category archive: free culture

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 – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

–The Jerk (of course!)

That’s what I felt like after receiving a copy of the 2008/2009 Rapid City/Gillete phone book in the mail recently. Look!

See, there in the upper right corner:

That’s a picture I took of Sylvan Lake in the Black Hills of South Dakota a few years ago.

The text reads:

Sylvan Sunset, by Scott Carpenter
http://www.MovingToFreedom.org
Creative Commons Attribution License, v3.0

Isn’t that an exciting something? Although I don’t …

It’s here! Big Buck Bunny is a free short movie created by the Peach open movie project. The animated movie is freely licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means, according to their “about” page: “you can freely reuse and distribute this content, also commercially, for as long you provide a proper attribution.”

Big Buck Bunny was made primarily with the awesome free Blender 3D graphics software. As far as I know, all the software used was free software, so you can download software and project files all for free and use them however you wish. That’s cool.

I wrote about the project last year: Peach! (Free Software, Free Movies). I’ve been following their blog with interest since learning about the project and investing in it by sending $40 to pre-order the DVD last September.

Still waiting for the DVD to arrive in Minnesota from Amsterdam, but I downloaded one of the Ogg Theora movie files from …

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 is full of characters and their stories: “The Heroes of the Computer Revolution.” Starting with the origins of hacker culture at MIT in the Tech Model Railroad Club, I felt transported back in time and was absorbed by the story.

Crypto

A month ago, I saw a reference to Levy’s Crypto, and I immediately ordered a used copy from Amazon. This is a story about how we finally got good crypto outside of the NSA. Having just started it, I’m finally learning something about those Diffie and …

I read with interest Crosbie Fitch’s rant: “In respect to the artist – NO PHOTOS”.

With this statement: “anything that is available to the senses of the public visitor is available to be recorded by that visitor,” I got to thinking about how copyright owners will try to control their “property” in the future.

It seems the time isn’t very far away when our senses will be augmented by our machines. What we see and hear will be much better preserved, and available for perfect recall. Will the RIAA claim the privilege and the right to dilute or maybe erase entirely our enhanced memory of a song we hear on the radio? Or control how we communicate so that we don’t share our experiences with others?

Doesn’t that seem awfully creepy? (Assuming you aren’t already creeped out by the idea of microchips and other hardware becoming a part of “you.” And I can’t say that I want to …

via QuestionCopyright.org:

Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special interest that is never satisfied and that will always demand that we take additional steps toward the ultimate control state. Today they want to transform the Internet Service Providers into an online police force, and the Antipiracy Bureau wants the authority for themselves to extract the identities of file sharers. Then they can drag the 15-year-old girl who downloaded a Britney Spears song to civil court and sue her.

Will the Antipiracy Bureau be satisfied with this? Probably not, because even the harsher laws now proposed will not stop the file sharing. Already there are anonymization services on the market that make the new laws ineffective. For this reason, the …

Originally published 17 October 2007 in Free Software Magazine.

I’m working on Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Good book so far, although I’ve ground almost to a halt halfway through. (I’d probably make better progress if it showed up in blog-sized chunks in my feed reader every day.) I like sweeping accounts of history, and this one presents many new ways to look at things. It also gets me thinking about the current sorry state of the patent system, with these excerpts:

All this is not to deny that Watt, Edison, the Wright brothers, Morse, and Whitney made big improvements and thereby increased or inaugurated commercial success. The form of the invention eventually adopted might have been somewhat different without the recognized inventor’s contribution. But the question for …

Way back in 1939, in his first published science fiction short story:

There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

–Robert Heinlein, “Life-Line”

I haven’t read the story, but that seems to apply very well today whether it’s Disney buying Congressmen and longer copyright terms, or Microsoft and many others using patents to stifle competition.

(Shouldn’t those ors be nors?)

Originally published 18 September 2007 in Free Software Magazine.

Apparently I’ve been living under a rock, because I only recently found out about the Blender project’s free and open source short movie, Elephants Dream, when I happened across Terry Hancock’s review of it last year at Free Software Magazine.

The motivation behind the project was to create a great movie short using only free and open source tools, while at the same time finding ways to improve the quality of those tools and free software projects in general.

Elephants Dream

The artists primarily used the excellent 3D modeling and animation software, Blender, along with many other free software programs, including The GIMP, CinePaint, and Inkscape. The credits page notes, “An enormous amount of improvements in [Blender] were a direct consequence of the movie project taking place.”

Most of the movie content is freely available under the Creative …

I first became aware of the P2P Foundation last year after Michel Bauwens sent me a nice email in response to “Free software is a weak mode of production?” I’ve since followed the P2P Foundation blog in my feed reader.

It is delightfully information-dense with good pointers and commentary about peer production. It can also be hard to keep up with, given my scattershot approach to information absorption. I should take more time to read and think about the ideas presented there by Michel and others.

An entry by Michel today is typically thoughtful and thought-provoking. He apparently has a deep well of enthusiasm and energy to draw from for this subject, and I’m glad someone is saying these things so eloquently. I love reading stuff like this, conveying so much and suggesting so many avenues to explore and learn more about.

Michel is responding to some critical remarks by Anthony Judge about the dark side of peer to peer. …

So the RIAA and MPAA want the colleges and universities (and corporations and your grandmother and etc.) to enforce our out-of-control copyright laws. It’s disturbing how much power these organizations already wield, and how much more power they think they should have in dictating how free the flow of information should be. Our future is digital, with infinite possibilities for freedom, but these guys would prefer that artificial scarcity rules the game.

(via Against Monopoly)

[...]

Reid’s amendment is a clear illustration of the effectiveness of lobbying. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think the trade groups actually wrote the text of the law. It vests in these groups a vast amount of money–taxpayer money–and, hence, power. The industry has already managed to move into a quasi-policing role, frequently working with federal, state, and local authorities on copyright and conspiracy investigations.

The bill also follows a continuing, troubling …