There are artworks that are very similar technically but utterly
distinct culturally and historically. Take the examples of a Kasimir
Malevich painting of a black square from revolutionary Russia and an Ad
Reinhardt painting of a black square from 1960s America. Technically
speaking you can’t get much more basic than a black square, but
culturally speaking there’s no way you can swap one of those black
squares for any other.
In contrast, software consists of easily substituted black boxes of
functionality whose formal qualities are insignificant (Vi and Emacs
aside 😉 ).
Stallman’s Four Freedoms are freedoms of *use*; the freedom to operate
software as a tool, as a means to an end. Stallman has written, briefly,
about how he views the freedom to use non-software works. That freedom
decreases the less the work is a means and the more it is an end, from
educational resources through to works of opinion and expression.
So fungibility for code and culture may simply be a product of the
degree to which something is a means rather than an end.
In contrast to Stallman’s freedom of use, the EFF use the concept of
freedom of speech to argue for people’s ability to work with software.
When we talk about free culture in general then if it has any meaning it
is primarily as a synonym for freedom of speech.
In order to speak freely, you must be free to refer to and quote the
words (or sounds or images or…) of others. And because of the
non-fungibility of cultural works, no other words (or sounds or images
or…) can be substituted.
A text editor works on a novel or a program listing equally well, and in
some jurisdictions software is regarded as a literary work for the
purpose of copyright. Different criteria of freedom may apply to the
fixed forms of software and art, but the restrictions are just the same.
For free software, part of the solution to this was alternative
copyright licensing.
So fungibility is related to use but free culture is concerned with
speech. It is not the case that free culture supposes or can in any way
cause cultural fungibility. And the non-fungibility of cultural works is
precisely why free culture requires the same solutions as free software
does at the level of copyright.
Category: Free Culture
Five years and several Wiki restores ago I wrote a sketch of an article called “How To Get Paid For Copyleft Art“. My opinion at the time was that cultural projects (or artistic careers) could be structured to make money using copyleft, but I was very wary of recommending any particular services for digital media.
Crosbie Fitch has been working on this sort of thing for a while. And recently some other projects that support different ways of funding projects have started gaining in popularity.
Kickstarter is best known in free culture and free software circles for funding Diaspora, but there are lots of other projects on there (I contributed towards the Mondo 2000 History Project for example). It’s an escrow or street performer protocol system where people promise to create or do something if contributors promise the right amount of funding.
Flattr is a micropayments service that allows you to add a donation button to blogs and other social media. I’ve started seeing this on blogs I read. There’s a flattr plugin for Android apps that might be a good way of getting funding from users of published free software.
VoDo is a peer-to-peer movie sharing
network (using Bittorrent) that allows you to sponsor the creators of
the work shared over the network.
And even good old PayPal buttons are increasingly being used to accept contributions in exchange for downloads. I just paid for a download of the “Jolly Roger” comic in this way.
These systems all offer ways of getting money in
exchange for artistic labour that are sorely needed. But they are all proprietary systems run by for-profit companies, so the
revolution will be monetized.
Categories
Free Agriculture
The specific mechanism Michaels goes on to propose is a “General Public
License for Plant Germplasm (GPLPG)” that is explicitly modeled on the
GPL developed by the FOSS movement for software.
(Via mp)
Categories
Freedom Porn
Some time ago I mentioned Sharing is Sexy, a Free Culture porn project. The site seems to be offline unfortunately (archive.org has a cache). But now there’s a new Free Culture Porn site, FreedomPorn.org :
Introducing, FreedomPorn.org, the world’s first ever free-as-in-freedom porn site, comprised of entirely free cultural works
in free formats, both Ogg Theora and WebM. Freedom Porn (FP) is a
participatory resource for ethical smut, promoting our favorite ideals,
and running on donations. From the about page:The mission of Freedom Porn is to
empower and engage individuals to create and share ethical porn as a
means of advancing sex-positivism and sexual freedom.We advocate safer sex and consensual sex, and feminism is inseparable
from our mission. We also fight for freedom of speech, privacy,
and free culture.
Sounds good. I’m glad that the project has a specifically feminist element and that it’s using free video formats. That last sentence shouldn’t read as strangely as it does.
Categories
Notes Towards Free Culture
Free jam:
http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/news/the-four-freedoms-two-rules-and-one-jam
Theory
book piracy:
Crowdsourcing
as wage saving and as workforce disempowerment:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/crowdsourcing-and-the-new-alienating-nature-of-work/2010/06/05
“Piracy
has increased my book sales 700%”:
http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/blog/2010/jun/5/piracy-has-increased-my-e-book-sales-700/
A
second-generation performance artist calls for copyright on
performances so they can enclose the performance commons:
http://www.artfagcity.com/2010/06/05/marina-abramovic-afterthoughts-willpower-control-copyright/
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Categories
Ebooks
I love books. At art school we learnt how to print and bind them, but I was reading them long before that and I’m one of those people for whom death by bookpile is not an unrealistic threat. So it’s the physicality of books as artefacts as well as the knowledge and fantasy they contain that has always appealed to me.
