A few weeks ago, I had the chance to talk to George Mayo, known as Mr. Mayo to his students, a middle school Language Arts teacher in Maryland. Mr. Mayo was brought to CC Learn’s attention by Lawrence Lessig, CC’s founder and current board member, who Skyped with Mr. Mayo’s class for thirty minutes, answering questions on copyright, YouTube’s take-down policy and downloading music. Mr. Mayo and his class have integrated CC licensed works into their daily activities, documenting it all at mrmayo.org. Instead of elaborating on the various innovative ways Mr. Mayo and his class uses CC, I’m going to let George speak for himself. The following is the interview I had with him via Skype. You can also listen to the audio here.

You were originally brought to our attention by Larry, who said he spoke to your classroom for half an hour about copyright and Creative Commons. And putting aside the fact that it’s awesome that you got half an hour of his attention, what is it that you teach and that spurred you to set up this first conversation with Larry?

Yeah, that was really cool that he gave us that much time; it was so nice of him to do that, and the way that he interacted with the kids was really awesome; he really took them seriously and gave very thoughtful responses. But what I teach this year–I’m a language arts teacher, but this year I’m teaching a film and literacy class. So it’s kind of a cool thing for middle schoolers to be able to take. My district is offering it and basically, we watch films and we make our own short films. And it’s all geared around kids building literacy skills through studying and making their own films.

So do they actually shoot their own films? Or do they use material that’s online and remix it, or do a little bit of both?

Right now, they shoot their own films. They have cameras and Apple laptops. The remixing part–I would like to; I have an after school club where we make stop motion films and we sort of mess around with some remixing in that club.

Do you encourage them to use Creative Commons licensed soundtracks or images or anything like that?

I do. That’s where, particular last year, as we started making films and I knew about all of the wealth of content online that you could use through Creative Commons, I started opening up all those resources to my students. So we’ve been using ccMixter and we use Freesound quite a bit, and so we basically tap into all those resources under the Creative Commons licenses, so it really just opens up just an amazing amount of resources. Like we drop in all this different music and sound effects, [and] it really helps the kids a lot and on their projects.

That’s really cool! So you’ve been doing that for the past year?

Yeah, I did that all last year. And even before that, as a language arts teacher, we were kind of experimenting with some of these resources, but really heavily over the last year.

How did you as a–you’re a middle school teacher right? You teach seventh and eight grades?

Right now I’m teaching sixth and seventh grade.

So how did you, as a middle school teacher, become aware of Creative Commons and decide to incorporate that into your film class?

Well one of the things is, as a teacher I was pretty confused about copyright, and when we first started making movies before I even started teaching the film class, I knew that we were using copyrighted material in some of our projects, and I just wasn’t sure what the rules were. And so as I started learning about Creative Commons I thought, as a way to learn more myself, we would start looking into it as a whole class.

So it was kind of a learning process together?

Exactly, yeah. I know we were making these video projects and posting them online, and I didn’t want to model inappropriate copyright, so I thought, well we’ll look into Creative Commons. And I just started learning more, and when you start looking into it you realize how easy it is and the wealth of resources that are out there at your fingertips. You know, it becomes really advantageous for the teacher to figure it out because the kids really get into it, it makes their projects better, and it helps us all learn about these issues of copyright. So I got into it because I wanted to learn about it, and I wanted to open up these resources for my students.

What are some of the resources that you started with and that were the most help to you?

The main one we used–last year there were two, there was ccMixter.org and there was another one called Freesound. And this year with Freesound… all last year, we took a lot of content from these websites–we just took and took. And this year we though it would be interesting if we added some to these sites as well. So we have a classroom Freesound account called “Pay Attention”, and we capture free sounds around our school with this nice digital recorder and we upload them to the account. So we’re trying to get the kids to understand that these are online communities where you take stuff, but it’s also really good to contribute content. So we’re making a point this year to rate the sounds in the songs as we download them to give feedback to the artists who uploaded them, and then we’re adding our own content that people are really downloading–we have some sounds that have been downloaded dozens of times, which the kids–they see that and they’re like wow, we’re part of this community.

Yeah, a community of sharing. That’s really cool, so how do you guys decide which license to upload your own content under?

Well the movies that we make, the stop motion movies, in the stop motion club called Longfellow Ten, those are all Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Ok, Attribution Only (CC BY), yeah.

And, however, with the stop motion, I like to change that to where there can be remix and mash-ups. However, movies where the kids are in it themselves, those are “all rights reserved” because they’re middle school students and we kind of just keep “all rights reserved” on those. But how are the sounds that we upload–[they] are sampling plus 1.0 license so they can take them, do anything they want, remix them, mash up, whatever.

So I guess when the kids are engaging in these projects, remixing, etc., where does the discussion about licensing and copyright issues come in? Do they see that ccMixter has Creative Commons licensed music and go, hey that icon is Creative Commons licensed music–what’s that? And you kind of go over it with them? How does that discussion come in?

Basically, it’s really just kind of a discussion that goes on all year. Creative Commons content and copyright is a discussion that we have throughout the whole school year. I have printed out some large Creative Commons posters that you guys make available on your site (which are really nice classroom posters), so we have this up and as the kids are downloading songs that they want to use, we have a format that makes sure they attribute the artist, that they cite the exact URL, that they cite the title of the track and the licensing status it’s licensed under. So they really learn about it by doing it. I don’t stand up there and lecture to them, but by going through the process they really get a grasp on the license and how it works. And why–the idea that artists want to share their stuff.

So they have an idea of–if it weren’t for the Creative Commons license the artists wouldn’t be able to share legally? Do you talk about how restrictive copyright naturally is? Or, have you gone over that with them?

Yeah, that comes up a lot because they don’t quite understand that you can’t take a 50 cent song or something and just drop it into your video.

They just do it anyway.

Yeah, and they do do it anyway because a lot of these kids are posting all kinds of content online as everybody knows, and then I’ll say, have you guys had YouTube videos taken down? And they’ll all raise their hands. And those are some questions we had for Professor Lessig.

Wow, so a lot of them have uploaded on YouTube and have gotten their stuff taken down?

Yeah, they’re all completely familiar with having videos taken down and it’s because of copyright. Some of the questions for Lessig were, you know, how are the filters on YouTube? How do they work? How does YouTube catch this? And the problems with that, and how the filters are distinguished between different types of use. So that’s another thing that’s interesting with the discussions of copyright is [that] the kids are really interested; they want to know what the rules are and they don’t know. Like particularly when one of the questions was can I take a song on iTunes and use it in a movie and upload it to YouTube, you know, again, underneath fair use there are ways you can do that, but generally, no, you really can’t. And then a lot of questions–when you talk about these issues of copyright, they’re really interested in this because, I mean they’re all using this. They’re using the website and uploading content all over the place, but they have sort of a–not a clear idea of what the rules are.

So do you find that once they–over the process of the year that they’ve been learning more and more about Creative Commons and copyright law–that once they know more about it, they start following the law more and they don’t post 50 cent videos up onto YouTube?

I think they do, and I know I’ve had some students who tell me, oh in our videos now we’re using ccMixter songs–you know, on our videos we’re making on our own at home. So a lot of this, it’s transferring to what they’re doing outside of the classroom. In my class, they can’t, I mean they have to use, they have to follow the copyright rules. But outside, I know from a few students who have told me that, they’re taking what they learn and they’re applying it to what they’re doing on their own.

So do you think that was kind of the biggest barrier to sixth and seventh graders (like breaking the law before)–[that] they just didn’t know about it?

I don’t think they had an idea. You know, even as a teacher, as far as fair use, it seems kind of complicated… I know talking to other teachers and being online and seeing what teachers say about this topic–even teachers are confused by it, so students are as well.

Yeah… I think everyone in general is confused about copyright and fair use.

But if they use Creative Commons it’s so simple. It just kind of bypasses all that complexity and it’s so clear.

Have you focused on any of the international aspects of Creative Commons? Because our licenses are global, so have you found that your students have been interacting with media from other countries or connecting even with video makers or video clips that were made in other countries under a Creative Common license? And if they have, what they think about that?

We’ve done projects in our classroom where we collaborated with students from other countries. We have projects that we’ve done but not directly related to Creative Commons. It’s very, very likely that the content they’ve downloaded is from countries besides the United States, but they don’t–that’s not something that they are actively sort of recognizing.

Right. What are these projects that are international projects?

Well we did one last year, actually a year and a half ago where we wrote a Twitter story. One classroom got the Twitter account and wrote a chapter, and then I sent it off to the next classroom and when it was done we had over a hundred kids in six different countries who added to the whole story. And then we published it as a little book and it was 140 posts total, so it was a cute little science fiction story.

So it’s kind of a story game where each student contributes a Twitter?

Yeah, but like in each classroom would be a chapter. So each classroom had 5-10 students and they would write, and we would get done with that chapter in a day and we would ship it off to the next class, and then they would add a chapter and figure out where the story goes. And it was at the 140th entry that was the ending.

So how did you coordinate among the different schools? Did you set this up beforehand, contact the schools and say we should all have Twitter accounts and do this? Or…

No it was really just on the fly, totally. Actually, we were sitting around at lunch and we came up with the idea and we sent it out, and I was talking with the teachers on Twitter… somebody in Canada, this teacher in Canada, grabbed the next chapter. We actually had like kids in England, China even, we had kids in China, like all over the place! And then another project we did recently, like a year or so ago, was the mini voices for Darfur–like March 6th we declared it Darfur day and we invited students from all over the place to come and comment on efforts to raise awareness about genocide. And we had almost 700 comments within a 24 hour period.

And this was on Twitter?

This wasn’t on Twitter; we used Twitter heavily to sort of promote it…

Was this on your blog?

Yeah, it’s on my blog.

Where is the Twitter Sci-fi story located? Is that on your blog as well?

It is, and it’s still up.

Are you planning to have any other projects kind of like that? Like another Twitter project–it might not be a Sci-fi story, it might be something else.

Yeah, I’m always open. Like one thing on my mind lately that I thought would be really interesting is to do a collaborative–and I’m just thinking middle school–is to do a remix project. I saw this thing online, following Creative Commons, and it was Infinity–you had artists create a picture, and musicians grab the picture and add a loop, soundtrack to it. This year it would be neat to do some sort of remix collaboration project where we upload all this content and everybody grabs it and remixes each others content as a way of teaching about Creative Commons and the whole idea of remixing. That’s kind of what’s floating in my mind lately and I have a couple teachers who seem like they would be interested.

