NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Powerhouse Musem goes Creative Commons!

reblogged via Powerhouse Museum (Sydney) blog:

Powerhouse collection documentation goes Creative Commons
By Seb Chan , Apr 2, 2009

We’re happy to announce that as of today all our online collection documentation is available under a mix of Creative Commons licenses. We’ve been considering this for a long time but the most recent driver was the Wikipedia Backstage tour.

Collection records are now split into two main blocks of text.

The first section is the relatively museum-specific provenance which is now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial license.

The second section is primarily factual object data and is licensed under a less restrictive Creative Commons Attribution, Share-Alike license.

Just to be very clear, images, except where we have released them to the Commons on Flickr, remain under license. There’s a lot more work to be done there.

So what does this really mean?

Teachers and educators can now do what they want or need to with our collection records and encourage their students to do the same without fear. Some probably did in any case but we know that a fair number asked permissions, others wrongly assumed the worst (that we’d make them fill out forms or pay up), and it is highly likely that schools were charged blanket license fees by collecting agencies at times.

Secondly it means that anyone, commercial or non-commercial can now copy, scrape or harvest our descriptive, temporal and geospatial data, and object dimensions for a wide range of new uses. This could be building a timeline, a map, or a visualisation of our collection mixed with other data. It could be an online publication, a printed text book, or it could be just to improve Wikipedia articles. It can also now be added to Freebase and other online datastores, and incorporated into data services for mobile devices and so much more.

Obviously, we’ll be working to improve programmatic access to this data along the lines of the Brooklyn Museum API, as well as through OAI and other means, but right now we’re permitting you to use your own nouse to get the data, legitimately and with our blessing - as long as you attribute us as the source, and share alike. We figure that a clear license is probably the ground level work that needs to preceded a future API in any case.

Thirdly, we’ve applied an attribution, non-commercial license to object provenance largely to allow broad educational and non-commercial repurposing but not to sanction commercial exploitation of what is usually quite specific material to our Museum (why we collected it etc).

You might be wondering why we didn’t go with a CC-Plus license?

A CC-Plus license was considered but given the specific nature of the content (text) we felt that this added a layer of unnecessary complexity. We may still, in the future, apply a CC- Plus license to images where it will make more sense given we have a commercial unit actively selling photographic reproductions and handling rights and permissions.

Conyers Tries [and Fails] to Explain His Opposition to Public Science Access

 

By contrast:

[Images: source]

via Huff Post:

John Conyers Tries [and Fails] to Explain His Opposition to Public Science Access
By Michael Eisen, Assoc. Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development, UC Berkeley.
Posted March 9, 2009 | 12:56 AM (EST)

[excerpt]

Lawrence Lessig and I have been writing about the link between publisher contributions to members of the House Judiciary Committee and their support for H.R. 801 -- a bill that would end the newly implemented NIH public access policy that makes all works published as part of NIH-funded research freely available online. On Friday, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) -- lead sponsor of the bill -- responded in a letter on Huffington Post.

The first several paragraphs of Conyers' letter contain an outline of his record as a progressive politician. But no record, no matter how distinguished, is an excuse for introducing an atrocious piece of legislation that sacrifices the public interest to those of a select group of publishing companies.

Conyers would have us believe that it is just a coincidence that his bill would erase a government policy vehemently opposed by publishers who have contributed to his campaigns. But his response to our letter -- like the bill itself -- is taken straight from the publishers' playbook.

Conyers trots out the publishers' two favorite lines of attack against the policy: 1) that the NIH policy is taking a right (in this case a copyright) away from publishers, and 2) that making taxpayer-funded research available to taxpayers will bankrupt publishers and thereby destroy science.

Both arguments are specious and reflect fundamental ignorance about how science and scientific publishing work. The accusation that the policy is bad for science because it will drive publishers out of existence is the more serious one, so I will deal with it first. Here is what Conyers wrote:

... on the narrow merits of the issue, Professor Lessig and proponents of "open access" make a credible argument that requiring open publishing of government-funded research information furthers scientific inquiry. They speak out for important values and I respect their position.

While this approach appears to further and enhance access to scientific works, opponents argue that, in reality, it reverses a long-standing and highly successful copyright policy for federally-funded work and sets a precedent that will have significant negative consequences for scientific research.

These opponents argue that scientific journals expend their own, non-federal resources to manage the peer review process, where experts review academic publications. This process is critical because it provides the quality check against incorrect, reckless, and fraudulent science and furthers the overall quality and vigor of modern scientific debate. Journal publishers organize and pay for peer review with the proceeds they receive from the sale of subscriptions to their journals, thereby adding considerable value to the original manuscripts of research scientists.

