Categories
Free Culture

LP – Congratulations To CC

Creative Commons won a very well deserved award for “project of social benefit” at Libre Planet 2009.  See here for a photo of Mike and Asheesh accepting it. I hadn’t met Mike or Asheesh in the flesh before, it was great to finally catch up with them.

Categories
Free Culture Personal

LP – Libre Planet 2009

Libre Planet was great.

The FSF extended their annual get-together to two days this year and discussed free network services and their high priority projects as well as free software activism. It was held at Harward’s science centre building, which was a great setting for rooms and for wifi but not so hot on food. 😉

I met lots of cool people, and I’m going to blog about what I learnt over the next few days. Before that I need to say a massive thank you to Benjamin Mako Hill for letting me sleep on one of his sofas, to Matt Lee for suggesting I attend the convention, and to the rest of the FSF staff for running such a well-planned and successful event.

Categories
Free Culture Personal Projects

Boston, and Libre Planet 2009

Due to an unlikely series of events I’m going to be in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts from Friday 20th to Monday 23rd of March. Amongst other things I’ll be at the FSF’s Libre Planet conference.

If you’ll be in the area or at the convention you can contact me using the comments here, identi.ca, twitter, facebook or email where I am always “robmyers”, although for email you need to add rob@ … .org .

And if you won’t be in the area but you’ve any questions regarding network service freedom or the FSF’s high priority projects add them in the comments.

Categories
Free Culture

Code is the Easy Part

I once offended some BBC backstage hackers by claiming that the hardware and software for an online media service was the easy part. I didn’t mean to imply that making and maintaining a large datacentre to serve audio and video streams to hundreds of thousands of users is easy, quite the opposite. It’s just that the even compared to such a striking technological achievement, the contractual negotiations with rightsholders are a harder problem.

Spotify is an authorised subscription-based streaming music service that has solved the harder problem. I can find tracks by even mid-level obscure indie acts from 20 years ago on it and listen to them safe in the knowledge that the BPI won’t threaten my kids. But the server and client software are proprietary.

That is silly. The software is easy to reimplement, as the Despotify free software client demonstrates. The secret sauce for Spotify is the licence agreements. They can make the client free software and the server a free network service without endangering those agreements. In fact doing so will increase the value of them, as they will grow and retain the audience for their brand and for their provision of music covered by those agreements.

If Spotify let a thousand projects bloom based on their source code, they could find themselves selling picks and shovels rather than panning for gold. Selling subscriptions to copyright licenced music isn’t particularly a good thing for free culture, but a service that means listeners don’t get sued and musicians are at least in with a chance of getting paid is good. And if it is based on free software and free network services, it can be even better for everyone.

Categories
Art Computing Free Culture

Why 3D Printing Will Go Mainstream

http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2009/03/why-3d-printers-won%E2%80%99t-go-mainstream/

Couldn’t resist. Sorry.

1. It’s debatable whether publishing on demand has gone mainstream, but word processing, webogs and inkjet printers certainly have.

2. Plastics are complex but so is colour printing. If you can do even a small subset of what professional 3D printing needs with just 3-4 compounds then 3D printing can be the inkjets of manufacture.

3. Laser printers used to be expensive. Now mono ones are less than 100 pounds and colour ones are less than 200 pounds. Innovation and economies of scale can work wonders.

4. Plastics are large and intricate but then so were electronic components. RISC and miniaturization can work in both cases. You can fit a jigsaw in a smaller box than a poster, and it can be more instructive to put together.

5. Designing in 3D is really hard but this is what “commons based peer production” is for. Make 3D design copyleft and it may still be hard but it will be decomposible and improvable. Make copyleft distros of fabbable components and objects made from them and watch them grow.

3D printing won’t go mainstream any more than home photocopiers did. But we will get the Kinko’s, Lulu.com, YouTube and HP Deskjets of 3D printing, and these will change things as much as the Internet and free software have.

Categories
Free Culture

The New Book Banning

the [US] federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute

The New Book Banning by Walter Olson, City Journal 12 February 2009

Via Neil Gaiman.

“Farenheit 451” meets Adbusters via “The Right To Read”…

Categories
Free Culture

NC Failage – Arnolfini Gallery

http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/

project.arnolfini offers a repository of materials for further use
under open content licenses

Fail. The GPL isn’t “open content”, and “open content” presupposes the
“content industry” as a frame of reference. “Free culture” is a
better description, but…

that require derived works to be made available under the same
(copyleft) conditions – using
using GNU GPL and Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

NC-SA is not a free culture licence. And NC-SA is not copyleft either
because it does not fully pass on the right to use and distribute the work.

It should be a precondition of getting Arts Council funding that work be
BY-SA so that the public get full access to the work that they have paid for…

Categories
Free Culture

FLOSS Manuals Shouldn’t Publish NC Books

(Update 13/3/09 – Adam from FLOSS Manuals points out in the comments that the licence page already says that the book will be re-licenced under the GPL. D’oh! Sorry FLOSS Manuals! But I still don’t think you guys should be publishing the book NC in the mean time…)

FLOSS Manuals is an excellent project providing manuals for Free Software. I gave the project a good review here, and I’ve written scripts to convert its HTML to ebooks.

FLOSS Manuals have been using the GPL for their manuals, which is a good licence if a strange choice for software manuals, but their latest manual, a digital art handbook, is licenced under Creative Commons’s Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike licence (NC-SA).

NC-SA is not a free licence by any definition. The FSF, OSI, Debian and Freedom Defined all reject it. It has no place in a project calling itself “FLOSS”.

It would be better for FLOSS Manuals not to publish this book than to break their principles in this way, particularly given the project’s robust rejection of the FDL for lesser reasons.

There are already other NC-SA Digital Art Textbooks available. What would be exciting, if it’s going to be CC licenced, would be a BY-SA one.

FLOSS Manuals should switch to BY-SA generally if the FDL is not acceptible. I’m not suggesting dual-licencing, which would just compound the problem, I’m suggesting re-licensing the project as a whole as BY-SA. This would answer FLOSS Manuals’ concerns about the FDL much better than using the NC.

But in the mean time, FLOSS Manuals should either relicence or pull the digital art manual. Because NC isn’t FLOSS.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Computing

New Art: Andy Warhol the computer geek

The enthusiasm for new technologies, when watched twenty years later, has something funny, but also something eery about it.

via New Art: Andy Warhol the computer geek.

Warhol meets Amiga. Good stuff