I also love computing machinery and high technology. Combine this with books and you get ebooks. “Ebooks” is a misonmer. You don’t call an ogg vorbis file an e-vinyl, or an ogg theora track an e-VHS. They should be etexts. But the ebook name has stuck. An ebook reader is a physical device used to read ebooks. I was using an old Palm Pilot, then my Android phone. I’ve now bought a BeBook One and installed the free OpenInkpot on it to get a free software ebook reader system.
The BeBook uses an e-paper display, which means the display flashes black before each page refresh (you get used to it, which surprised me) and the image remains even if the system isn’t drawing any power. I won’t pretend that the resources used to manufacture and deliver the BeBook are less than those consumed in the production of many dozen paper-and-ink books, but it is energy efficient. Ebook readers might appear to be a temporary aberration, dedicated devices that will soon be superseded by general-purpose devices such as the iPad. But I like to concentrate when reading, and that means that the absence of a Twitter client is a plus not a minus for a dedicated ebook reader.
Like the music industry’s ten year sulk over Napster, the publishing industry and far too many authors who should otherwise know better regard the vastly increased audience and demand for books in electronic format as a threat rather than an opportunity. Many books that I would purchase as ebooks have two problems. Firstly, they have idiotic DRM on them that prevent me buying and using them on the hardware and software that I use. Secondly, they have ridiculous prices that are equal to or greater than the hardback price for the same book despite the greatly reduced production costs of the ebook.
There are two ways of looking at the freedom to read an ebook.
Free Software requires that you be able to use the software that displays the book as you see fit and that the book not require any limitations or controls in the software that reads it. DRM and proprietary ebook reader software breaks this. Free reader software like OpenInkpot and FBReader, and free and open formats like epub without DRM added support this.
Free Culture requires that you be free to use the book, at the very least to have your fair use/fair dealing rights, and preferably to have the freedom to use it without restriction. Ideally the book will have a copyleft licence such as Creative Commons BY-SA, but it must at least not have DRM applied.
I prefer books that are both free software and free culture, but it’s difficult to avoid non-free culture of value.
Out of copyright works are ideal. The best source of these is Project Gutenberg, which now provides epub version –
The website Manybooks formats up Gutenberg texts in many different formats and aggregates other texts as well. It’s a good way of finding contemporary books available under Creative Commons licences –
Google Books has many out of copyright books and magazines that Gutenberg doesn’t.. These are available from archive.org, which has many other out of copyright and Creative Commons licenced books as well –
Smashwords ebooks are not Creative Commons licenced but are DRM-free and reasonably priced –
FLOSS Manuals are producing collaboratively edited manuals for free software –
And Artists Ebooks are exploring the possibilities of ebooks by artists –
I’ll post some specific ebooks to try in another post, but the above are where most of the ones I’ve read have come from.
Categories
Upcoming Free Culture Movies
Sintel, the third Blender movie – http://durian.blender.org/
Tube, an update of the Gilgamesh legend (also Blender) – http://tube.freefac.org/
Morevna, anime made with Synfig and Blender – http://morevnaproject.org/
Categories
Notes Towards Free Culture
Fair Use Gets a Fair Shake in Second Life
Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either) – Cory Doctorow
Enforcement of the GNU GPL in Germany and Europe
Wall wart / plug servers – A UK-based seller of devices fitting Eben Moglen’s “wall wart” internet server description
Miguel de Icaza acknowledges Mono’s past problems with patents, but not its current ones –
Theora is not more of a patent threat than h246, Gruber 😉 –
Gruber’s Theora journey continues (answers to his questions – because it would be easier to establish the precedent while the MPEG-LA won’t face massive retaliation from cross-licensees, and it depends on the text of the licence) –
An example of “open source” hardware’s growing pains. Ideas of “openness”, “share-alike” and “the commons” can easily be misleading here: it is only users of hardware who need schematics in order to protect their freedom, the original authors of the schematics neither need nor are owed them, and the freedom of users of simple hardware may not be restricted by the lack of schematics (I don’t know) –
The UK GIS industry’s largest players are, unsurprisingly, against making Ordinance Survey data free despite the fact that it would be better for the economy than they are-
Synthetic biology meets art, you can apply for a residency in the UK or the US until March 31st 2010. Mutate and take over the artworld! –
If you’re in Boston on Friday, come to the FooBar!
With a lot of people in town for the LibrePlanet conference, we decided to have a little event of our own.
What
If you’re interested in free software, free network services, art, music and copyleft, come along!
Where
We’re meeting at 7pm, on Friday 19th March 2010.
The venue is the back room of JJ Foleys Bar and Grille, on the Red Line in Downtown Crossing and just a 10-12 minute fast train journey from Harvard Square.
The venue is the back room of JJ Foleys Bar and Grille, on the Red Line in Downtown Crossing and just a 10-12 minute fast train journey from Harvard Square.
Why
If you’ve used Libre.fm, or you’re excited to find out the latest about daisychain development and some of the musical projects we have in the pipeline, come along. We’ll be giving out free CDs with some our work, as a sampler.