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Definition of Free Cultural Works 1.0 Released

February 14, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The Internet, February 14, 2007.

A diverse group of writers has released the first version of the “Definition of Free Cultural Works.” The authors have identified a minimum set of freedoms which they believe should be granted to all users of copyrighted materials. Created on a wiki with the feedback of Wikipedia users, open source hackers, artists, scientists, and lawyers, the definition lists the following core freedoms:

* The freedom to use and perform the work
* The freedom to study the work and apply the information
* The freedom to redistribute copies
* The freedom to distribute derivative works.

Inspired by the Free Software Definition and the ideals of the free software and open source movements, these conditions are meant to apply to any conceivable work. In reality, these freedoms must be granted explicitly by authors, through the use of licenses which confer them. On the website of the definition, <http://freedomdefined.org/> a list of these licenses can be found. Furthermore, authors are encouraged to identify their works as Free Cultural Works using a set of logos and buttons.

The definition was initiated by Benjamin Mako Hill, a Debian GNU/Linux developer, and Erik Möller, an author and long-time Wikipedia user. Wikipedia already follows similar principles to those established by the definition. Angela Beesley, Wikimedia Advisory Board Chair and co-founder of Wikia.com; Mia Garlick, general counsel of Creative Commons; and Elizabeth Stark of the Free Culture Student Movement acted as moderators, while Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons provided helpful feedback.

As more and more people recognize that there are alternatives to traditional copyright, phrases like “open source,” “open access,” “open content,” “free content,” and “commons” are increasingly used. But many of these phrases are ambiguous when it comes to distinguishing works and licenses which grant all the above freedoms, and those which only confer limited rights. For example, a popular license restricts the commercial use of works, whereas the authors believe that such use must be permitted for a work to be considered Free. Instead of limiting commercial use, they recommend using a clever legal trick called “copyleft:” requiring all users of the work to make their combined and derivative works freely available.

Möller and Hill encourage authors to rethink copyright law and use one of the Free Culture Licenses to help build a genuine free and open culture.

Links

* http://freedomdefined.org/ – Official homepage of the definition
* http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses – Information about specific licenses
*http://freedomdefined.org/Logos_and_buttons – Logos and buttons for identifying free cultural works

Contact

* Erik M̦ller Рeloquence (at) gmail (dot) com Р+49-30-45491008
* Benjamin Mako Hill – mako (at) atdot (dot) cc

Jamendo – (More or Less) Free Music

February 13, 2007 / / 2 Comments

When I discover something great, new on the web that has been around for a while, I always feel this weird combination of pleasure and shock. First: “Wow, this is great!” Then: “Why did I not find out about this sooner?! Damnit, I’m supposed to know this stuff!” (Occasionally followed by: “I should blog about this!” 😉

Jamendo is an example. It’s a multilingual web 2.0 style music-sharing community with an emphasis on copyright licenses which are at least free as in beer. Some are also free as in speech. You can browse the available music by genre and license, and download or stream the tracks you want. BitTorrent is supported, though I haven’t seen any mega-size torrents yet (it would be neat to download an entire genre). It’s got everything else you could want: RSS feeds, discussion & review boards for each album, prominent donation links, cover images ..

The reason I hadn’t heard about is that its largest community is French-speaking. But Jamendo is multilingual, so it seems only a matter of time until the other languages catch up. The site seems to be a bit buggy at times, but reloading usually does the trick for me. Now I’ve got lots of new music to explore ..

Social social networks

February 9, 2007 / / 2 Comments

The web 2.0 hype is beginning to make an impact in the political and activist sphere. Two examples are dotherightthing.com and change.org.

Dotherightthing.com is the capitalist’s approach to changing the world, relying on markets and information to make all the difference. Here, people gather to rate the impact of a company’s actions on the world. It’s an interesting approach and may work well in some cases. Then you have examples like Philip Morris getting a positive impact rating for a $50K charity project in Vietnam. Given that their core business is to kill people by selling addictive substances, I wonder whether the “let’s reward them when they do good and punish them when they do evil” approach is really applicable to all companies. Market forces also make little difference when we’re not talking about domestically mass-marketed products but, say, the international trade in land mines. At some point, the discussion needs to go to another level, political regulation and control.