One of the things I’ve always done with my projects is I make it super, super easy. Like lower the barrier to participating and just make it so stripped down and easy for people to participate so they can–I mean that’s why some of the projects have worked well, because people can jump in and it’s not very complicated. It’s very clear cut.

So have you found that your students are pretty adept at using the Internet and Web 2.0 tools? For them to just jump in and Twitter? Do your students come from a background where they have computers at home?

Yeah, many of my students, this year they do. Like in the past as a Language Arts teacher we used lots of blogs and wikis. When I’m just teaching this film class we share many of our movies online on a blog, but the kids aren’t actively blogging themselves in this video class. In the past I’ve had all my kids blogging, they’ve had individual blogs and stuff, but with the film class we’re just focusing on the movies and we share our movies on one collective blog.

So have you come across students that aren’t as comfortable with technology? And if you have, how have you dealt with their skills?

Well, yeah, there seems to be… even just going on ccMixter, downloading a song and putting it on a flash drive, putting it into the Mac and grabbing the song–just simple things like that, some kids aren’t quite clear on some of those things. And since we’re all together, we’re all sort of learning and doing this, you find that kids help each other, and the kids that don’t quite have a grasp on some of the things we’re doing quickly learn by watching and being helped by other students.

So I guess, going back to your Skype conversation with Lawrence Lessig, I was wondering about your students’ reactions to Larry. After they finished interviewing him, what did they think about Larry? Did they feel like they got their questions answered?

Well, I think they were really proud of themselves because you know he had answered the question and there wasn’t any sort of playing around, and I think it helped clarify some of the issues. I mean one thing that stood out–they had a lot of questions about peer to peer file sharing sites and they’re not clear why that’s illegal, and then Mr. Lessig spent some time talking to them about that. I think that overall, they felt really good about the conversation. That was the last week… We haven’t had a lot of reflection time with that particular class (yet) but I know things went well. We had a bunch of students come in from other classes to watch that, [and] the principal was in it. I thought we had a really good conversation and the students felt good about it. Mr. Lessig was really awesome with the way he talked to and treated them.

What do you consider was the most interesting student question and answer from Larry?

I thought the questions about the filters on YouTube and how that can start to restrict–he was mentioning if the content industry has their way, YouTube would have heavy filters that would really limit the YouTube as we know it now. We were interested in that, and then another thing that I was really surprised by is their questions about peer to peer file sharing. Because they all used the site, they all use various peer to peer file sharing sites to basically download copyrighted content, and they weren’t aware that was really illegal, so that really helped them clarify that for them.

What did Larry say about that?

Well, he said–another question was, why are these sites allowed to exist if everybody’s using them illegally? And he kind of clarified how peer to peer file sharing sites can be used legally. I mean, if you’re downloading CC licensed content, you can do that. And he went up and talked about how these make it possible for artists to sort of distribute their content to a larger number of people, and he explained how the supreme court said these sites are allowed to exist, even though as a tool people are using them for illegal things, he said the tool itself is not an illegal tool.

So this is kind of off topic, or it’s more about yourself, because I remember middle school teachers–I remember when I was in middle school myself, and I hated it, because you know, middle school is just known as the age when students are not at their best, and I was wondering what in the world made you want to be a middle school teacher? Because you’re obviously really involved with your kids and really involved with copyright and Creative Commons issues and what made you, I guess, want to be a middle school teacher first of all and second of all, to delve into these issues with your students? I mean, for instance, do you have any background in your schooling with open issues or copyright issues?

I don’t, actually. I was actually a construction worker and a truck driver for a number of years. I dropped out of college. And I always wanted to be a teacher so I went back to night school for like a number of years. In San Diego I got my teaching degree. So I come to teaching after having a lot of other jobs. I just always wanted to do it.

And middle school–I don’t know what it is, I really like teaching middle school students. I have a sub this week, I was talking to him yesterday and he was telling me how hard middle school is, you have to deal with behavior issues and it’s kind of a tough age group. But it’s really–something about middle school appeals to me. It’s kind of crazy, you never know–you know the kids are going through so many different changes, and there’s so much psychology involved, and sort of like getting the problem students and the good students and making everything move along. It’s kind of just mentally appealing. And also I like the creative aspect, where you can do all these creative things, you have a lot of room to sort of do out-of-the-box types of things. If they see that the kids are engaged and learning the content, you really can kind of go out there and do some kind of crazy stuff, so it’s kind of open in that regard. So we have a lot of fun and do some kind of nutty, you know, just projects that are a little unusual sometimes.

Reflecting back to your own middle school experience, how would you compare yourself with the kids of this generation? Do you think they’re all that different from you? Do you think they’re much more–obviously the Internet just recently took off–has that made things different about the way you teach and the way you were taught in middle school?

I don’t even remember. I mean I can remember one or two of my middle school teachers. I don’t remember anything particularly that I learned or like what I was–

I don’t either.

I think it’s sort of a gray area, the whole experience of middle school. I remember being really awkward and skinny and self conscious. And I was in Texas and we were still using typewriters. We didn’t have computers when I graduated from high school–there weren’t even computers yet in the buildings really. So I mean it’s just so different now. The kids today–all they know is the Internet, they grew up with it. So not a lot of parallels I don’t think, and I sort of blacked out my middle school years, to tell you the truth.

They were too traumatic. Do you think your kids are awkward too at this age? Or do you think they’re a little bit more well adjusted than we were?

I guess a little bit of everything?

What do you think the value of them learning about Creative Commons now and copyright issues will be for their future?

Well, I think as they–I think these are skills that are worthwhile knowing as they move on. ‘Cause the whole world is sort of going into this Web 2.0 and everybody is sharing and adding content, and I guess as Mr. Lessig was saying, “the Read Write Web,” so it’s good to have them understand these basic issues of copyright and to open up the world of Creative Commons to them. So I just think that it will be helpful to them as they go through knowing that they have all these resources and that they can sort of–what they make and create can be added to all the content that’s out there. They’re not just consumers, as Mr. Lessig would say, they’re artists themselves.

What advice would you have for other teachers? A lot of teachers are in the dark about copyright and Creative Commons just as you and I probably were a few years ago. What advice would you have for them to incorporate that kind of education into their classrooms and why should they do so?

Photo by Mr. Mayo CC BY-NC

I think why is just to show their students how much great resources are out there for them to use. That’s a great entry point. And also if they’re doing a project, like many classrooms now are doing multimedia projects, it’s worth the teacher’s effort to go to a site like Freesound.org, which is a really great community for classrooms because it’s a very–it’s middle school safe as far as being appropriate. If you find one of these sites that have Creative Commons content and just allow your students to investigate it for possibilities of sound effects and music to use in their multimedia projects, it doesn’t even have to be music. Obviously, Archive.org has all these resources, so I think it’s very much in the teacher’s interest to open up the doors for the students to see this stuff, and I mean it’s just so easy. Right click, download, download, I mean you can grab this stuff so quickly that it’s just crazy not to allow kids the access to this content… It’s a good entryway into starting a conversation about copyright.

CC BY-NC by Stephen Downes

So I caught up with him via Skype; and though different operating systems and timezones may have jumbled some of our conversation, I was still able to catch most of his words, if not the heart of his views. Below is our chat transcribed, in more or less the same fashion as it progressed.

If you could just briefly introduce yourself and explain your position at the National Research Council of Canada?

I’m Stephen Downes. I work for the National Research Council of Canada based near New Brunswick, Canada, and my position here is officially titled Senior Research Officer. So I’m a researcher–that’s kind of like being a professor, except without students, although I do teach a course with George Siemens online, so that’s sort of like having students, too. My work involves research… I do some project development, project management, I do some writing. I do some public speaking and talking in areas like this. I do a daily newsletter; it goes out to several thousand people around the world, and [I do] basic, various other activities that are relevant.

So how does this position facilitate your mission related to OER or Open Education?

Well, for me it’s how does OER facilitate my mission. My mission is to make it so that every person around the world has full access to educational opportunities and equal opportunity to make the most of their lives. Open educational resources are an important part of that because, of course, access to open materials enables all of that. So what I do works hand in hand with open educational resources in the sense that a lot of what I’m up to is building and recommending networks and structures to facilitate the easy creation, easy reuse and redistribution of resources, and ideally, these are free in every sense of the word resources.

So that kind of gets a little bit at what access means. What constitutes the ideal level of access for you? Is it just having free access online to view [the resources]?

That’s sort of a funny question. Because now there’s a lot of other discussion that’s sort of sitting there. Because of course access isn’t just viewing stuff free online. But then, what does it mean? Does it mean having a copy locally on your computer? Does it mean being able to incorporate it particularly into your own work? Yeah, I think it does. It’s similar to Stallman’s four freedoms. Which are, roughly adapted to the OER space, the freedom to access, the freedom to adapt, the freedom to redistribute, the freedom to remix. So you know, it involves not just seeing it, but seeing how it was created. To be able to take it and rework and harvest it. I think all of those are important. I might add that learning itself is not a passive activity. In order to learn, we have to be active. You have to do things; we have to create things. So learning, whether it occurs in the classroom, in a formal situation or informal situation, it involves not only accessing, but remaking, remixing, repurposing, and rewriting learning resources; the creation of learning resources; the redistribution of them.

Assuming that everyone has achieved this initial access to open educational resources, and to education in general, would the open education movement have achieved its end goal? Or do you think there’s something more that has to be done?

No, that’d probably do it. (Laughs) I’m sure the people involved would find something else…

Well, if we assume for a moment that we have a deep and diverse quality-tested and wide open corpus of open educational resources, what additional barriers would remain for more positive and transformative impacts that we are hoping for in education?

Other than the educational system itself? George Siemens and I had this in our course and we talked about three dimensions of open education. The first dimension is access of resources themselves–the reading, tests, whatever. The second dimension is harboring [leveraging] that corpus, and that’s access to learning deliberately… offering more instructional delivery openly. So we’re offering not only the resources, like MIT does, but we’re going a step further to actually offering the instruction itself online.

So [George and I] get these additional enrollments. Last year the course had 2200…this year it’s not nearly as popular as it only has about 700 people. Anybody can access any part of it.  And then there’s a third dimension of openness that we’ve talked about and that we are adding to our corpus. And that’s open assessment, which offers a way outside the system.  Or how in order to get a degree you must go to a college first, and this offers some other way of doing it. This is open access to evaluation to assessment… So we talked about opening that social source community or open assessment and various levels of that.

