The New York Times: Making Use of Public Domain

Eric Steuer, November 20th, 2008

In yesterday’s Personal Tech Q&A section of The New York Times, there was a useful item called Making Use of Public Domain (registration required, although I was able to see the page at first without logging in) that describes a bit about how images that are found online can be used. The article points to a few good sources of public domain images and also mentions Creative Commons-licensed works as a source of legal-to-use material.

Just because a photo or document is available online does not mean it is automatically in the public domain, so check for copyright notices or a Creative Commons license before grabbing something to reuse. (A Creative Commons license works alongside a copyright and allows writers and artists more flexibility in sharing their creations with the world …)

That was quick - Restocking the Jump Drives

Fred Benenson, November 20th, 2008

We sold our last “JoCo Looks Back” USB jump drive sometime this morning — they sold at incredible rate that surprised everyone including our supplier. But do not despair, more are on their way, and everyone who donates more than $50 before December 31st will receive one. Thanks for your continued support of CC!

Digital Tipping Point

Cameron Parkins, November 19th, 2008

Digital Tipping Point, a documentary on the free software and free culture movements, recently posted over 80 digitized hours (350 hours have been shot in total) of CC BY-SA licensed footage of “leading politicians, CEOs, and software developers from all over the world.” The footage is available for free at their archive.org page:

The DTP crew describes their project as a Point-of-View (POV) documentary film about the rapidly growing global shift to open source software, and the effects that massive wave of technological change will have on literacy, art, and culture around the world.

The DTP crew says their project will be the first feature length documentary about free open source software to be built in an open source fashion out of video submitted to the Internet Archive.

[...]

The DTP crew invites you to take their video and rip, mix and burn it however you like, for whatever purpose you like. You can even use the footage for your own commercial film, as long as you release your final product under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike license.

Victor Stone, programmer and site admin at ccMixter, has a great post about the project up on his blog. We previously discussed Digital Tipping Point back in 2006.

Bombardirovka

Cameron Parkins, November 19th, 2008

Last night I had the pleasure of attending Art Knows No Borders, an event that was both a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders and a release party for Bombardirovka, a book written by Crystal Allen Cook in 2004 while she was in Armenia on a Fulbright Scholarship. The novel is a work of fiction that, in the words of Cook, functions “to observe, up close, how the past, not necessarily even our own personal past, lives on the actions and bodies of people living in the present.”

Bombardirovka is free to download and released under a CC BY-NC-SA license, meaning it can be re-used and adapted in any way as long as it is non-commercial in intent, shared under the same license as the original, and Crystal Cook is properly attributed. Check out the Share Novel page on Bombardirovka’s website in the coming weeks to find more about interesting reuse opportunities ahead.

Mark Hosler: Some Thoughts for Congress About Creativity and Copyright

Cameron Parkins, November 19th, 2008

Mark Hosler, co-founder of experimental music and sound collage act Negativland, recently took a trip to Washington D.C., where he penned this letter to members of congress on creativity and copyright. From metroactive:

Ours is a world in which copyright has fallen woefully behind the curve of what the public actually wants to do with all that digital “stuff” out there. Millions worldwide are creating art, music and video that incorporate elements of existing work—cutting and pasting bits and pieces of music, video, text, and pictures made by others to create new works. Millions of web pages now use various Creative Commons licenses to provide a nuanced alternative to traditionally black and white interpretations of copyright laws (one such license Negativland helped to write). The prevalence of these alternative copyright strategies is a testament to how many of your constituents are not at all happy with copyright as it stands now.

Negativland have been working through these sort of issues for close to three decades and even helped us in the drafting of our (now retired) CC Sampling license. Hosler’s piece is a great read and makes a compelling argument that recent changes in the ways that art and culture are created and distributed make a fresh approach to copyright a necessity. While this may not be anything new Mike Doyle, we hope that it inspires conversation among other policy makers.