free culture category archive

May I help promote your music?

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 [...]

How will we pay for free?

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 [...]

Police guitarist Andy Summers demonstrates Thomas Jefferson's point

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 [...]

Free Culture (Briefly)

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 [...]

Oh, the Pettiness... It Hurtses Us

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 [...]

Thru-You: Kutiman, the YouTube Maestro

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 [...]

Richard Stallman supports Creative Commons. Do you?

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 [...]

Free Culture 'Take Backsies' on Flickr

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 [...]

The Phone Book is Here!

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 - Johnson, Navin R.! I'm somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity - [...]

Steven Levy = Awesome Writer

Hackers

Many years ago I read Hackers for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed it. Levy takes exhaustive research and interviews and weaves them in to a great tale. I like reading about the people behind technology and how they came to do what they do (or did what they did), and this book [...]