links for 2008-01-04
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New report from the Centre for Social Media. Looks at the uses, motivation and challenges in using material currently under copyright in participatory media. US-centric in its looks at fair use, et al, but still an interesting read.
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The companion website for Axel Bruns’ much anticipated Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Already lots of bits worth reading!
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In their worst ever re-writing of their own universe’s history, Spider-Man makes a deal with the Devil and was never married (nor revealed his identity to the world). Seriously: worst retcon ever.
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“Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Kim Carr said the government had cancelled RQF because it was fundamentally flawed. “The RQF is poorly designed, administratively expensive and relies on an impact measure that is unverifiable and ill-d
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A scene by scene remake of Star Wars shot in 1977 on Super8 film!
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“… One of the reasons that Heroes (and other NBC shows) shot to the top of this list is that NBC decided to sever their relationship with iTunes last year, meaning you couldn’t zap these over to your iPod at $1.99 a pop. …”
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“64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004. Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog…”
links for 2008-01-03
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“An outspoken Saudi blogger is being held for “purposes of interrogation,” the Saudi Interior Ministry confirmed Tuesday. … the blogger, Fouah al-Farhan, was “being questioned about specific violations of nonsecurity laws.””
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Last year, Stacy Snyder, 25, was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile.
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Lawrence Lessig corrects some misunderstandings held by ASCAP(American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers ) in their recent stance on CC licenses.
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“Illegal downloads of videos continue to grow, with Australians increasingly pirating new US shows well before they ran downunder. … Television series Heroes was last year’s most popular television program with 2,439,154 downloads”
Australia’s Internet Censorship Regime
The first big concern for 2008 is that the newly-elected Rudd Labor Government in Australia has introduced laws requiring across-the-board filtering of the internet by ISPs. While the plan may have some good intentions behind it, if implemented in the way currently envisaged it will almost certainly make the internet in Australia slower, make internet services more expensive and likely infringe on privacy and civil liberties of Australian net users (seriously, a PIN number of equivalent to log on to the internet – why not have just been honest and kept the Australian ID card?!).
Not good.
For an overview of the changes, see Bookbuster; and for a good wrap-up of the increasingly negative media response, check out Peter Black’s solid overview here. Facebook users might want to join the Australian ISP filtering plan is stupid! or People against mandatory internet filters in Australia groups.
Update: As you might expect, the most sensible response thus far from an Australia politician to Labor’s internet censorship plan has been from Senator Andrew Bartlett:
As with every aspect of the measure, until the full details are known its impossible to judge. However, comments like Conroy’s make it much harder to be confident that the government is doing anything other than populist pandering, putting up a feel-good measure which will have no practical impact but create the illusion of doing something effective.
(My italics.)
Merry Christmas
Have a fabulous festive season, wherever you are in the world!
links for 2007-12-19
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“One of Australia’s biggest computer game developers, Auran Development, was placed into voluntary administration yesterday, despite recently securing multi-million dollar investments from the National Australia Bank and the federal Government.:
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“YouTube has seen tens of thousands in the conservative Saudi kingdom upload and download a broad range of thrill-seeking, political and just downright bizarre video clips in a surge of expression.”
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“… the adorable animals that dominate so many online video streams refuse to do their work—that is, to be adorable—in solidarity with striking writers who have walked out on their work…” (It’s WGA-week at In Media Res!)
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“The Hollywood Foreign Press Association had requested a waiver for its NBC broadcast, but the WGA rejected it.” So, no writers for the Globes or the Oscars!
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After catching his 15-year-old smoking pot, a Canadian man sold the hard-to-get Guitar Hero III video game he bought his son for $US90 ($103) for Christmas at an online auction, fetching $US9,100 ($10,420) from an Australian buyer.
CC+
One of the big announcements at the celebrations of Creative Commons’ fifth birthday was the release of the CC+ (CCPlus) licensing arrangement which combines existing CC licenses with ability to also explicitly point to additional licensing (for example, terms for commercial use on an NC CC license). From the CC blog:
CC+ is a protocol to enable a simple way for users to get rights beyond the rights granted by a CC license. For example, a Creative Commons license might offer noncommercial rights. With CC+, the license can also provide a link to enter into transactions beyond access to noncommercial rights — most obviously commercial rights, but also services of use such as warranty and ability to use without attribution, or even access to physical media.
“Imagine you have all of your photos on Flickr, offered to the world under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial license,” said Lawrence Lessig, CEO of Creative Commons. “CC+ will enable you to continue offering your work to the public for noncommercial use, but will also give you an easy way to sell commercial licensing rights to those who want to use your work for profit.”
While CC+ isn’t exactly new – it was always possible legally – the simplification of this arrangement is sure to see a lot more people explicating the terms under which they’d released material commercially and, hopefully, this encourage commercial producers to use material in this form.
In case you prefer you explanations to be more engaging, here’s a video explaining CC+:
If the video is a little hard to watch at this size, head to the full-size version on blip.tv or download a QuickTime movie version (56Mb). Alternatively, you can check the CC+ page or download the explanatory PDF.
One of the reasons I really like CC+ is that I can really see its value for media produced by students; CC licenses really encourage others to view and share, but having commercial uses spelt out means that if what students create is good enough, they could also see it making money for them!
Tama Leaver dot Net by Tama Leaver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.