Featured Commoners
Featured creators, tools, and works.
Kembrew McLeod
Mia Garlick, November 1st, 2005
Kembrew McLeod is currently an Assistant Professor, University of Iowa, Department of Communication Studies. In addition to being an academic, Kembrew is a self-professed prankster. In 1998 he trademarked the phrase “Freedom of Expression®” as a comment on how the intellectual property law is being used to fence off culture and restrict the way in [...]
Lonely Island
Mia Garlick, October 17th, 2005
Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer are the members of The Lonely Island, an LA-based comedy collective, who have released much of their music and video shorts online under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
Also known as “the dudes”, Andy, Jorma and Akiva soon found that they were developing a fan base, some [...]
Rice University’s Connexions
Ashley Craddock, October 1st, 2005
On first glance — brown hair, pale skin, and undergrad-style clothes — Rich Baraniuk looks like an average guy. But look at his eyes, and you know you’re in the presence of something rare. They’re giant and brown and fairly glowing with the light of the millions of synapses firing at the same [...]
Marshall Sahlins
Alex Golub, October 1st, 2005
Marshall Sahlins wants to make the Internet the new medium for traditional pamphleteering. Sahlins, a celebrated anthropologist at the University of Chicago and the founder of Prickly Paradigm Press, has decided to re-release the press’s backlist with “some rights reserved.” This week, Prickly Paradigm goes online with the publication of five pamphlets [...]
Rick Prelinger
Lisa Rein, October 1st, 2005
Dateline: 1980. New York-based typesetter Rick Prelinger was trying to “make it in the movies” and writing a reference book on two-way radio frequencies on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Two years later, he became the Research Director for “Heavy Petting,” the Norman Lear-funded Atomic Café-like documentary about sexuality in the 20th Century. Armed with photocopies [...]
Wiley Wiggins
Matt Haughey, October 1st, 2005
Wiley Wiggins has starred in the films Dazed and Confused, Waking Life (on which he also worked as an animator), and Frontier. Wiggins was a contributing editor to the late, great FringeWare Review. His collection of short Stories, Solarcon-6, is available for free under a Creative Commons license from his website (also licensed!).
We caught [...]
Media Rights
Neeru Paharia, October 1st, 2005
MediaRights.org is an innovative non-profit, based in New York, but accessible around the world via their website that helps to showcase important social issue documentaries and puts media makers, educators, librarians, nonprofits, and activists in contact with each other to enable the use of documentaries to generate discussion and encourage action on [...]
Ourmedia
Neeru Paharia, October 1st, 2005
Ourmedia launched three months ago as a home for grassroots media. The site provides a place where anyone can upload video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media and store it for free on ourmedia’s servers forever. Uploaders have the option of making their works available under a Creative Commons license.
Recently, Ourmedia was [...]
Illegal Art
Derek Slater, October 1st, 2005
A museum exhibit called “Illegal Art” might sound like a history of naughty pictures. Turns out that the exhibit (through July 25 at SF MOMA Artist’s Gallery) is more innocuous than most primetime TV: A Mickey Mouse gasmask. Pez candy dispensers honoring fallen hip-hop stars. A litigious Little Mermaid. Not kids’ stuff, exactly—but illegal?
Copyright [...]
