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Tag Archives: Free Culture

Licensing Changes

After realizing that my issues with WordPress' autosave feature was probably caused by the fact it has been almost a year since I upgraded wpLicense, the WordPress plugin that integrates Creative Commons licenses, I decided that it was high time I looked at changing the license that my content is published under.
In December 2004, [...]

09 F9 11 why don't you do something useful with your lives?

GNOME developer David Trowbridge on why the mobs posting a certain hexadecimal number around various places on the Internet are not being productive:
Most of the people copying this key did so under some delusional notion of “free speech” or “numbers not being copyrightable”. Under current US law (regardless of what you think of it), this [...]

False Assumptions about FairPlay

Over at Gadfly, Peter Mulcahy complains about Randall Stross' recent article in the New York Times, which rightly castigates Apple for the limitations of the FairPlay DRM with which it encodes audio and video purchased from the iTunes Store. While I think commenter Markus Kolic is right in noting that Stross seems to be misreading [...]

The Difficulties of Distribution in Boycotting the RIAA

Starting in June 2005, I decided that I would no longer purchase music from bands who released albums on record labels that belonged to the RIAA. I have broken that promise, mostly because the RIAA is everywhere.
Take Downtown Records. On the "About" section of their official website, immediately after claiming that they are an "independent [...]

Saying No to the iPod

An essay on why I am not going to buy another iPod in the near future. First in a series on the state of Linux support (or lack thereof) in the digital audio player market today.

Copyright Law in Rhyming Form

Via BoingBoing comes all of Title 17 of the United States Code, which encapsulates all of American copyright law, in short quartains with ABAB rhyming scheme. On 17 USC 107 (fair use):
Despite all of these rights
All people can reproduce
To report, criticise, or teach
Because that is fair use
Almost as interesting as the verse is the copyright [...]

The Coming Digital Library

In tomorrow's New York Times magazine, Kevin Kelly writes the best explanation I have recently read of why book digitization is a good idea and its potential pitfalls. The beginning of the article is a bit silly and utopian, with its claims that the "universal library" (which will include the sum of all human [...]

Monster Island: A Smart Zombie Novel

I was suffering from anomie earlier this week when I stumbled upon Monster Island thanks to a locked LiveJournal post.[1] Despite the fact you cannot read my friend's praise of Monster Island, I think it is still worth reading. Although the novel is for sale at Amazon, the author, David Wellington, decided to make it [...]

Radiohead on Not Being Attached to a Major Record Label

Pitchfork has an article about the fact the popular band Radiohead might be coming on tour to the United States. While the ability to see one of my favorite bands live in concert is pretty cool, I was even more excited to see that Radiohead is currently unaffilated with EMI, a member of the RIAA. [...]

YouTube's Pretty Girls Make Graves Video Contest & Music Licensing in Film

The popular video website YouTube is hosting a "Make Our Video" contest for the Seattle indie rock band Pretty Girls Make Graves in order to promote the band's upcoming album Élan Vital. Entrants are directed to download the album's first track, The Nocturnal House, and create a music video based on it. While the grand [...]

His Girl Friday Remix

An special action-filled edit of the 1940 film His Girl Friday. Brought to you by the public domain and Ourmedia.

Go Go Open Source Forever!

So today, there were problems with accessing email on the FAS network. I tried Mozilla Thunderbird, mutt, and pine, but none of these client provided optimal results. My regressive friend (who uses Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, and Trillian - all non-open source software) decided to be difficult and asked if I used open-sourced medicine instead [...]

The Decemberists Join Capitol Records

The Decemberists, a moderately well known indie rock band, have announced that they have signed a contract with the major recording company Capitol Records.

Mirror, Mac Mirror, on the Wall

How DrunkenBlog's "Evening at Adler" is symptomatic of our new creator-oriented world.

On Crossposting

I abhor crossposting. There is enough text on the Internet that it seems like a waste to put the same piece of writing in two places just because you do not think your readers are intelligent enough to either have already realized that everything you write is genius (and thus have subscribed to every website [...]

Free Culture Comes to Harvard

Way back last December, I noted that there was no Harvard chapter of Free Culture, a national student organization working to affect change in copyright legislation, to expand fair use, and to help restore the common cultural pool that artists, writers, and other content creators can draw from.[1] A little less than a year later [...]

iTunes Music Store and Napster are Not Your Friends

The Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes an excellent roundup of the most popular online music stores, identifying their flaws and explaining how they limit user freedoms. Of the four online music services that the guide suggests that users use instead, I take a look at Bleep and Audio Lunchbox.

Updated CC Licensing

I updated the Creative Commons license governing the use of this blog from the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license to the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. I feel sort of guilty about using such a restrictive license, but I figure anyone who wants to use the contents of one of my entries in a commercial enterprise can jump through [...]

Classical Music Labels Criticize BBC for Free Beethoven

As I reported back in June, the BBC's Radio 3 offered 9 Beethoven symphonies for free download on their website in a staggered period ending early this month. This article from the British newspaper The Independent comes via Scripting News. This is why the Internet can't have nice things anymore.
Managing director of the Naxos label, [...]

Need for Open Source Armor?

Via TalkLeft comes a New York Times article I overlooked that explores why our troops in Iraq do not have the armored vehicles necessary to properly protect them from IEDs. Part of the problem is that the chassis design of the Humvee allows it to absorb much of the force from explosions that occur underneath [...]

Happy Birthday MP3 for Free Culture

In April, the Free Culture movement celebrated its one year anniversary. What is Free Culture, you ask? It is a college-based movement which wants to ensure that humanity's traditional values of innovation and creativity are not stifled. From their manifesto:
The freedom to build upon the past is necessary for creativity and innovation to thrive. We [...]

Pledging for Fair Use

I was reading earlier in the week about PledgeBank, a website where you can create pledges to do something, but are only required to complete your task if a certain number of other people also make that promise. As the site claims, you can "Tell the world 'I'll do it, but only if you'll help [...]

Let's Push Music Forward

The New York Times write about three albums coming out today (Coldplay's X&Y, the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan, and the Black Eyed Peas' Monkey Business) and how they are symptomatic of the music industry's decadence:
The big record companies continue to insist that the only route to profitability is blockbuster sales of a few [...]

Free Culture, Anyone?

From a post on Michel's blog, I "rediscovered" (I browsed it some time ago, but was busy) freeculture.org. There is still no Harvard chapter, which irks me; I assumed someone else would have started one.
I do not really have time to start a club, but I just might have to make some…

The Dangers of DVD Region Encoding

The story: Boy sees movie. Boy falls in love with character from movie. Boy buys DVD of Japanese movie that inspired character boy loves. Boy realizes that DVD is Region 3, since there is no Region 1 DVD. Boy gets angry. Boy gets even, by constructing an extremely funny dialog between "DVD Jon" (famous for [...]

The Importance of Open Source

From Slashdot today comes the news that the newest version of the popular Shareaza peer-to-peer program has been released under the GPL. Why is this important?
Suppose the main developer of Shareaza develops a terminal illness. Or suppose the RIAA realizes that its strategy of suing the people who use peer-to-peer networks will not work. Instead, [...]

The Hills Are Alive…with the Price of Music

In this letter to the editor, the Executive Director of the Canadian Music Publishers Association, attempts to defend the standpoint of songwriters, who are apparently the "real victims" in the music wars.