons" and may interfere with the original user's or other users' ability to receive value from their contribution to the commons.

2. The licenses are too different to be considered "compatible".

• The FDL allows un-editable, un-translateable, un-removable material expressing an opinion to be added in derivatives. These "invariant sections" interfere with the remix culture that BY-SA was written to enable.

• If the original licensor wishes to use derivatives of their work as part of a commons, they are forced to use the FDL. This "compatibility" is at best one-way. It will not reduce the fragmentation of the commons, quite the opposite: it will cause more work to end up under licenses that are not as well suited to remix culture as BY-SA with no hope of the work returning to BY-SA.

• The FDL is designed for computer software manuals and allows front and back covers to be specified, terms which may be meaningless for other media. BY-SA is designed to allow the free remixing of work and its translation between languages and media. The FDL can be (mis-)used to explicitly prevent this.

3. It will break business models.

• Revver is a website that allows you to upload videos under a CC license to have advertisements attached and displayed for money. But if derivatives of your work can be taken and placed under the FDL, they could have advertisements attached that you cannot remove (and that are under a license that you cannot use at Revver). If derivatives of existing BY-SA work can eventually be placed under the FDL, even existing work on Revver could suffer this exploit.

• Flickr allows photo hosting under Creative Commons licenses. Someone who posts (or has posted) work there under BY-SA would expect derivatives of their work to form part of a BY-SA commons of work. If derivatives of it can be placed under the FDL they

• Wikipedia is based on the FDL, but does not allow invariant sections. If the extra attribution URL from the 2.x licenses is kept as an invariant section in an FDL derivative, Wikipedia cannot use the work. If the URL is stripped, this destroys some of the original licensor's intent and some of the value their use of the license gives them.

The alternative.

I believe that CC should focus on persuading projects to use BY-SA rather than coercing their own users into allowing the FDL to become a black hole for content. They should negotiate with the authors of minor licenses to deprecate them in favour of the CC licenses, as the EFF music licence and the original Open Content licences did. And they should produce the technological and legal tools to help projects and individuals re-licence. BY-SA is simply the best copyleft license for cultural works and the only one that genuinely creates and protects a commons, and it should not be reduced to being a proxy for licenses that do not afford the same freedoms.

Technorati Tags: creative commons, free culture

http://www.xach.com/ - Graphics and utilities.

http://www.metabang.com/open-source-software.html - Utilities, graphs and a documentation system.

http://www.weitz.de/tbnl/ - Dynamic website system in portable Lisp.

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/lispbox/ - Lisp in a box. Good starter Lisp system.

http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners - Lisp Gardeners. A new community making Lisp more accessible.

Technorati Tags: lisp

LOL:

http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34269

Has anyone ever done a painting of a chrome sphere on a chessboard? That would be fun.

I'm still recovering from an operation I had on Monday. It's not major but it's painful and I can't really do much. Yay for Paramol.

A blog post on freedom of speech that actually works through the ideas (via normblog):

http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2005/12/free-speech-marc-cooper-vs-nathan.html

Technorati Tags: philosophy

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/08/videogame_teaches_fe.html

The more (players) stimulate the bunny, the happier he becomes until eventually he begins flying through the air. But Lapis is also an unpredictable creature who needs a variety of sensations. Sometimes, no amount of stimulation is going to work.

"Sex is a perfectly natural part of the human experience and there has to be a way to handle it meaningfully and tastefully in games,'' said Kelley, who took first prize for the prototype at the Montreal International Games Summit last month.

Technorati Tags: games, feminism, sexuality

A posting on crap installation art:

I think they're just bored...

that links to:

Clusterfuck Esthetics

My apologies to anyone who is offended by the title of the second link. But I think that's the American spelling of aesthetics.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics

http://www.generatorx.no/20051208/openstudio-collaboration-and-capitalism-in-art/

It's a microcosmic verion of the kind of ponzi scheme economics and aesthetics that suspension of disbelief allows you to see as capitalism in MMORPGs like Second Life.

" " " in contemporary art.

Technorati Tags: art, collaboration, virtual reality

If only it was linked to a tile factory so you could decorate your bathroom On Demand:

http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1312_artsandcrafts/design_a_tile/flash.php?sendFriendId=1926

Technorati Tags: generative art

DataIsNature: Minara Is Not A Recursive Acronym

Reblogged by Eyebeam

Thanks guys!

Technorati Tags: art, free software, generative art, lisp

http://www.thepcf.org.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1657083,00.html

A wonderful project to catalogue paintings in public collections in the UK.

