Guerrillas in the Mix

Glenn Otis Brown, July 17th, 2003

There’s a good, brief article in Wired News today on the importance of digital editing tools to the underground film movement.

They describe themselves as “guerrilla filmmakers,” independent directors who create for both fun and profit, and they see themselves as a resistance force battling the banality of mainstream movies.

“There’s a world full of weird and important stories to tell, so I’m not sitting around waiting for scripts or budgets to be approved,” said filmmaker Laszlo Balogh. “I roll my own movies.”

Take Another Little Piece of My Art

Glenn Otis Brown, July 17th, 2003

A museum exhibit called “Illegal Art” might sound like a history of naughty pictures. Turns out that the exhibit (through July 25 at SF MOMA Artist’s Gallery) is more innocuous than most primetime TV: A Mickey Mouse gasmask. Pez candy dispensers honoring fallen hip-hop stars. A litigious Little Mermaid. Not kids’ stuff, exactly—but illegal?

Creative Commons’ Derek Slater has a nice review of the Illegal Art exhibit, which ends its stay at the SF MOMA later this month, plus some insight into surrounding issues.

Physics Textbooks

Matt Haughey, July 17th, 2003

This week we’re featuring physics textbooks that are available for free download under Creative Commons licenses:

The Light and Matter series of introductory physics textbooks, as implied by its title, has a story line built around light and matter. The outlines of Discover Physics and Simple Nature are based on conservation laws.

The author states reasons why the books are available for free, encourages reporting of errors and sharing of problem sets, and keeps track of schools adopting the titles as textbooks.

Howard Dean on Lessig Blog

Glenn Otis Brown, July 15th, 2003

In case you haven’t heard yet, Governor Howard Dean is guestblogging on Lessig.org this week. (Be sure to check out the Lessig-Dean mash-up photo.)

Wired News on OYEZ and Creative Commons

Glenn Otis Brown, July 15th, 2003

Wired News has a nice article on our work with Supreme Court audio archivists OYEZ today.

Download and fileshare a few megabytes of history.

Put the Supremes on Your iPod

Glenn Otis Brown, July 15th, 2003

Our friends at OYEZ.org have now made it ridiculously easy to download MP3s of classic U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments for free under a Creative Commons license.

Here’s a list of the first wave of Supreme Court recordings that OYEZ has embedded with license information.

Download (warning: big) a few here if you like, then browse OYEZ for a few dozen more:

(1) Roe v. Wade;

(2) the Pentagon Papers case;

(3) Miranda v. Arizona;

(4) the Sam Sheppard (a.k.a., “the Fugitive”) murder appeal;

(5) the justly titled Loving v. Virginia (in which the Court overturned a Virginia law banning inter-racial marriage).

OYEZ also has the audio from the recent affirmative action cases Gratz and Grutter.

Not jogging music, exactly — but many of them do get the blood going. Hats off to OYEZ for this ongoing public service.

Digital Mix: A Special Bay Area Event Celebrating Illegal Art

Matt Haughey, July 14th, 2003

On July 25th the Electronic Frontier Foundation will host a night of music, art, and conversation to celebrate digital culture. Hosted at the Black Box in downtown Oakland, this all-ages event will bring up-and-coming artists of electronica, digital film, and illegal art together with leaders from the cyber-rights movement. Among the event’s speakers, Creative Commons’ Glenn Otis Brown will be there to discuss the new sampling license. For more information, please proceed here.

BitPass + Creative Commons

Neeru Paharia, July 9th, 2003

Musicians Joshua Ellis and Big Friendly Corporation have implemented a new technology called BitPass to sell their Creative Commons-licensed content via micropayment.

Joshua has offered his songs under an Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. If you buy a song for 50 cents, or the entire album for $3.50, you’re then free to copy, distribute, and make derivative works — as long as you give Joshua attribution, don’t make commercial uses, and release all derivative works under an Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. Joshua says he’s sold over $100 of content within a few days.

Anyone interested in mixing these songs, or putting them into your student film?

Commons on the Hustings, II

Glenn Otis Brown, July 3rd, 2003

Our licenses make another appearance on the campaign trail. Check out AmericansForDean.

An Opsound Exchange

Glenn Otis Brown, July 3rd, 2003

You’ve got to hear this. This week’s featured content is exactly the sort of innovative co-authorship that Creative Commons, and good folks like Opsound, make possible.

Colin Mutchler explains:

About a month after submitting a few acoustic guitar tracks to
Opsound‘s sound pool [and thus releasing the song under an Attribution-ShareAlike license], I got an email from a violinist named Cora Beth, who had added a violin track to one of the guitar tracks, “My Life.” She called it “My Life Changed,” and I think the track is definitely more beautiful now. Maybe eventually we’ll add drums and words.

This is collaboration across space and time, as our Flash movie puts it — with no rights-clearing needed. Great stuff. We’d love to hear more of this sort of thing, so tell us if you have a similar story.