I read in your recent post on copyright, the one on Half an Hour, and you mentioned that while you were a self learner, going to night school classes in Ottawa, and at the University of Calgary obtaining your first degree, you found that the biggest barrier for a self learner in wanting an affordable education was copyright. And in that sense, Creative Commons licenses have offered an alternative to “all rights reserved” copyright, allowing the creator of the open educational resource to choose how open their resource is.

I recently read a post by David Wiley talking about how openness is not a binary factor; he used the analogy how a door that is open at 2cm is still partially open, but you know… the door is obviously not open enough for a person to walk through that door. So in light of your statement about access to education and everything that comes with it, how open is open enough for OER for you? In terms of the particular license you would choose for OER or anything else?

Well for me the big barrier as always is a financial barrier. So what I mean is–a system of information distribution that existed at the time was based on information sale–the sale of books for example, the sale as default. And so for me, fundamental open access is free access. You know to me it’s a contradiction to say that we have open access but you have to pay for it… So as I mentioned earlier, free access is not simply to look at it. Learning involves more than just looking at things and displaying content; to learn is essentially to work with material. To conceptualize the material, to remix material for open access of a form that enables resubmission of the work… The educational system doesn’t have that open access that’s something like the four freedoms… so I would say it’s the freedom simply to read, [and then] to take the material and repurpose it for your own uses.

In that vein, what CC license do you prefer for OER? Obviously, the Noncommercial-No derivatives license (CC BY-NC-ND) doesn’t fit that ideal because it doesn’t allow adaptation.

I mean, this is a debate David [Wiley] and I have had on many occasions. The license I would use for educational material is Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike (CC BY NC-SA), and you know Noncommercial is a contentious clause… and the reason I use the noncommercial clause is that I don’t want to participate in a plan where educational materials are taken and made commercially available in such a way that the openly and noncommercial available version of the resources is not available. And that’s what happens where you share things with a license that allows commercial use.

But making your work available through an Attribution only license (CC BY), [though] it does allow others to reuse it and maybe even use it in a commercial enterprise, it does not prevent the access of the original work online. So how–

Here’s what happens right: You allow for commercial use so somebody prints that and say, takes it overseas and takes it to this remote community and then lobbies against the provision that enables access to the materials on the grounds that the content is available anyways. See, there’s a situation in these communities where their only access to a resource is commercially, and the commercial quarter’s interest is ensuring that the noncommercial access is not allowed, is not available. They take and produce commercially in proprietary formats, like the Kindle reader… so the materials are not available outside the Kindle, or only commercial materials are. So a person using the Kindle, say, that has acquired it perhaps through their high school, can only access the commercial version of the resource. This is what happens. To the person, access to the noncommercial material is closed so that only the commercial content is accessible.

So you’re talking about areas that don’t have Internet access to the original?

Well that’s one kind of closed, right? But that’s not the entire picture. You can have them closed by geography; you can have them closed by technology; you can have them closed by legal arrangements.

So do you have a specific example of any country or region in the world that this has happened to–where they’re not allowed to access the free [and open] work but only the commercial versions of them?

I mean, not allowed or not able? ‘Cause I gave an example of the Kindle… which is a case where they’re not able to access the open version of the work. Go try to open up Kindle right now; you cannot open your Kindle. And then any place with limited Internet access is a place where only the Kindle version is available.

But what’s stopping people from… or other enterprises from taking the original work and making it available in those regions?

Well, look at what’s happening in Britain with the BBC. The BBC is attempting to take educational materials and make them accessible and agencies like BSkyB are taking them to court because they view it as a quote-on-quote ‘unfair competition’. Let’s take the public Internet companies in the U.S. It’s the same story. People, themselves, are forming pockets in order to create Internet wireless gatekeepers… And companies who aren’t actually involved in wireless of any sort, in communities, are taking them to court… Again, arguing that free content is an unfair competition. So this is the sorta thing that these kind of examples reflect.

Since they’re dealing with it in the courts, your preference is just to operate in a separate sphere outside of the commercial sector? [And you're way of doing that is] not licensing it with a Noncommercial license.

Basically, yeah..

But you still support initiatives like Flatworld Knowledge, for instance, who–they’re the only ones who have control over the work to commercially make it available because they have licensed their textbooks under a Noncommercial [license]…

Yeah, I find it kind of ironic that after all the conversations I’ve had with David Wiley whether we should use a Noncommercial license, he gets involved with Flatworld Knowledge. I mean, one of the purposes of Noncommercial licenses is to protect the commercial advantage of the person who issued the license. I don’t have a problem with that; I don’t consider the sale of content to be the provision of free learning, the provision of open educational resources, but if they can make money selling something that they’re already offering for free, I don’t mind that. Besides if it’s not a matter of whether it’s open or not, it’s outside my realm, my interest.

Ok, I guess we can move on from noncommercial. I’m interested in your view on open courseware. David Wiley recently distinguished between open courseware 1.0 and open courseware 2.0, and that was in reference to the recent discontinuation of funding for Utah State Open CourseWare.  And he suggested that it wasn’t the lack of funding on the part of the university, but the lack of priority for developing resources which, after the fact, would become OER.

Yeah, what did George Siemens say…

There’s a quote by George that says, “Openness should be built into the process of curriculum design and it should be systematized.” I was wondering if you agreed, or what your view on that was.

Yeah, in the short version I agree. There’s a longer version that’s a lot longer. Now, the point George made, and that is the inspiration for mine as well, is that creating an open educational resource is kind of like creating a customized version of the resource. It’s like creating a low carbon emission car is what you’re doing, but in general you just want the car… It’s like you want whatever comes in the box however it is you want to throw it in the box. And you don’t want to set up a development like a car where the creation of open resources is only some kind of add-on or customization, and that’s the case right now.

The other aspect has to do with sustainability. Like David Wiley who was at Utah. Then he moved to Brigham Young and there wasn’t the local support at Utah to continue the program there… and that creates a great division between open resources that seek funding from foundations and community based resources, such as Wikimedia, Wikiversity, Wikieducator and the like… The model we see coming out of foundations is a model where some content producer creates its content and sends it out into the world with a great act of charity, and the world sits and receives those open resources that rain down upon them. The other model is more sustainable, where it is community based or driven. The community is part and parcel of the process, and OER is the consequence of doing other activities that creates, almost if you will, a chapter of learning materials and open resources, in the process of doing other work. Like if it’s physics, just in the course of doing teaching, you develop resources, and these resources could be open educational resources. Something like that… you can’t depend on foundations for it to work. If we’re going to have sustainable open educational resources, it’s going to have become people and groups sharing for themselves.

So then are you suggesting that, instead of approaching it as an institution-wide type of policy of OER or open courseware we should just focus on the local–the cultural and different local, academic and open access groups, etc., for them to each develop their own resources?

Yeah, and with concern to the initiatives that get funding, I would focus much more on tools and processes that enable development of resources rather than the production of the resources themselves.

I think that’s all the questions I have for now… thank you so much for doing this.

Oh, you’re welcome.

Last year, Sarah Kirn, the Manager of the Vital Signs project at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, popped into the CC San Francisco office and gave me a wonderful introduction into everything they were doing. This year, we’re closer in proximity, as Sarah is still in Maine while I am stationed in New York. As a preview of things to come, we connected over email about the progress VS has made since we last met.

To rewind and clarify, Vital Signs is a “field-based science education program” that “links 7th and 8th grade students and scientists in the rigorous collection and analysis of essential environmental data across freshwater and coastal ecosystems. Innovative technology, relevant content, and critical partnerships create an authentic science learning experience for students, a distributed data gathering network for scientists, and a statewide community of teachers, students, and scientists collaborating to learn about and steward the Gulf of Maine watershed.”

What’s new at Vital Signs?

We now have 47 teachers trained in how to use Vital Signs in their science teaching. These teachers hail from all across the state, from Aroostook County to York County. Teachers have already begun making and sharing observations themselves as a way to prepare for using Vital Signs in their classrooms.

To support this program growth we have hired Alexa Dayton to serve as our new Vital Signs Community Specialist. This new position will focus on bringing the citizen science and scientific communities into Vital Signs – as users of the data, as participants in the online community (discussing findings, commenting on data records, confirming or questioning identifications, contributing their own observations to the database), and as on-the-ground supporters of teacher and student field work. Alexa has experience in field biology, science outreach to rural Maine schools, web development and management, marketing, and computer science. We are excited to have her diverse skills brought to bear on supporting and growing our Vital Signs community!

We also have a new scientist partner, Dr. Les Mehrhoff, Director of the Invasive Plant Atlas of New England who is committed to serving as a Species Expert in our online community. He’s recruiting graduate students and others to join him in serving the Vital Signs community in this capacity.

In October a Maine Conservation Corps Environmental Educator will join us for a 10-month position to work with teachers in classrooms and after school clubs to support their use of Vital Signs.

We are collaborating with the MLTI professional development staff to plan Vital Signs-related science and social studies modules that MLTI will deliver this year to complement the summer teacher institutes and provide training for teachers not yet exposed to Vital Signs.

How does CC play a role in these new projects?

We’re spreading CC licenses around – to other education programs. GMRI’s VitalVenture project, a collaborative curriculum development project, has just provisionally agreed to use CC BY licenses, pending agreement by collaborating teacher. Les Mehrhoff, one of our Vital Signs scientist partners is going to use CC BY with his species photos.

And, of course, prior to our launch in November we will be finalizing the CC licensing for student-contributed creative works, teacher-contributed creative work, and citizen scientist-contributed creative work.

How are you leveraging OER in the classroom/with teachers?

All of our curriculum resources are open, so teachers will learn how to use OER through the course of using Vital Signs. As they become familiar with how OER works and become interested in other resources for teaching, we will point them in the direction of other OER.

The most exciting “open” aspect of Vital Signs, I think, is that the learning and work that happens within the system is open to the scientific community. Folks like Les, a well-known and well-respected expert on invasive plants in our region, will be regularly interacting with students on the subject of their contributions to the Vital Signs database. By design, every observation contributed to the Vital Signs site will confirmed or questioned by another member of the community. In this way, Vital Signs opens up students’ experience of learning science.

Tell us what you are most excited about!

Most excited about? It’s a tie between the enthusiastic response we are getting from teachers and students and the near completion of our program infrastructure. I can’t wait for the day (in November 2009!) when we make the www.vitalsignsme.org site live!

This project has been a long time in the development stages. It’s absolutely thrilling to have students contributing field notes like the following from a student in Old Orchard Beach:

“I am happy because I’m helping collect data for science, and was helping find if there are any invasive plants in Milliken Mills.”