Technorati Tags: art

"Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control"
- from the Free Expression Policy Project at the Brennan Center for Justice, NYU School of Law
http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/WillFairUseSurvive.pdf

Technorati Tags: free culture, puppy

Cut to:

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/6396/dingdong.htm

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, generative art

Who are the NME owned by again?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1656637,00.html

Technorati Tags: free culture, music

http://www.poetryarchive.org/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4482824.stm

There's a lovely disclaimer on the legal page to the effect that the freedom of
expression found in poetry may offend some people and that if it does they
should get over it. :-)

The legal page also asserts copyright over all the recordings. Even if some of
the older recordings were out of copyright, I'm guessing very few of the actual
poems would be. Any poetry experts on the list? :-)

Wonder if they would consider CC-NC?

Technorati Tags: free culture, poetry

A new logical fallacy has been doing the rounds:

Appeal to Stallman

The author appeals to the writings of Free Software guru Richard Stallman in order to make the opposite point to the one Stallman makes. Having removed the possibility of dissent the author is then free to claim that NonCommercial licenses or relicensing work under a less free license are what Stallman would want.

Technorati Tags: free culture, free software, satire

Technorati Tags: free culture

The Scottish CC licenses are live, and they are being used as the working draft for the revised England & Wales licenses as well:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/scotland/legalcode

Congratulations to the Scottish team!

Technorati Tags: creative commons, free culture

A list of Lisp Books that are available online, via Lemonodor.

Technorati Tags: artificial intelligence, generative art, hacking, lisp

France may soon enact the worst copyright law in Europe, sneaking it through in a legislative session scheduled for December 22 and 23

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/02/france_about_to_get_.html

Friday November 18th, 2005, French Department of Culture. SNEP and SCPP have told Free Software authors: "You will be required to change your licenses." SACEM add: "You shall stop publishing free software," and warn they are ready "to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code" should the "VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department"[1] bill proposal pass in the Parliament.

http://www.fsffrance.org/news/article2005-11-25.en.html

Please sign the petition against this:

http://eucd.info/petitions/index.php?petition=2

Here's a machine translation of the petition, which is in French of course:

By this petition, I thus ask you solemnly:
- to withdraw the bill n° 1206 on the royalty of the parliamentary agenda;
- to organize a true debate between the parts concerned aiming at finding a real balance, and where associations of authors and users of free software, librarians, and Net surfers will be able to really take part;
- to make so that the requests in particular initiative EUCD.INFO and interassociation of the archivists, librarians and documentalists (http://droitauteur.levillage.org) are taken into account.

By signing this petition, I join the many organizations which are opposed clearly to the provisions of this bill and to the conditions of its development.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Feucd.info%2Fpetitions%2Findex.php%3Fpetition%3D2&langpair=fr%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

Technorati Tags: free culture, free software

Cool colour analysis generative art in Flash, via Generator.x:

In The Mod

Does an extracted palette count as a derivative of a painting?

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, generative art

http://www.scarletstarstudios.com/blog/archives/2005/09/notes_on_making.html

I've been influenced by Julia Cameron's "Artist's Way" and also Philip Sylvester at the Drawing Studio -- but I feel like I'm really beginning to get a grip of my own on the creative process and wanted to take some quick notes.

Technorati Tags: art

Dean Gray Tuesday

Only 10 days after its release, the mash-up album American Edit, which pays tribute to the acclaimed Green Day album American Idiot through some of the best mash-up productions of 2005, was shut down reportedly after received a cease & desist order from Green Day's label, Warner records, despite the fact that it was released as an internet only release with no commercial gain for the team of mash-up artists involved. [...]

We hope to mobilize the online Mash-Up community by organizing a simple one-day organized event. Participants would be asked to post the American Edit album online for 24 hours only starting on Tuesday, December 13, at 12:00AM. Doing so is not intended to be a mass organization of music piracy but, rather, one single display of the consumptive power of the mash-up and home remix community in the hopes of encouraging the labels, publishers and artists who are curious about the mash-up community to consider giving the high quality productions of "illegitimate" music a legitimate consideration as a promotional avenue for all music.

Technorati Tags: free culture, music

Copyright maximalists like to contrast copyright with the old system of patronage, when you could only make art if you could convince the Pope or a duke or a king that your art was worthy. Patronage really distorted creative expression, and copyright did indeed promise to decentralize authority over what kind of art was permitted.

But the EMI rep's answer to the Grey Album is patronage. "You must not make this art unless we permit it." If you work for one of a few big record companies, you can use their legal apparatus to clear the material you want to use in a mashup. Otherwise, your art is illegal and will be censored.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/29/warners_censors_mash.html

Technorati Tags: free culture