With dotherightthing.com itself being a for-profit, we also have to wonder how they will behave if they do become successful, and how susceptible the whole thing is to PR. That said, it’s certainly an innovative platform, and I wish them well. The market principle is complemented nicely by change.org, a navigation tool for finding ways to make a difference — and connecting people with NGOs which are already working to do so. In true web 2.0 style, the page opens with a tagcloud, but one which is actually useful, showing the issues most people care about. For each issue, there’s a page which allows people to post blogs, videos, images — and importantly, links to relevant organizations and networks. I’m not seeing any meetup.com style features, which could make things even more exciting.

The whole thing seems pretty well thought out, with a clean UI that makes the gimmicks unobtrusive. The software itself does not appear to be open source, nor do I find any information about the organization that runs the project. But they support donations through JustGive.org and get their NGO list from GuideStar, so they seem to know what they’re doing.

These are some very important first experiments, and I think things will get very interesting soon. Once we have a good idea what works and what doesn’t, open source components to replicate the success models won’t be far off, no matter what the originators do. There are two areas where similar experimentation has yet to happen on a large scale: direct democracy, and distributed fundraising.

Tagged Planet aggregators rock

February 9, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Planet aggregators are pretty cool, but many of them are “polluted” by blog posts that have nothing to do with the subject. If I subscribe to a MySQL or Apache feed, I don’t want to read about what the MySQL or Apache devs are having for breakfast. Planet Maemo is an example of an aggregator that works well. It still has the occasional off-topic posts, but thanks to tag-specific feeds, many of the aggregated sources are filtered. It’s a truly powerful way to keep up to date with the devs, while still allowing them room for individual expression.

I guess it’s time for me to start lobbying for a Wikimedia planet aggregator. The additional issue here is language — perhaps we need one for each language, unless there’s an aggregator software that supports multilinguality.

Google’s Mystery Meat Image Search

January 28, 2007 / / 1 Comment

It seems that one of Google’s UI designers must have gone to art school, as there can be no rational explanation for the mystery meat navigation they chose to implement for Google Image Search. As of now, a search result page does no longer give you all the information about the results, such as the originating website, the full resolution of the image, or its size. Instead, in a nod to web 2.0 design, we get a cool blue “highlight” when we hover with the mouse over a thumbnail, and the additional information is shown only while the mouse is hovering in this area. This is known as “mystery meat navigation”.

I’m sure Google apologists will try to explain that, oh, the user interface is so much cleaner this way! So much whitespace! It makes the user feel welcome, and reduces confusion with information the average searcher will not understand! Rubbish. The information is still there, just randomly popping up, being more confusing and distracting than ever. The change also reduces accessibility. For instance, the link “More results from ..” that will appear under some thumbnails disappears if the web user accidentally moves their mouse of the area of that particular image. Which is exactly the kind of mistake newbie users are likely to make. The lack of information makes it harder to ignore results from spammy sites, and on repeated searches for the same query, more difficult to distinguish known from unknown hits.

I have found no way to switch back to the old modus operandi. I find the new behavior so annoying that I will probably switch to Yahoo! Image search. Still, it’s somewhat reassuring that even the deviously clever folks at Google occasionally make profoundly idiotic UI decisions.

Blasphemy Challenge

December 16, 2006 / / 0 Comments

The Blasphemy Challenge is one of many interesting uses of Youtube’s video reply functionality. A bit silly, it challenges viewers to upload their own videos where they “deny the Holy Spirit,” an unforgivable sin according to the New Testament. Up to 1,000 responders will get a free DVD of the documentary The God Who Wasn’t There.

This kind of decentralized collaboration will become really interesting when people can actually start to, well, collaborate: i.e., turn many small snippets of video into a documentary. Even now, it’s an interesting display of the new media culture that is arising on the Net.

WikiYouth

December 6, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Are you an advocate of youth rights on the Internet?

Have you ever used or edited a wiki, such as the world-famous Wikipedia?

Then we want you to join the Wiki Youth Movement.

http://www.wikiyouth.org/

Wikis like Wikipedia allow young people everywhere to share knowledge, ideas and experiences. But wherever young people use the Internet, they are faced with reactionary and condescending views. Fearful adults try to regulate the content they can see and the communities they can contribute to. The Wiki Youth Association seeks to give young readers, users and editors a voice.

Beyond demanding equal treatment as wiki contributors, our goal is to build a shared understanding of wiki ethics. Vandalism and immature behavior are condemned on most wikis, and sensible learning approaches for new wiki users are encouraged. We want to have fun, but not at the expense of others. We want to help you to understand the maze of wiki-rules, so that you too can have fun.