“I saw brownish water, lots of leaves in the water, trees, plants, birds, bugs, grass, dead trees and plants, frogs.”

“I smell fresh water.”

“I hear birds, the wind, and water splashing.”

“I am suprized by what I found or didn’t find because even though it was an invasive species I thought I would find it.”

Likewise, it’s thrilling to read the words of a participating teacher from Kennebunk who says “In a nutshell, the Vital Signs program has made the science I teach richer, more real and more meaningful for both my students and myself.”

For more on Vital Signs, see our detailed Inside OER feature on Sarah from last year.

A recent emigrant to New York, I experienced the first turn in weather on the east coast marking the transition from summer to a fast approaching fall. Though a lovely relief from the hot, muggy season that has persisted here for the last few months, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sadness. Many students all over the world are feeling this same twinge, mingled with excitement, as their summer vacations skid to a halt. No more lazy, hazy days in the sun—instead, it’s time to hit the books and lockers, classrooms and lecture halls.

This is the vision of school we have had with us for ages. A first grader, when asked to draw school, usually draws a little red school house with a bell, or a teacher standing at her desk, with an apple for added effect. However, this traditional picture is hardly where the future of education is headed, as new technologies and mediums of communication, like the Internet, have already revolutionized the way we interact, learn, and live.

CC BY by Philipp Schmidt

Peer 2 Peer University is one initiative that acknowledges this fact—that the world has already changed, and not everyone is going to settle for the traditional modes of teaching. First of all, not everyone can afford to dole out the thousands of dollars required for a higher education, and secondly, not everyone has the time to—those of us with full-time or several part-time jobs, families, and other responsibilities, especially.

P2PU, in their own words, is sort of like an “online book club for open educational resources.” It’s “an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses… The P2PU helps you navigate the wealth of open education materials that are out there, creates small groups of motivated learners, and supports the design and facilitation of courses.” Unlike formal universities or distance education, P2PU’s courses are all defaulted under CC BY, which means anyone can access, share, adapt, and redistribute them. In fact, the founders are more than happy for others to adapt the model they have begun to new and successful ways of thinking about education’s future.

What do you think is the future of education? P2PU co-founder Philipp Schmidt answers the big question and more.

P2PU has been getting a ton of attention lately. Courses are set to start on the 9th! What are you hoping to gain from these first six weeks? What are you most excited about?

This is the first time we will run courses. We have been thinking a lot about how to make sure participants get a lot out of the experience, but this is the real test. I am sure we’ll discover many things we did not anticipate at all—and I look forward to learning as much as the participants. This is an amazing learning experience not just for the participants, but also for ourselves.

I am most excited by the fact that we seem to be providing something that many people from all over the world find useful and want to participate in. One person is taking the Copyright for Educators course and intends to get credit from his university for it. The fact that he is thinking about the course in his own context and trying to “hack” the system in a way that makes sense for him is awesome. This is exactly what we were hoping to see. Another person said that she had always wanted to take a course about cyberpunk literature, but couldn’t find a place to take one. To realize that we can provide a type of learning experience that people are looking for and which simply doesn’t exist elsewhere, is incredible.

There’s so much speculation around the future of formal education. What are your thoughts on it? What will be P2PU’s role in this changing educational landscape?

It is clear to me that the education landscape will change dramatically. I should mention that I am a huge fan of the university as an institution where young people spend a few years learning and immersing themselves into knowledge. It’s wonderful and I wouldn’t want to miss it. However, learning is not just what happens in universities and there will be new and different organizations providing many of the components that today’s universities offer as a package. There are two areas where P2PU could fill a gap. One is to create the social learning experience that will make open educational resources more useful to more people. The other is to provide forms of recognition for informal learning—this could be by enabling pathways to formal credits or by creating a community based reputation.

What do you have to say to those who confuse P2PU with distance learning? How is P2PU more than that?

The core of P2PU is social learning—working with others who are interested in the same topic as you. The fact that it happens by distance is almost secondary and we are hoping to have local off-line groups joining the P2PU community in the future. Distance learning is a broad term, but too often it is used in the context of what I would call industrialized education. Content is delivered to students—either by an online teacher or in the form of course materials designed for self-study. Knowledge is considered as something that can easily be measured, like weight or height. It is a totally different model from what P2PU is doing.

All P2PU courses are licensed CC BY. Why CC BY?

The pilot phase materials are licensed CC BY because that places the least amount of restrictions on others who might want to use and re-mix our content. However, the licensing choice is still a big debate. Some members of the community feel that CC BY-SA better reflects their desire to create a global knowledge commons. It’s one of the topics we will discuss at our upcoming workshop and we will make a final decision there.

Online, it is well-known as the producer and distributor of The Concert, a classical music podcast that features unreleased live performances by master musicians and talented young artists, recorded at the museum’s Sunday Concert Series. The podcast is free, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license (Music Sharing), and widely popular. The Concert was one of the first classical music collections to be shared under a CC license, and the ISGM was one of the first art museums to actively distribute digital content under a CC license.

We’ve talked about The Concert before, but wanted to learn more about the series and the decision to use CC licenses for the project. We recently caught up with Director Anne Hawley and Curator of Music Scott Nickrenz, who were able to provide a lot of great information about the series and how CC licenses have played a role in its success.

Those in the CC community best know of the ISGM as a result of your highly successful The Concert podcast. What was the inspiration for the podcast series? Why did you choose to release it under a CC license?

Anne Hawley: We launched The Concert – the museum’s first podcast – in September 2006, as a way to continue the museum’s long history of supporting artists and creative artistic thinking. During Isabella Gardner’s lifetime, the museum flowed with artistic activity: John Singer Sargent painted, Nellie Melba sang, and Ruth St. Denis performed the cobra dance within these walls. Isabella Gardner was a committed patron of artists and musicians and the museum has always followed her lead. The podcast is the latest example of this; it’s a modern way to bring the museum’s wealth of programming to a wider audience, promote the exceptional work of the musicians who perform here, and ultimately expand the reach of classical music.

Music has always been an important part of the Gardner. When the museum opened on New Years Night 1903, attendees enjoyed a performance of Bach, Mozart, Chausson, and Schumann by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—“a concert of rare enjoyment” according to one guest. During Gardner’s lifetime, the museum hosted visits and performances by well-known musicians and rising stars including composers Gustav Mahler and Vincent d’Indy, pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, and cellist Pablo Casals, and memorable concerts including the 1903 premiere of Loeffler’s Pagan Poem, composed and performed in honor of Isabella Gardner’s birthday. Four years later, the work had its “official” premiere at the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Today, the Gardner’s music series is the oldest of its kind in the country, with weekly concerts and special programs that enrich and draw musical connections to the museum’s special exhibitions and permanent collection, while continuing Isabella Gardner’s legacy as a music lover and patron of the arts.

Scott Nickrenz: We had hundreds of hours of fabulous live performances on CDs just sitting in the museum’s archives, so creating the podcast seemed a natural way to literally “dust off” these musical treasures and share them, expanding the reach of our concerts and promoting the talented artists who perform here to a worldwide audience. It’s the performances and the generosity of our artists that drive The Concert — and the CC license that fuels it.

The Concert features free, unreleased recordings of live performances recorded in the museum’s intimate Tapestry Room. New programs are posted on the museum’s website on the 1st and 15th of every month, and listeners can subscribe to receive free, automatic updates. Podcast episodes contain about 45 minutes of music featuring selections from the museum’s recording archives, with a brief introduction that provides context and makes connections among the featured works. The podcast is linked to our online music library, where works are archived individually. The online library – growing every month – currently includes almost 150 works.

Thanks to the “Share Music” license, the Gardner’s program is unique in encouraging the public to download, or save, classical music performances from the Gardner – and share them with friends and family.

Anne Hawley: The podcast is a true collaboration, bringing together the talents of emerging and established musicians who perform in The Concert series, the freedoms offered by Creative Commons licensing, the legal expertise of Jeff Cunard and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the support of the Internet Archive, and the work of many people here at the Gardner Museum.

We like to think that, were Isabella Gardner alive today, she would be an active subscriber to our podcast feed, just as she was an innovator and forward thinker during her lifetime—an “early adopter” of all the arts! We’re delighted that The Concert contributes to the democratization of classical music through technology.

What kind of results have you seen from using a CC license for The Concert? How important has that license choice been to the project as a whole?

Anne Hawley: The Creative Commons license has been key to the entire project. The Concert broke new ground, marking the first time an art museum actively encouraged sharing and free distribution of its online programming through a “some rights reserved” copyright license. We were also one of the first classical music collections to encourage and legally allow file sharing of its music.

Scott Nickrenz: I was really excited when I heard about the possibilities offered by a CC license, and knew that it was what we had to do for the podcast. Our goal with The Concert was to bring what we do at the museum to the widest number of people possible worldwide, and CC has allowed us to do that.

Through the podcast and our online music library, we’ve reached hundreds of thousands more people than can attend our concerts live each year in our intimately-sized concert hall. To date the podcast and music library have been accessed by listeners in 116 countries across the globe, from Azerbaijan to Croatia. I’m thrilled that we’ve been able to use the power of the internet to spread classical music, in a way that fits how people live and listen to music today.

Anne Hawley: These are extraordinary performances that Scott brings to the museum, and the new ways of distributing music—online and almost instantaneously—make them incredibly accessible. We’ve gotten extremely positive feedback from all across the world, most recently from a listener “up a mountain in Eastern Crete.” The podcast has helped us to reach many people who might not otherwise know about the museum or have access to these kinds of performances.

The launch of The Concert was heralded by the media as well as listeners for its revolutionary approach in offering free music and encouraging sharing. Bostonist called the creation of the podcast “a totally hip move” and Fast Company commented that using technology to share the museum’s “classical goodness” is “just the way Isabella would have wanted it.”

The Concert recentlly reached over 1 million downloads. The license you all chose enables the free sharing of music – do you see a correlation between the two? How has the CC license affected the distribution of the podcast?

Anne Hawley: Absolutely – making these high-quality recordings free and shareable is a major part of why The Concert has been so successful. In thinking about the podcast, it was important to us to really embrace the way people are listening to music today. And it seems to have worked: in the first six weeks alone, we had over 40,000 downloads from 83 countries–which was unprecedented for a classical music podcast–and we reached the one-million download mark this past May.

Scott Nickrenz: We welcome filesharing, because it’s a new way people can share their experiences and the things they discover. We include introductions to the music that place it in context because we want to provide for listeners at all levels of familiarity with classical music. And the podcast features many of today’s major artists and rising stars, who have all been enthusiastic and supportive partners in this project.

