category archive: free culture

Bob Lefsetz directed my attention to a New York Times op-ed piece by Damian Kulash, Jr., “WhoseTube?” I’m not familiar with Damian or his band, OK Go, but was interested to hear how EMI no longer allows the band’s YouTube videos to be embedded, which had previously contributed greatly to their visibility and success:

Now we’ve released a new album and a couple of new videos. But the fans and bloggers who helped spread “Here It Goes Again” across the Internet can no longer do what they did before, because our record company has blocked them from embedding our video on their sites. Believe it or not, in the four years since our treadmill dance got such attention, YouTube and EMI have actually made it harder to share our videos.

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But this isn’t how the Internet works. Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items …

We want to have a free culture, where we may freely share copies of things like literature, music, and movies, and where we can freely build on these works. We also want to reward the people who create the culture. Well: We want to reward people who are good at it, or show promise. We would be happy if talented artists can earn a decent living at it, so that they can spend their time creating more art for us to enjoy.

(free photo!)

Someone might ask: “How will artists make a living in this la-la dreamland of sharing and cooperation and free love? How are we going to pay people to make all this great content to which you feel entitled?”

Well, I’m not 100% in love with your tone there, Mr. Someone, but one way of paying for free is to go back to the good old days …

After reading Sting’s memoir recently, which ends just as he is starting to find success with The Police, I read Andy Summers’s One Train Later: A Memoir, mostly wanting to learn more about The Police. From his younger years, there was this passage which made me think of the popular Thomas Jefferson quote about ideas (emphasis mine):

There’s a boy a year ahead of me named Peter Jones who some of the kids say is the best guitar player in school. He has this reputation because apparently he can play the intro to “Move It,” which is a hit by Cliff Richards and the Shadows, but he won’t show it to anybody, so I get friendly with him with the ulterior motive of capturing the lick. We get chummy and one afternoon after school he invites me to his house to have a session in his mum’s front room. We play for half an hour, strumming along in unison on the …

The free culture movement, according to a recent Wikipedia revision, is “a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works, using the Internet as well as other media. The movement objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, or completely reject the concepts of copyright and intellectual property, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity.” Also: “The free culture movement takes the ideals of the free software movement and extends them from the field of software to all cultural and creative works.”

That sounds like a good start at defining free culture, and is something I agree with. Copyright is a privilege that has been over-extended and is abused by many of those who hold copyright on artifacts of our culture. I am very much in favor of creative people earning rewards for their work if it is valued by others, but I don’t think the way to do this is to grant exclusive rights to the work for 100+ years.

Industries that rely on …

I think I first learned about the web site Zen Habits when my sister sent me a link to this post: Open Source Blogging: Feel Free to Steal My Content, in which the blog’s author, Leo Babauta, places all of his writing from the site and from his ebook Zen To Done into the public domain.

It was music to my ears, coming from someone enjoying success (financial and otherwise) with their blog and their writing, and it really showed that he “gets” Free Culture. Since then I’ve subscribed to Leo’s blog and have found many things to inspire me there.

Given Leo’s generous and enlightened attitude about his own work and the importance of sharing freely, it made his post from yesterday even more disappointing. In “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (or, the Privatization of the English Language),” Leo starts:

Today I received an email from the lawyers of author Susan Jeffers, PhD., notifying me that I’d infringed on her trademark by inadvertently using the phrase …

I’m in awe. I’m awestruck. I’ve visited the land of awesome.

There is so much great stuff on the Internet that you might despair of all that you will never see. But then there are the gems you find.

For example: Thru-You.

Kutiman, according to Wikipedia, is an Israeli musician, composer, producer, and animator. And he has made something wonderful for which I’m very grateful.

This is the first of a collection of songs that Kutiman created by mixing together clips of people singing and playing instruments on YouTube:

Kutiman, Mother of All Funk Chords

The artistry in weaving together these songs out of the cacophony of YouTube is extraordinary. The song above credits and links to 22 different videos. It’s interesting to look at the source videos. They range from mundane to very good on their own, and I just can’t get over Kutiman’s creativity in making something so …

I was happy to share my Hawaii vacation pictures under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, but it occurred to me that I may not have the legal right to do so for several of them.

Three were taken by my wife, but I’m pretty sure she’ll go along with me on the licensing choice.

Two of the pictures I placed online were of my wife and me together, and these were taken by random bystanders. Since I neglected to bring copyright assignment forms to be filled out and signed in triplicate, I think that means the copyright belongs to those unknown — and by now almost thoroughly unknowable — people.

Since they agreed to take the pictures, it seems safe to suppose that they consented for them to be captured to the memory card on the camera, but I don’t know if we can assume they would give permission for me to copy them to my hard drive, to CD, and …

In a post about the relicensing option from the GNU Free Documentation License to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, Richard Stallman writes:

If a wiki site exercises the relicensing option, that entails trusting Creative Commons rather than the Free Software Foundation regarding its future license changes. In theory one might consider this a matter of concern, but I think we can be confident that Creative Commons will follow its stated mission in the maintenance of its licenses. Millions of users trust Creative Commons for this, and I think we can do likewise.

Sounds like a strong endorsement from someone with demanding standards.

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And seems like an opportunity to shill for donations to Creative Commons. They are running their annual fundraiser right now, and for $50 ($25 for students) you can become a member of the CC Network, which allows you to sport a button on your web page to proudly show your support (and link to your CC Network profile page):

And, I think …

I was excited yesterday to hear about a new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. (Also mentioned in a Creative Commons blog post.)

I wasn’t familiar with James Boyle and his work, which is disturbing, because it seems like I should already have been a fan of such a free culture luminary. He has lots of good things to say on the topic. (I’ve since tried to remedy my negligence by adding him to my “Free Links.”)

The book is available for free online under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike License. After downloading it and reading through part of the first chapter, I ordered the paper copy from Amazon.

I fully expect it to reinforce my beliefs and give me some good talking points about the value of free culture and the public domain. I think it will also challenge me to think about the subject in a more rounded …

Ice House ruins in Tyler, Texasphoto by Terry Shuck (crowt59)Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

I can’t remember when or how I first found Terry Shuck’s work on Flickr, but I immediately became a fan of his photography. It appears that he uses HDR techniques quite a bit, although I can’t tell what all magic he summons with different lens and filters and whatnot.

I liked that he often shared his images under Creative Commons licenses, including the liberal Attribution license which allows for commercial reuse. It was for this reason as much as anything that I subscribed to his photostream. It’s good to find kindred free culture spirits. But then he increasingly released new photos under standard copyright with “All Rights Reserved,” and I soon unsubscribed.

For random things that I stumble across on the Net, “free” has the edge in keeping my attention. …