We would also like to give intelligent young people a shared social space where they can talk about their experiences in not only wiki communities, but also their daily lives. eventually, we hope that we can develop the WYA into a true social movement which organizes events and campaigns. But our initial goals are modest: we only want to become the single largest world-wide community of young wiki users.

The WYA is not a formal organization. There is no membership other than registration for our wiki and forums.

Join today!

—James Hare, Co-founder

—Erik Möller, Advisor

Faking File Sharing Evidence

July 5, 2006 / / 0 Comments

The Swedes have come up with a neat tool that can be used to generate fake screenshots showing the use of file sharing software to distribute illegal files from a particular IP address. What’s the point? Screenshots like this have been used in court as evidence of illegal file sharing. This kind of tool can help to throw out such as “evidence” as inadmissible.

Literate Programs

June 19, 2006 / / 0 Comments

A very interesting new wiki project: Literate Programs. Source code is posted directly to the wiki and can be commented and edited by the community. An extension allows downloading all the relevant source files in an archive. Syntax highlighting for various programming languages is supported. This could become pretty big, I think.

RfC: A Free Content and Expression Definition

May 1, 2006 / / 0 Comments
If you distribute this announcement, please make an addition to /Log so we can avoid duplicates.

The free culture movement is growing. Hackers have created a completely free operating system called GNU/Linux that can be used and shared by anyone for any purpose. A community of volunteers has built the largest encyclopedia in history, Wikipedia, which is used by more people every day than CNN.com or AOL.com. Thousands of individuals have chosen to upload photos to Flickr.com under free licenses. But – just a minute. What exactly is a “free license”?

In the free software world, the two primary definitions – the Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition – are both fairly clear about what uses must be allowed. Free software can be freely copied, modified, modified and copied, sold, taken apart and put back together. However, no similar standard exists in the sphere of free content and free expressions.

We believe that the highest standard of freedom should be sought for as many works as possible. And we seek to define this standard of freedom clearly. We call this definition the “Free Content and Expression Definition”, and we call works which are covered by this definition “free content” or “free expressions”.

Neither these names nor the text of the definition itself are final yet. In the spirit of free and open collaboration, we invite your feedback and changes. The definition is published in a wiki. You can find it at:

http://freedomdefined.org/ or http://freecontentdefinition.org/

Please use the URL <http://freedomdefined.org/static/> (including the trailing slash) when submitting this link to high-traffic websites.

There is a stable and an unstable version of the definition. The stable version is protected, while the unstable one may be edited by anyone. Be bold and make changes to the unstable version, or make suggestions on the discussion page. Over time, we hope to reach a consensus. Four moderators will be assisting this process:

  • Erik Möller – co-initiator of the definition. Free software developer, author and long time Wikimedian, where he initiated two projects: Wikinews and the Wikimedia Commons.
  • Benjamin Mako Hill – co-initiator of the definition. Debian hacker and author of the Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, board member of Software in the Public Interest, Software Freedom International, and the Ubuntu Foundation.
  • Mia Garlick. General Counsel at Creative Commons, and an expert on IP law. Creative Commons is, of course, the project which offers many easy-to-use licenses to authors and artists, some of which are free content licenses and some of which are not.
  • Angela Beesley. One of the two elected trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Co-founder and Vice President of Wikia, Inc.

None of the moderators is acting here in an official capacity related to their affiliations. Please treat their comments as personal opinion unless otherwise noted. The Creative Commons project has welcomed the effort to clearly classify existing groups of licenses, and will work to supplement this definition with one which covers a larger class of licenses and works.

In addition to changes to the definition itself, we invite you to submit logos that can be attached to works or licenses which are free under this definition:

http://freedomdefined.org/Logo_contest

One note on the choice of name. Not all people will be happy to label their works “content”, as it is also a term that is heavily used in commerce. This is why the initiators of the definition compromised on the name “Free Content and Expression Definition” for the definition itself. We are suggesting “Free Expression” as an alternative term that may lend itself particularly to usage in the context of artistic works. However, we remain open on discussing the issue of naming, and invite your feedback in this regard.

We encourage you to join the open editing phase, to take part in the logo contest, or to provide feedback. We aim to release a 1.0 version of this definition fairly soon.

Please forward this announcement to other relevant message boards and mailing lists.

Thanks for your time,

Erik Möller and Benjamin Mako Hill

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