Renowned pianist Jeremy Denk, one of the musicians heard on The Concert, has called the podcast “a great opportunity, not just for the musicians involved, but for listeners, too…Projects like this support new voices in classical music, and create new opportunities for audiences to hear them.”

We hope that these artists and this music will be heard by people who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise. It’s clear that the old models for distributing classical music aren’t what they used to be; we want to reach to people where they are, and that’s online. Our hope is that people take full advantage of what we have to offer. I keep thinking of this whole thing as “the Mozart virus” – we want it to keep spreading to as many listeners as possible!

What is up next for ISGM?

Anne Hawley: We’re always exploring new ideas about how cutting-edge technology can help us bring the full Gardner Museum experience to art- and music-lovers across the world. The launch and success of The Concert has been a wonderful and educational first step, and we look forward to breaking still newer ground and embarking on many other technology-fueled initiatives in the future. Stay tuned!

Anne Hawley, Copyright Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, All Rights Reserved

Scott Nickrenz, Copyright Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, All Rights Reserved

Today, in conjunction with our interview, Kenzo is releasing the most recent addition to COGS titled City of God’s Son: Cinema for the Blind. The piece features interviews with blind musicians on “sight through sound, synesthesia” and the film itself, crafting a fascinating perspective on how our senses work in conjunction with (or without) one another. You can watch the piece, which is released under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license, in HD at YouTube – check out a still of the video below:

We caught up with Kenzo recently to pick his brain in regards to the project generally, his approach to creation through sampling and reuse, why he chose to CC-licence this project, and much more. Read on to find out what he had to say.

Can you give our readers some background on yourself and the project? What inspired you to create City of God’s Son? You call it a hip-hop opera and a film for the blind – what do you mean by these descriptions?

I am a digital artist, video artist, director and music producer based in NY. Early 90ʼs hip hop was always a big inspiration to me growing up, it served as the soundtrack to a lot of my childhood and adventures growing up. I was really into graffiti as a kid, and used to sneak out of the house all the time and run around with my friends or sometimes by myself and go bombing. I considered the city at night to be kind of an altered reality. No one was around except for the junkies, prostitutes, and gangsters who occupied the same streets that by day would be bustling with business men, school kids like myself, and delivery men. I loved the fact that in my mind only a few people were privy to seeing these same streets during the day while I was entrenched in my civilian life (school and family), and at these late hours were things were pretty wild, and as a kid of course I was very excited by that. What really inspired me as a kid was also the fact that the only traces of my existence in this alternate reality were the tags and graffiti art left behind. Music played a huge role in this. My walkman was probably one of the most essential things going out at night, as the music was a key component to setting the mood and getting myself in the proper frame of mind to create. By experiencing the city this way, and listening to the music, everything through the night played out cinematically. So much so that it would leave these super visual impressions in my imagination that I could recall and trigger through the music.

Musicʼs relationship to time, both as a medium and a device to manipulate time, in addition to a listenerʼs historical relationship to a song is what “City of Godʼs Son” seeks to expand and explore. “City of Godʼs Son” is a hip hop opera in that it is an epic, a greek tragedy, and like opera, understanding the actual lyrics and slang is not necessary to understanding the story and experiencing the drama of the story. Understanding the slang and verses definitely adds another level of meaning and depth to the story, as well as a knowledge of hip hop music history. “City of Godʼs Son” while seemingly a strictly music focused project, is equally about gangster cinema culture as well, as references to everything from pre-code Edward G. Robinson gangster flicks, to 70ʻs Japanese gangster flicks like “Branded to Kill”, to “Le Cercle Rouge”, “Clockers”, “Goodfellas” and of course “City of God” litter the story and soundscape, as some of hip-hopʼs most influential artists of this generation collide with the gangster film icons that helped define their genre. It is about weaving the various mythologies from each medium and creating a new language called “Beat Cinematic”. It is a film for the blind in that it exists in the listenerʼs imagination and recalling of their own psychological associations to music, film, and sound. I specifically wanted to play this for blind people because I wanted to see how blind people reacted to a film made to be experienced sonically. I am interested in how a blind personʼs mind works like a visual sampler depending on whether the person was born blind or lost their vision along the way, and what those visual impressions mean to them now. It is also a film for the blind in that my own artistic journey into music production was inspired to make this project. As a completely self-taught disgustingly bad keyboard player, creating the music for this project was in and of itself a very blind process in that I had to really feel out my entire way through this new world of sound.

COGS is a project that would not exist were it not for its use of sampling and reuse. From your perspective, what kind of relation does COGS have to its sample sources? While the samples are obviously sources of inspiration, COGS is much more than simply the sum of its parts – how important is the act of appropriation to your art?

COGS seeks to really expand upon how artists sample and really giving everything a critical meaning. Every sample, verse, sequence, and sound design element is carefully planned and placed, and there is a great amount of interesting metaphor and symbolism that is delivered through the juxtaposition of verses, samples, and dialogue in the story. The more expansive your music and film knowledge, the more rewarding the experience and the more ways you can understand the characters and story. In this way it is really a tribute to both my favorite hip hop producers and film directors alike, blurring the line between the two in a medium that has yet to be fully explored. I also want it to inspire people to explore and seek out the sources of music and film, exactly the same way I discovered soul music, jazz, and world music that hip hop producers inspired me to search out through the samples used in their beats. This is how I discovered Joe Bataanʼs music, through a background song on a skit off The Fugees “The Score” album.

You have said that hip-hop is the ideal medium for this sort of project, as it is “a genre created using only the resources available and re-contextualizing them.” How is this ethos reflected in the project?

Hip hop music was originally based on sampling, with DJʼs in the 70ʼs turning two turntables into the worldʼs first sampler. Most of my career as an artist has been in more visual mediums like film, video, print, and drawing. Naturally I always dreamed of making a film that captured the same sensation I felt as a kid starring these very same rappers and actors. Instead I felt it would be interesting to really utilize the technology I had available to me, and create the epic film experience I always dreamed of making in this new sound medium I call “Beat Cinematic”. By my definition, “Beat Cinematic” is any audio and music driven sample based long form narrative. It is in that vein and spirit that this project was created, making the most of what I had access to, and funding it through my own video and commercial endeavors as a director. That is why hip hop is the perfect medium to explore this story.

The project itself is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND license. Why did you choose to use this license for the project?

I picked that particular license because it enabled people to share the project freely, and protected the project so that it has to be kept in its original form which is essential to retaining the narrative function of the project. This is not merely a remix project, this is something that I hope raises the bar and opens peoples eyes to the potential of sampling.

What was production like? You pull from a variety of sample sources to create a cohesive narrative – how did you go about organizing and choosing these sources? What sort of relation do the beats have to the project as a whole? How was the production different on COGS as opposed to a traditional music project?

With COGS, I really wanted to create the illusion that all of the various elements used were unique and not sampled by creating a seamless and lush soundscape where the characters could be reinvented in this mythical jungle-like New York metropolis. While the goal process-wise was to mask and re-contextualize the source of the content, it was also really important that the each piece used somehow referred back to the original source through the music to pay homage to the original creator. Some film sound bites are more recognizable than others. Specific scenes are homages to some of my favorite directors, and even sound design elements sampled from specific films are more of a tie in conceptually with COGS and the message of the film. For example there is a specific sound design element sampled from “There Will Be Blood” in the opening scene that ties the relationship between father and son and concepts of masculinity to the characters in COGS personal plight. There are scenes in COGS that are direct tributes to Scorcese, Tarantino, Spike Lee, Fernando Merielles, and some of the lesser and more obscure gangster film directors like Seijin Suzuki and Jean-Pierre Melville. This is to further meld the musical mythology and the film mythology to really further explore the uniquely American gangster icon obsession and satirize it. While I am a fan of the genre and of course hip hop from the 90ʼs, I am disgusted with the exploitation and glorification of that lifestyle, which is why I chose to pay homage to my favorite rappers and crime films through a sound based medium so that the listener could escape the redundant imagery of modern gangsterism and live the story through more of a cerebral and imagination based visual language. It is a very anti-gangster tale, where my childhood heroes are humanized and turned into vulnerable characters. It is a new language, and intended to be a new experience that rewards your attention and willingness to experience a story this way in a new form of audio induced dramatic sensory experience.

The actual production process of COGS was very intensive. I was a DJ for many years back in high school and had compiled a healthy record collection, as well as a deep appreciation and knowledge of music and film, but had never really taken the step into music production. As an artist over the course of my life I bounced from drawing to graffiti to deejaying, then went to art school at Carnegie Mellon, and then back to film/ video working with video artist Nam June Paik, and then starting my own production company. I saw this project as the perfect convergence of my two sensibilities, playing off of the cinematic elements of music and the musical elements of cinema to create something in between. I decided to start making beats in order to have maximum control over the dramatic tone and pacing of each song, and through this project really got into music production. Aside from the beat making aspect of it, I worked with a great sound designer named Joe Fraioli and together we did a lot of field recording and layering of both field and sampled recordings to meticulously craft this pseudo 90ʼs New York crime noir world. It was a massive undertaking, and we essentially created a dewey decimal like library of sounds, dialogue, tons of material. Since Iʼm not a trained music producer by trade, I canʼt say how this differs from production of a “regular” album, but I can say that this was a very visually and cinematically driven approach to music. Each scene, each beat, every verse was specifically used and created to fit a specific dramatic beat. This process is all about a visual inspiration to create a sound, and then bringing it full circle with the soundinspiring the image within the listenerʼs mind.

What is next for COGS? I read about a possible installation piece – is that still taking place? Anything else our community should know?

Yes, the installation is the true intended experience for “City of Godʼs Son”. As an artist and filmmaker, I ultimately seek to explore new formats and cinematic experiences of all kinds ranging from traditional film to experimental, as I believe technology and new media enables artists to explore the strengths of various mediums and bridge and connect them to create new experiences, which is what COGS is all about. Right now I am trying to raise funds for the installation for COGS, as well as the production of “City of Godʼs Son” pt. II. If you are interested in donating and helping the cause you can visit the website.

photo by Tommy Agriodimas | CC BY

Offering a tiered subscription service (amenities include stickers, bonus albums, a song written for you on your birthday, and much more depending on price), Learning Music Monthly is a great case study in figuring out how independent artists and labels (LMM is released through CC-friendly label vosotros) are approaching distribution in today’s current music climate.

We were able to catch up with John and pick his brain about the project, including his thoughts on writing and producing an album a month, a subscription/donation-based distribution model, and his decision to release all the music, cover art, promotional text, mix-stems, sheet-music, and lyrics under a CC license.

