So as reported about two months ago, the Free Culture Movement turned one in April. I promised a present. At the time, we were organizing a call in recording of “Happy Birthday,” from some of the leaders of the free world. Well, finally, after some struggle clearing rights, and after lots of nitpicking on my part, we’ve released the song. Check out the page at Creative Commons, donate something in support, and download the song.
Sorry for the delay.
So the world is bursting with extremely cheap, very good high quality digital cameras. No doubt the vast majority of images snapped (is that the verb these days?) with those cameras are by people who have no interest in enforcing a copyright. Yet as Grant pointed out to me, the AP reports, an increasing number of photo labs are refusing to print “high quality” digital images, out of fear that they “might” be professional photographs, and therefore, “printing the pictures might be a copyright violation.”
This begins to make plain a point Rusty Russell suggested to me in an email recently: No doubt copyright is a property right. But why isn’t anyone out there defending the property rights of digital camera owners? This is a conflict in property rights, produced by an insanely inefficient property system — copyright. The solution is not, as some seem to believe, to abolish copyright. It is instead to abolish the insanely inefficient part. Yet it is the character of our time: to argue against inefficiency is to mark yourself as a “communist.”
The Duke Law School offers an explanation of its leadership in the Open Access Law movement. Of course, that part of the world is responsible for lots of important movements of freedom, and that law school is particularly responsible.
So we’re looking for two fantastic people at Creative Commons — one to help us with development, and one to replace the irreplaceable Neeru Paharia, who is going to get her PhD at Harvard. The job descriptions are here: Development, ED-CreativeCommons.
JD Lasica’s fantastic book, Darknet, has now been published. It is a wonderful collection of stories and analysis around new media issues. He says some nice things about me in the book (some at least) so I won’t go on about it. But his publisher has allowed him to prime the reading with some mini-chapters.
Boing Boing has a great story about Rush Limbaugh’s copyfight.
openDemocracy, an independent online magainze for debate about global politics, has adopted CC licensing. From the press release: “Past contributors include Todd Gitlin, Mary Kaldor, Kofi Annan, Anne-Marie Slaughter, John le Carré, Ian McEwan, and Siva Vaidhyanathan.”
Michael Geist is a professor at University of Ottowa. He’s certainly one the most prolific and effective advocates for all things good. Among the million things he does is write a weekly column for the Toronto Star. That writing, along with his other work, has angered those with whom he disagrees.
Of course, I know well what it’s like to be, let’s say, not liked. But I’ve been astonished by the means deployed by our friends in the North for dealing with people they don’t like. So too have I been amazed at the rhetoric. Check out Michael’s post, Groundhog Day to get a flavor. I guess this is as good a measure as any of effectiveness. Bravo, Michael.
We (Creative Commons) just upgraded to Apple’s Tiger to get the benefit of some cool new iCal features. I’m regretting the decision already. I had moved to Mail.app a while ago, after being frustrated with Entourage’s bloat. And after some tinkering, I had crafted a series of hotkeys to automatically move mail from the inbox to different folders. I have always been astonished that this function wasn’t integrated into mail applications — do you all really drag and drop the hundred of emails you file, or do you just not file email?
Anyway, though Apple proudly lists all the improvements to Mail as an inducement to upgrade, it doesn’t list the things it broke — in particular, scripting. No longer can you script within Mail. And while you can script at the system level, hot-key support for those scripts doesn’t work right now.
This is a bug, no doubt. I imagine they’ll fix it. But meanwhile, they’ve also changed the naming convention for such scripts (used to be ctrl, now ctl, etc., or something like that). All of which makes me wonder: who is it that thinks changes like this are improvements? How could you ever imagine that there’s more good than harm done by a change like this? Just part of an endless conspiracy to disable the ability to automate life in macland. Why work to automate when some genius will change a convention to force you to recode every time you “up”grade a system?
Update: I thought I had posted this update last week. Sorry for the delay. Just about an hour after I posted this, a modest coder sent along his work which solves the problem. Check out Red-Sweater’s Fastscripts. See also this free plug-in.
I’ve been a fan of the OECD’s “Working Party on the Information Economy” reports. Though I don’t agree with everything they’ve said, they’ve been extraordinarily balanced and informative. This is the latest — a report on “Digital Broadband Content: Music.” It promises to be interesting and valuable weekend reading.
