Category Archives: free culture

OpenBusiness.cc has a blog entry about a film about “piracy” and its politics in Sweden, including a bit about the Swedish Pirate Party. Appropriately enough, you can download it for free. Continue reading →

John Anderson sent me a link to a fantastic collection of political mashups. The current President is a popular target, but the Nixon stuff is really great as well. Continue reading →

Check out the very cool finalists for the 2006 Wikimania awards. Continue reading →

The Stanford Center for Internet and Society‘s Fair Use Project has filed a law suit against Stephen Joyce, who claims the right to control access to the papers and letters of James Joyce. The context of the suit is described well in this article appearing in the New Yorker by D. T. Max. The complaint in the case can be found here.

This is the first in what we expect will be a series of cases defending the boundaries of fair use. Stay tuned. Continue reading →

Next Monday, June 12th, in Los Angeles, there’s another Google Print Debate, this time at the LA Public Library. Tickets are free but you must reserve them here. Continue reading →

So last year today was the event at the NYPL with Jeff Tweedy. In my continuing effort to tinker with podcasting like technology, I’ve synchronized the slides with the audio from that event. The file is available as a torrent.

(How to use a torrent)

Also available on:

YouAre.TV: Who Owns Culture?

(Very cool re YouAre.TV: Built in CC licensing in the upload engine).

Google Video: Who Owns Culture?

YouTube.Com rejected the video — too long. Continue reading →

I’m just leaving Japan after a day long conference sponsored in part by the Japanese National Institute of Informatics. The morning session was sponsored by Creative Commons Japan and consisted of six presentations by people using Creative Commons licenses, or in a couple cases, doing things that depend upon CC-like freedom.

Japan is one of my favorite places in the world, and I love any excuse to be here. But I had a strange deja vu as I listened to the stories of what people are doing here.

In the late 1990s, I travelled a bunch to South America to talk about cyberspace. In conference after conference, I listened to South Americans describe how they were waiting for the government to enact rules so they could begin to develop business in cyberspace. That reaction puzzled me, an American. As I explained to those who would listen, in America, business wasn’t waiting for the government to “clarify” rules. It was simply building business in cyberspace without any support from government.

Yet as I listened to the Japanese describe the stuff they were doing with content in cyberspace, I realized we (America) had become South America. One presentation in particular described an extraordinary database the NII had constructed to discover relevance in linked databases, and drive traffic across a database of texts. I was astonished by the demonstration, and thought to myself that we could never build something like this in the U.S., at least until cases like the Google Book Search case was resolved.

And bingo — the moment of recognition. We are now, as the South Americans in the 1990s, waiting for the government to clarify the rules. Investment is too uncertain; the liability too unclear. We thus wait, and fall further behind nations such as Japan, where the IP (as in copyright) bar is not so keen to stifle IP (as in the goose that …).

(Oh, and re broadband: NTT is now well on its way to rolling fiber to the home. Cost per home — between $30-50/m, for 100 megabits/s). Continue reading →

The folks at xml.com, part of the O’Reilly goodness, have made a streamed version of my book, Free Culture, available. You can access it as a stream, or download it to your device.

(Thanks, David!) Continue reading →

I feel like one. Here’s the text of a letter I’ve sent to Congresswoman Lofgren and Congressman Boucher — the two key leaders on all things good re copyright in Congress — about the Copyright Office’s Orphan Works Report. No one will like me for this letter. Continue reading →

The Center for Social Media has released a fantastic report on “fair use” in film. The aim of the report is to try to state, and hence establish, norms or “best practices” that should govern “fair use” for film. This is an important effort and Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi deserve thanks for the hard work pulling the team together to produce this. Download the report here. Continue reading →