Learning Music Monthly @ Machine Project – 01, cameronparkins | CC BY

Can you give our readers some background on yourself and the Learning Music Monthly project? What has your career as a musician been like? LMM monthly has existed previously – what is different this time around?

LMM really began in November 2006. I had spent the previous two years doing a fair amount of touring with other bands, and assisting on a film score, all of which was really fabulous and fortunate to experience. That month, I turned down a bunch of work and created the first Learning Music album. For me, it was something very much apart from my professional musical experiences. I get paid mostly to create what other people hear or see, which I’m very lucky to do. When I set out to complete that first album, there was a deep spiritual need inside me, which I had been aware of for a long time, to create something more personal. The payoff, instead of a check, was the pleasure of handing to friends this little secret disc, weirdly wrapped up in reclaimed cardboard. LMM is a little different from that now, in that we actually sell subscriptions. I think I’m still in the process of learning what that means creatively. It’s also much different now because of all the support from John G and Vosotros. The first year, my audience was mostly my friends. Now I’m making music for people I’ve never met. And they’re paying for it! Part of me of course wants to only create what I think these people want to hear. Hopefully I will eventually be able to give them something that they never expected, but that’s really good for them. Sometimes I feel like I lack the confidence to do that, but then ultimately there’s no time for doubt.

How do you generate the ideas and energy to complete an album a month? Do you work with collaborators? What is your recording and distribution process like?

The ideas come from everywhere. Each album has it’s own purpose or guidelines. So that gives a lot of focus. I think that is the most important idea each month: the bigger concept of the record. I get a lot of ideas from books and art, going to museums. I’m not entirely sure about the energy. It’s probably a mix of carbohydrates, inherited workaholism, and the excitement of potentially doing something great. I’ve learned that the energy comes in waves; there’s a time each month when I become drained and just want it to be over; it usually lasts a day before I get inspired again.

Three of the last five albums were big collaborations, and even those other two had various musicians coming over to play on different tracks. Mostly I’ve been asking people to be producer for a month. There are several more of those planned. Hopefully, as we grow, I’d like to delegate more responsibilities.

Each month, I’ve been making production schedules, which ultimately aren’t followed at all except for getting the album done in time to ship out by the first. When I’m recording, songs will usually get a little demo, with tracks built around that. I’ll record all the instruments first (except for maybe a couple parts), then vocals. I do a lot of mixing while I record, but also spend time on that after tracking is done. Since I’m usually working in the computer (with Protools), I have a whole system of saving different versions and color-coding files to tell me how close they are to finished. I also have a little white board with all the tracks listed and different colors and notes next to them. Once the tracks are finished, the CD is handed off to John G. We get CDs made in relatively small numbers, which takes a few days. Then it’s off to the post office to send them out to subscribers. Every album also goes onto our website, where subscribers can stream or download them.

You’ve utilized a subscription/donation-based model for the project’s distribution. How do you feel about this decision in hindsight? Much has been made of these trends enacted by big-name musicians – as a smaller artist, have you found that it works?

It’s still hard to say at this point, as it is relatively new for us. I’m sure we have a handful of subscribers who wouldn’t have signed up had it not been for the donation option. The majority of subscribers have paid by donation, and some of those very generously. I feel good about the way we have it set up right now.

You chose to release all of the music coming out of the project under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Why did you choose this license? Have there been any positive benefits as a result? Obstacles that you have had to overcome?

CC seems to fit the project well. I feel like this license can inspire new creative opportunities. Also, it just makes sense with the current state of technology. I’d rather people have the music than not; so if someone burns a CD for their friend, that’s great. We’ve gotten a lot of positive nods from people just for being aligned with CC. There have been no real obstacles so far. But I could see issues coming up as we get into remixes and covers of work by other artists who aren’t using CC licenses.

You are at a halfway point for the year long project – what is up next for LMM? How can our readers get involved?

LMM 2.5, Christine Finley | CC BY-NC-SA

The albums are lining up. The next one is made up of 99 twenty-second songs, using only sounds from my body (voice, claps) and samples of objects found in our kitchen. Then we’re remixing a bunch of songs by friends of ours. I’m also talking with a few great musicians about producing/collaborating on upcoming albums. I’m hoping that at the end of these twelve months we’ll have the energy and ideas to keep going.

The easiest way to get involved is to go to the contribute page on our website. There, anyone can download stems for remixing and sheet music for covering LM songs. Remixes and covers, as well as individual samples, can be uploaded to us (through Soundcloud);

ccLearn recently spoke with Lisa Brooks from IssueLab. Instead of crossing telephone lines (who does that anymore anyway?), I caught up with her via that archaic method of correspondence known as electronic mail…*

*Similarly archaic, but not outdated in coolness factor, are comics. The first comic issue of Inside OER is this same interview in comic form. Instead of the same-old and streamlined text with interspersed pictures, we decided to experiment. Let us know what you think! For those of you on hand-held devices (or a preference for just text), read on here.

Who are you and what do you do at IssueLab?

I’m Lisa Brooks, co-founder and co-director of IssueLab – a nonprofit organization based in Chicago that can’t get enough of nonprofit-produced research.

Photo by Gabi Fitz | CC BY-NC-SA

The biggest chunk of my IssueLab to-do list centers on technology and programming. Essentially, I handle anything tech on- and offline. I have no background in computer science, information systems, etc. — I have a degree in sociology and a year’s worth of public policy graduate school under my belt. In my experience, a liberal arts/jack-of-all-trades background is a typical pedigree for a nonprofit IT professional. I owned and operated a website/web application design company that worked exclusively with and for nonprofits for about nine years before doing IssueLab full-time. In that time, rarely did I meet an IT or IS staffer who had formal training in tech.

Along with all the techie work, I handle bookkeeping and accounting, client support (we have a couple of newly launched services — “SubDomains” service and our Custom Dissemination service — with a client base that increases monthly). It’s fair to say I am an office manager of a sort — I’m the one who gets Cheetos for staff meetings, chooses our VoIP provider, grabs the mail, deals with a virus invading a computer, makes sure that we don’t run out of water for the office water cooler…. I love my job(s)!

What is IssueLab? (And why is it called that, anyway?) How did it come about?

IssueLab is an open source archive of research produced by nonprofit organizations, university-based research centers, and foundations. We track research across thirty-four social issue areas. Research contributors categorize their works in up to three issue areas and further sub-categorize as needed.

Archiving is part one; part two is dissemination. Daily we get in touch with people (nonprofit professionals, researchers, policy professionals, academics, etc.) who have expressed interest in the work we collect. As well, we start new relationships with people interested in social policy, or the sector, or research, or all of the above. We maintain a number of communication channels including our website, RSS news feeds (one per issue area plus a comprehensive give-me-everything-you’ve got feed), e-newsletters, we Twitter, we have a Facebook fan page, we run a LinkedIn policy discussion group. We also have an Open Archives Initiative-compliant data provider set up at http://harvest.issuelab.org for data sharing. And we have data partners that carry titles from our archive that fit with their mission.

About our name, here’s a fun fact: while she’s grown to love it, co-director and co-founder Gabriela Fitz hated the name “IssueLab”at first. I take full blame for the name. I read the New York Sunday Times and the magazine often has a section called “IdeaLab” which I just find catchy. We deal in social policy issues….so….”IssueLab”. I’ve noticed that has hit a stride online in recent years; for once we were surfing on top of the wave! Anyway, regardless of her feelings at the start, Gabi created a killer logo and designed the rest of the site to suit. It has all hung together rather nicely I think. People really like the name — and the buttons we hand out at conferences that say “I’ve got issues!”

IssueLab was inspired by exasperation! Gabriela and I spent many years putting together websites and online communications plans where the knowledge created by a nonprofit in the form of case studies, white papers, issue briefs, etc., was just not high on the site redesign list of priorities if it was on that list at all. We would run into these great collections of research and have to fight to get it valued as worthwhile content and included in a site. We started to think about better ways to handle this body of knowledge. Centralizing it was a given, relating it across issue areas was a priority, defining and cultivating audience — taking the works to people who would find it of interest and useful rather than hoping folks stop their busy lives to come to it — has always underpinned everything we do.

We launched a prototype website in late 2005 and maintained it in our spare time on week nights and weekends. The concept started to catch on and we started to be overwhelmed. Luckily we were able to secure funding through the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 2007 and that allowed us to pursue IssueLab full-time. As of today IssueLab has four full-timers, a couple of part-timers, and (when lucky) a few interns. Oh – and our office pooch, Twyla.

Photo by Gabi Fitz | CC BY-NC-SA

On your About– “But IssueLab is not simply an online archive.” That’s cool. So your “efforts are evenly split between aggregating research on social issues and pushing that research back out to other online communities and end-users.” Based on this, I have a three-part clump of questions:

a) Are aggregating research and pushing that research back out IssueLab’s main goals? What other goals, or vision, does IssueLab work towards?

Aggregating and disseminating — mainstreaming — research are primary goals, but they aren’t our only goals.

IssueLab is very interested in the open sharing of information, ideas, and technologies. Collaboration is high on our list and we would like to be a conduit for the creation of original data and research. We are currently involved in a project that will hopefully result in new analyses of an extensive data set on hunger and poverty. The analysts hail from academia; the data set comes from a national hunger relief organization. We are the “middle-ware”, cultivating the partnership and facilitating the data share. In the end we’ll handle dissemination of the results. We’re very excited about this type of partnership and hope to do much more of this type of work in the future.

We also have a front-burner goal of fostering debate on the issues. We are working hard to get perspectives on social issues from across the political spectrum. We have plans to do more original content that showcases the diversity of opinion and approach that can be found in the missions and work of the organizations that contribute research to IssueLab.

Another goal is to archive the research of defunct nonprofits. What a shame it would be if the work of these organizations were just to disappear. We currently house the work of several defunct organizations — Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, Center for Impact Research, Girl’s Best Friend Foundation — and keep our eyes and ears open for news of other organizations that produced research and are going out of business.

b) How do you go about aggregating research? For instance, how do you decide the kinds of organizations you will work with? Example: Your home page feature is currently “Teaching About the Birds and the Bees”, which I guess demonstrates the range of research out there…

There is an enormous range of research produced by the third sector. Enormous! While we do take work from any nonprofit, we focus a bit on smaller, lesser known nonprofit organizations that don’t typically get the spotlight. These are groups that do direct service and have a hands-on perspective on an issue. Or groups that find meaning and relevance in the qualitative aspects of social issue research and create insightful case studies and ethnographies.

