culture category archive

Monday Photopost: Quebec City Wall Mural

Stacy Cashman has some great pictures of wall murals in Quebec City at her Rambling Traveler blog. Go there to learn more about the murals and see the uncropped and larger version of the picture below and two others.

I love the detail with the birds and the balloon having shadows. I also wonder what it’s like in these buildings with no real windows facing out.

Stacy makes all of her work available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, so I can heartily recommend her as a fine purveyor of free culture.

Of course, the nature of things today suggests that somebody might claim the art on the building is copyrighted and thus pictures of it are not free. I say, no way! If you …

A Free Culture Acorn Sprouts

I keep half an eye on references to this site by using feeds from Google News and Blog Search to catch links to here or mentions of the site (or me).

A lot of times the feeds turn up some crummy splog scraping my content. A lot of people get up in arms about this, but so far with the sites I’ve seen, I really don’t care. Whether they properly attribute the work or link or not; big deal. They’ve just been no-name sites. If some really popular site used my work without attribution (or with misattribution), that might bother me more. We’ll see if and when it happens.

I’m just not a fan of copyright or the idea that people can own published digital bits. My use of a …

Unbounded Freedom

The billblog pointed me to a new book and blog about Creative Commons licensing, by Rosemary Bechler.

I enjoyed contributing some scattered and rambling observations to discussions here and here. I enjoyed it for the chance to fire off some thoughts, but not so much as a debate. This is one of those debates where people on both sides are pretty well set with what they believe. (As are most debates. Tastes great! Less filling!) We’re all talking and no one is listening.

It occurs to me that for some time I’ve been reading and have been influenced by people with whom I very much agree. Now I’m reading …