I listen to public radio all of the time and I hear the same nonprofit players over and again — Urban Institute, RAND Corporation, Human Rights Watch, American Enterprise Institute. We actually have work from all of those groups archived at IssueLab and we are happy to have them as participants. But these groups don’t — can’t — tell the whole story about an issue. That’s the wonder of the nonprofit sector — it’s as diverse as the people and communities that are served by it.

We do have a bit of a soft spot for the “little guy”, the “underdog” if you will. But truly, when you read the work these organizations produce you will come away with more ways to think about an issue, and maybe — hopefully — get closer to what is really going on.

c) What do you mean by “pushing” research back out to other communities? Do you, for instance, circulate research publications somehow? Or do you simply host the research and let the cross-pollination occur organically?

We do host the research and provide tools that let folks browse, search, and learn about the archive. But we didn’t start out with a “build it and they will come” notion. We’ve been doing online communication for years and know that you have to get the message to the people rather than wait or rely on the people to stumble upon you.

Here’s what “pushing research back out to other communities” means at IssueLab. For our last CloseUp on adolescents and reproductive health (http://birdsandbees.issuelab.org), we reached out to legislators who had sponsored or co-sponsored legislation about sex education, hundreds of practitioners of health and sex education at state level boards of education, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google groups where individuals are discussing sex ed and abstinence, bloggers covering the topic, and nonprofits who are working on this issue but don’t necessarily do research themselves. In addition, we commented on articles and blog posts about the issue, linking readers back to the special collection on IssueLab. Depending on the collection and the issue covered we sometimes also do outreach directly to educators and students. We are now set to go back to many of these same audiences with a special podcast we produced about the collection. This is typical of the kind of outreach we do around nonprofit research and is what we mean by “pushing it out”.

“In fact, we are fans of Creative Commons and have decided that all IssueLab-generated content is subject to a Creative Commons license.” Thank you! All your content is licensed CC BY-SA; any thoughts on why CC and, more specifically, why BY-SA in particular? (Also, what kind of content does IssueLab generate?)

IssueLab generates a couple of e-newsletters that go out to our research contributor community and subscribers. We create a bi-monthly “CloseUp” feature where we reach out to organizations that work on a particular issue and build a special collection around the research we collect. We create companion podcasts for our CloseUps as well (and we use a remix by a CCMixter contributor as our podcast background music!). And we just launched our IssueLab blog, called FootNotes.

IssueLab is an open access archive; it would be ludicrous of us to create content and make it difficult or impossible for people to access and share it. We use a Creative Commons license because we want to share what we do. We follow Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) in our data collection practices for the same reason. We chose BY-SA because it makes it crystal clear what people can do with our content — share and/or remix — and we want people to do just that.

Call us naive nerds but we do think the world would be a better place if everyone adopted an attribution standard that has sharing, not commerce, as its first concern.

As the education program of CC, we love that you have specifically set up an OER Research collection (http://oer.issuelab.org/research). Is most of the OER research in this collection licensed openly? (Ironically, not all research on openness is licensed openly.) Why do you think this is? Is IssueLab taking any steps towards greater openness of all the resources it hosts?

We partnered with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to make that particular project happen. It’s a great project and we are happy to host it. And no! – most of the research in that collection is not licensed openly. I just did a quick advanced search on the entire IssueLab archive and, of the 2,128 available research listings, only 252 carry a CC license. Ironic and a bummer.

I think that a lot of individuals and groups simply do not know what to do when it comes to licensing, copyright, rights, whatever you want to call it. Much of what we archive has totally restrictive “All Rights Reserved” rights information (and it many times comes to us with that capitalization which makes me wonder if people simply look at a work by a group they consider legitimate and copy the language).

We do push our contributors to at least consider using a CC license. We’d love to implement CC’s license chooser so that people can select a CC license as they create a listing but that gets tricky. When a group creates a research listing with us they fill out a form to describe the object they are archiving. They must fill in rights information for the work they are sharing. I’d guesstimate that 98% of what we archive are PDF files that incorporate copyright info in the text of the file. When our users create a research listing they can put whatever they want into our system, but the file that gets downloaded will show the copyright info that was embedded in the PDF. Switching to a CC license on the IssueLab site doesn’t revise the text in the downloadable PDF file and so a conflict is created should they enter rights data that appears on an IssueLab listing page that differs from the rights info you see in the PDF. Even if we were able to change the metadata in the PDF file on upload, there would still be a need to change what people reading the text of the PDF file see.

I think for most folks copyright is about pursuing or protecting capital and they do not know that alternatives to stringent copyright notification are available. This is so unfortunate because, in the end, I believe people really do want to share their work. No one wants to spend all of their time researching and writing a whitepaper only to make it impossible to share, access, use, reuse. Truly maddening.

Copyright law is such a pain in the brain. Agree or disagree?

AGREE.

By setting up this separate collection for OER Research, it appears that IssueLab recognizes the importance of openness in education especially. What are your thoughts on open education and OER generally? Do you think OER will solve a lot of problems in education? Come to think of it, what do you think are the problems facing (formal) education today?

I live in a big city — Chicago. Education and education reform is on the news nightly. We have a lot of public schools that are suffering from a lack of funds, a lack of human capital, just lack. We also have a lot of experimental education projects going on such as small schools, charter schools, and the like. Some are getting a great education, many are not.

As someone who has been into the Internet and its potential for a pretty long time (remember Pine Mail? Amber letters on black screens – no graphics?), I have hope for OER, in particular as a field leveller post-high school. I don’t think it is a magic bullet, but I do think that OER can fill a need and a niche.

The current global economy is making higher education impossible for a lot of people to pursue. This reality may very well be the opportunity that OER needs to get over the obscurencia hump (at least outside of some academic circles) and become something that is more commonplace. I know that OER is being deployed more and more in community colleges which I think is great. I’ve often thought that where OER’s real opportunities lie is in wide deployment in non-traditional learning spaces — incorporated into adult literacy training, deployed as community based learning groups akin to book clubs but structured around learning and discussing concepts rather than reading and discussing books. The nonprofit sector will play a vital role in the take-up of OER, and I hope that academia and foundations, in partnership with nonprofits, start to dream about and propagate experimental OER learning projects.

How about in IssueLab’s own future? Any exciting developments in the pipeline, such as a snazzy tool that maps all content contributors in neon colors?

If only we had time to do “snazzy”! We have to focus on the nuts and bolts almost all of the time. But a girl can dream!

I’d like to get an API assembled that will plug into common open source content management systems and allow organizations to manage their IssueLab accounts alongside their other CMS-based online initiatives. I can imagine some of your readers do not find that to be sexy; but around here, we think it’s burnin’ up HOT.

Finally, do you have any last thoughts? Any questions or concerns for us? (What should ccLearn be doing?)

Only that I see a number of documents on the ccLearn Productions page that are not included in our OER Research Repository. Happy to help get those into IssueLab and out to our many audiences! And also, it would be terrific to get an IssueLab feed of OER titles onto ccLearn’s Resources page. I’ll e-mail you!

We recently had the opportunity to talk with Paley about the film – we touched on the film’s aesthetics and plot points, but perhaps most interesting to those in the CC community is Paley’s decision to utilize our copyleft license, Attribution-ShareAlike, and her thoughts on free licensing and the open source movement in general. Read on to learn more about the licensing trials and tribulations associated with the film’s release, how CC has played a role, and Paley’s opinions on the Free Culture movement as a whole.

RamSitaGods, Nina Paley | CC BY-SA

One of the major stories surrounding Sita Sings The Blues been your use of songs by musician Annette Hanshaw and the back-and-forth dialogue you have had with the copyright owners as a result. Can you explain why you used these songs?

The songs themselves inspired the film. There would be no film without those songs. Until I heard them, the Ramayana was just another ancient Indian epic to me. I was feebly connecting this ancient epic to my own experiences in 2002. But the Hanshaw songs were a revelation: Sita’s story has been told a million times not just in India, not just through the Ramayana, but also through American Blues. Hers is a story so primal, so basic to human experience, it has been told by people who never heard of the Ramayana. The Hanshaw songs deal with exactly the same themes as the epic; but they emerged completely independent of it. Their sound is distinctively 1920’s American, and therein lies their power: the listener/viewer knows I didn’t make them up. They are authentic. They are historical evidence supporting the film’s central point: the story of the Ramayana transcends time, place and culture.

What is this story? Sita is a goddess/princess/woman utterly devoted to her husband Rama, the god/prince/man. Sita’s story moves from total enmeshment and romantic joy (Here We Are, What Wouldn’t I Do For That Man) to hopeful longing separation (Daddy Won’t You Please Come Home) to reunion (Who’s That Knockin’ At My Door) to romantic rejection (Mean to Me) to reconciliation (If You Want the Rainbow) to further rejection (Moanin’ Low, Am I Blue) to hopeless longing (Lover Come Back to Me,) back to love – this time self-love (I’ve Got a Feelin’ I’m Fallin’).

Sita’s role is to suffer, especially through loving a man who rejects her. Women especially connect emotionally to her story and these emotions are clearly expressed in songs. As Nabaneeta Dev Sen writes in “Lady sings the Blues: When Women retell the Ramayana”:

But there are always alternative ways of using a myth. If patriarchy has used the Sita myth to silence women, the village women have picked up the Sita myth to give themselves a voice. They have found a suitable mask in the myth of Sita, a persona through which they can express themselves, speak of their day-to-day problems, and critique patriarchy in their own fashion.

Sen is talking about the songs of Indian village women, but she could just as easily been talking about American Blues. That is the point of Sita Sings the Blues: we all struggle with this story, which connects humans through time, space and culture, whether we’re aware of it or not. Just as the Ramayana has mostly been written down and controlled by men, the songs in Sita Sings the Blues were mostly written by men; but sung by a woman – Hanshaw – they pack an emotional wallop and express a woman’s voice.

The synchronicity of the Hanshaw songs and Sita’s story is uncanny. This impresses audiences and allows the film’s point to be made: the story of the Ramayana transcends time, place and culture. Because the songs feature an authentic voice from the 1920’s, they demonstrate that this story emerged organically in history. New songs composed by the director, while they could be entertaining, could not make that point. They would be a mere contrivance, whereas the authentic, historical songs give weight to the film’s thesis. They are in fact the basis of the film’s thesis, irrefutable evidence that certain stories – like the story of Sita and Rama – are inherent to human experience.

Upon reading the above, Karl Fogel added:

Using something that already exists demonstrates that the universality of your theme is external to yourself. Whereas causing something new to exist wouldn’t achieve the same effect. Instead, it would be circular: it would demonstrate that the artist has the ability to make more of what she’s already making. So rather than being connective or expanding, it would be narcissistic (just in a descriptive sense, not necessarily a pejorative one).

There has to be a reason so many composers, even non-Catholic ones like Bach, set the Latin Mass to music instead of making up their own words. (Hmm, now imagine if those words had been monopoly-restricted… :-) ).

What has your experience been in trying to get permission it use Hanshaw’s music in the film, and the current state of affairs?

Because distributors were going bankrupt right and left in 2008, it was no longer possible to sell an indie film to a distributor for big money and then “have them take care of” the licenses. Since in February of 2008, when the film premiered in Berlin, I was not yet a Free Culture convert, I thought I needed a conventional distributor. So it fell on me to clear the rights. I had to pay intermediaries to contact the license holders, since they don’t speak to mere riff raff like me; they’re too busy, and under no obligation to do so. Even before that, I needed legal help to research who owned the rights in the first place, since there’s no central copyright registry any more, and rights are traded like baseball cards between corporations. Luckily, I was aided by the student attorneys of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic of American University.

Anyway, in 2008 a lawyer charged me $7,000 to get this response from the licensors: an estimate of $15,000 to $26,000 per song, AFTER I’d paid a $500 per song Festival License. (Festival Licenses last one whole year and require a promise to not make any money showing the film. So a festival license isn’t enough to get the “week-long commercial run” required for Academy Award qualification. Now that “Sita”’s been broadcast, she will never qualify for an Academy nomination; if I’d really wanted one, I would have had to delayed the release of the film for another year. But I digress.).

Even though we made it explicitly clear the entire budget for the film was under $200,000, the licensors came back with the “bargain” estimate of about $220,000. It was simply not possible for me to acquire that kind of money. So legally, my only option was to not show the film or commit civil disobedience.

I hired another intermediary, a “rights clearance house” which is less expensive than a lawyer, and they negotiated the “step deal” I eventually signed. This brought the price tag of the licenses down to $50,000, but with many restrictions. If more than 5,000 DVDs (or downloads) are sold, I must pay the licensors more. I wrote about this at length on my website.

I borrowed $50,000 to pay these licenses for several reasons. First, to reduce my liability. I may still be sued for releasing the film freely online – after all, the licensors may interpret free sharing as “selling” for zero dollars – but I’ll only be sued for breach of contract, not copyright infringement. Copyright infringement carries much harsher penalties, including possible jail time. I also wanted to make free sharing of “Sita” as legal, and therefore legitimate, as possible. Sharing shouldn’t be the exclusive purview of lawbreakers. Sharing should – and can – be wholesome fun for the whole family. I paid up to indemnify the audience, because the audience is Sita’s main distributor.

So it’s now legal to copy and share Sita Sings the Blues. The files went up on Archive.org in early March 2009 and have spread far and wide since. Having paid off the licensors, I could have chosen conventional distribution. But I chose a CC BY-SA license to allow the film to reach a much wider audience; to prohibit the copyrighting – “locking up” – of my art; to give back to the greater culture which gave to me; to exploit the power of the audience to promote and distribute more efficiently than a conventional distributor; and to educate about the dangers of copy restrictions, and the beauty and benefits of sharing.

As a result of the trouble you’ve had in regards to Annete Hanshaw’s music, you have turned into a self-proclaimed Free Culture activist. Was this shift gradual? What has that experience in particular informed your views on copyright, fair use, and the public domain?

Annette Hanshaw was immensely popular in the late 1920’s. Now almost no one’s heard of her. Why? Because of copy-restrictions.

I met many talented filmmakers on my “festival circuit.” Most had conventional distribution deals, but it’s very hard to see any of their films, which had small, brief theatrical runs, and then were never heard from again. Why? Copy-restrictions.

I’m an artist. I need money to live, but even more importantly I need my art to reach people. A $10,000 advance in return for having my work locked up for 10 years is a devil’s bargain. More than anything, I wanted people to see my film – now and in years to come.

My turning point in choosing a CC license happened in October of 2008. “Sita” had just opened the San Francisco Animation Festival, and I’d disclosed to the audience we’d all just done something illegal. It’s always great to share the film on a big screen in a theater with an audience, and this one was particularly enthusiastic. The next morning I woke up realizing that a free release online wouldn’t in any way prevent theatrical screenings. Why had I never considered that before? Because the film industry insists people won’t go to theaters if they can see a film online. But that’s not true of me, nor many cinephiles. When I lived in San Francisco my favorite movie outings were to classic films at the Catsro: 2001, Nights of Cabiria, Modern Times, Mommy Dearest. These are all available on home video, but I went to the Castro for the big screen and the dark room and the shared experience. If enough people watched and liked “Sita” online, there’d be demand for it in cinemas. And so far that’s proving true.

In particular, how have you viewed CC licenses in this whole process? What was your motivation to release Sita Sings the Blues under a CC BY-SA license? Why did you choose that license and not another CC license? What are the obstacles and benefits you’ve seen in using CC licenses?

I want my film to reach the widest audience. It costs money to run a theater; it costs money to manufacture DVDs; it costs money to make and distribute 35mm film prints. It’s essential I allow people to make money distributing Sita these ways and others; otherwise, no one will do it. So I eschewed the “non commercial” license. Share Alike would “protect” the work from ever being locked up. It’s better than Public Domain; works are routinely removed from the Public Domain via privatized derivatives (just try making your own Pinocchio). I didn’t want some corporation locking up a play or TV show based on Sita. They are certainly welcome to make derivative works, and make money from them; in fact I encourage this. But they may not sue or punish anyone for sharing those works.

I looked to the Free Software movement as a model. The CC BY-SA license most closely resembles the GNU GPL, which is the foundation of Free Software. People make plenty of money in Free Software; there’s no reason they can’t do the same in Free Culture, except for those pernicious “non commercial” licenses. A Share Alike license eliminates the corporate abuse everyone’s so afraid of, while it encourages entrepreneurship and innovation. Everyone wins, especially the artist!

What else would you like our reader’s to know? Any plans for the future?

I’d love you all to read my essay Understanding Free Content and of course watch the film!

I’m currently busy making “containers” like DVDs and T shirts available now at our e-store. QuestionCopyright is my main partner in releasing Sita; we’re trying to prove a model in which freedom and revenue work together. We know other filmmakers are watching what happens to Sita, and we’d like to show that yes, you can make money without impinging on everyone else’s freedom.

I’m also negotiating with theatrical distributors in France and Switzerland, as well as a couple book publishers. I’m negotiating not “rights” to the film, which belong to everyone already, but rather my Endorsement and assistance. To understand how this works, please read about the Creator Endorsed Mark.

Once I have the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire started, I hope to work on short musical cartoons about free speech – you can hear one of the songs here. There’s more where that came from. Really, I have more ideas than I have time to implement them – a happy yet vexing problem.

I also hope to have all my old Nina’s Adventures and Fluff syndicated comic strips scanned and uploaded at high resolution onto archive.org under a CC BY-SA license. The University of Illinois Library is currently seeking funding to move ahead on this project – interested individuals should contact Betsy Kruger.

Lastly, I’m still looking for money, although the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire should be generating some in a few months. Still, I plan to apply for grants and fellowships. Any foundations with too much money burning a hole in your accounts, please get in touch.

Nina Paley, anonymous | CC BY-SA

The contest is in full swing, with winners receiving inclusion in Imaginashun – Power to the people, an album filled “with remixes from pro’s and bedroom producers from around the world” slated for release this autumn. We caught up with DJ Vadim to learn a bit more about his creative process and how he views the changing nature of interaction and communication in music. Read on to see what he had to say.

DJ Vadim supporting Mos Def at The Islington Academy, James Bradley

Can you give our readers some background on yourself as an artist? You’ve worked with a wide variety of musicians, from The Pharcyde to Kraftwerk, and released countless albums, singles, and remixes. Your career is long in scope and prolific in production but perhaps you are able to distill it all into a manageable chunk.

I started my music journey in the late 80’s, first with DJing, and in 1992 I started getting involved with production. It was very simple back then, just an Atari and a sampler. There weren’t the possibilities people have now. In ‘94 , I set up my own label and the rest is history.

In that journey i met and have worked and performed with lots of people, although rocking Glastonbury in 1999 and performing at Sonar in 2006 with DJ Krush and DJ Shadow stand out as highlights.

Have technological shifts changed how you approach music production? What kind of production tools do you do use?

Yes. I have so many more possibilities now that didn’t exist 15 years ago. I have so much more equipment, software, and toys for creating music now that didn’t exist or was not affordable. It is a bit like riding a push bike and going on a top of the range Yamaha super bike – they both get you to where your going but you have so much more options with the super bike, right?

I use Cubase, an MPC, my Apple computer and Ableton Live.

The environment leading up to your new album U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun was one of personal turmoil and growth. What was the process you went through on the way to releasing this album? How did the aesthetic of the album come into fruition as a result?

Well, when you go through turmoil and tragedy you can come out of it either being overwhelmed, pensive, and quite depressed or come out fighting and positive. I did the later. I felt that if cancer couldn’t hold me back, nothing would. It was hard – personal turmoil with my family, personal relationships and my own health. It was like being stripped back to nothing. But now I feel good about life and that is the most important.

What is your motivation behind the U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun remix contest? You’ve already done one successful contest on ccMixter – what was your experience like previously?

Well I think one of the most important things with releasing music is communication. Nowadays, that means participation and that is what ccMixter offers. It is a combination of the two, letting fans and music people participate and communicate together, with you, with me and create new music and ideas. This sort of interaction wasn’t possible 10 years ago.

Music is about communication. Without it you either have a huge MTV campaign or you get lucky – the music that people like is one that communicates with them, music that they (the fans) feel part of.

Both remix contests are using CC-licenses as their mechanism to enable this kind of reuse. As an artist who uses sampling as one of their core techniques, how do you view this sort of licensing? What are the major differences to you between working with live musicians and sampling material?

I think its a great marketing and promotional tool plus it is fun for the fans and producers. In regards to sampling and live musicians, you have more opportunities with live musicians because you can break any piece of music down to its basic elements – bass keys, drums etc. and hence be able to manipulate and control what you do much more

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know? Any plans for the future?

Well touring, releasing more music and making new music. I am up to so much its hard to remember it all. Best thing is to keep up with it via my homepage and MySpace profile!

U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun Artwork, SMALL Studio