The policy Professor Lessig supports, they argue, would limit publishers' ability to charge for subscriptions since the same articles will soon be publicly available for free. If journals begin closing their doors or curtailing peer review, or foist peer review costs on academic authors (who are already pay from their limited budgets printing costs in some cases), the ultimate harm will be to open inquiry and scientific progress may be severe. And the journals most likely to be affected may be non-profit, scientific society based journals. Once again, a policy change slipped through the appropriations process in the dark of night may enhance open access to information, but it may have unintended consequences that are severe. 

Far from being the reckless act Conyers portrays, the NIH policy is actually fairly conservative. It requires that papers that arise from NIH funded research be made freely available, through a website run by the National Library of Medicine, within 12 months of publication -- not immediately. This delay between publication and free public access was put in precisely because it will allow publishers to recoup, and profit from, their investment in publishing by charging for access to the freshest material.

Science moves far too fast for active researchers to afford a year's delay before reading papers in their field. Thus universities and other research institutions have to maintain subscriptions to journals even if their year-old content is freely available. Many journals, realizing that their revenue comes primarily from new material, already make their complete contents freely available online after a year or less. And these journals have not reported a wave of canceled subscriptions -- or any appreciable loss of revenue. So both empirical data and publisher actions refute Conyers' central argument against the NIH public access policy.

Conyers' argument is also clouded by several misconceptions about scientific publishing. He correctly identifies peer review as the most important role of scientific journals. But he is incorrect in his assertion that publishers make a tremendous investment of "their own, non-federal resources" in the process of peer review. While publishers supervise peer review, the process itself is carried out voluntarily by members of the research community. Scientists receive no remuneration whatsoever when they review a paper -- they do it instead because they recognize that peer review is central to the scientific process.

Since the salaries of most American scientists are paid, directly or indirectly, by the US government, the peer review process is actually a massive federal subsidy to publishers, whose very existence is based on the tens of billions of annual taxpayer dollars invested in scientific research. That even after they have had a year to profit from this taxpayer largesse some publishers are still unwilling to grant the public access to copies of papers they paid to produce and review is unconscionable.

And while Representative Conyers' publishing friends may have convinced him that there are severe unintended consequences that will arise from the NIH public access policy, the scientific community -- who has been debating this issue for over a decade -- strongly disagrees. [read on...]

via lessig.org:

A Reply to Congressman Conyers

March 9, 2009 5:32 AM - comments (10)

Mr. Conyers says I "cross the line." He says I label his motivations for introducing this bill as "corrupt," that I accuse him of "shilling," and that I "dismiss" his bill as nothing more than a "money for influence scheme." On the basis of this "one piece of legislation," he says I have waved away "forty years of fighting against special interests." He insists that he has "earned a bit more of the benefit of the doubt" and "that there is far more to the 'open access' story than [my] muckracking tale lets on." (Mike Eisen and my original posts are here and here. My blog post is here.)

First, as to substance: As others have shown without doubt, there is absolutely no "more to the 'open access' story" than my and Mike Eisen's criticism let on. (See the rebuttals especially here and here.) This bill is nothing more than a "publishers' protection act." It is an awful step backwards for science -- as 33 Nobel Prize winners, the current and former head of the NIH, the American Library Association, and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access have all said. And Mr. Conyers knows this. Practically the identical bill was introduced in the last Congress. Mr. Conyers' committee held hearings on that bill. The "open access" community rallied to demonstrate that this publishers' bill was bad for science. Even some of the cosponsors of the bill admitted the bill was flawed. Yet after that full and fair hearing on this flawed bill, like Jason in Friday the 13th, the bill returned -- unchanged, as if nothing in the hundreds of reasons for why this bill was flawed mattered to the sponsors.

[read on...]

New Copyright Sanity

Great article in The Guardian by Cory Doctorow:

Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses
guardian.co.uk,Tuesday January 29 2008

In theory, there's just one set of copyright rules and they apply to everyone, from Sony Pictures to your neighbour's eight-year-old who wants to photocopy his Spider-Man comics and sell them to the other kids.

Regardless of who wants to make a new Spider-Man comic, movie or other derivative work, that person has to hire a lawyer, have that lawyer call up Marvel Comics, set up a call or a face-to-face, negotiate a contract, sign it, pay a fee, and report on their ongoing uses, opening their books for auditing and inspection.

Sony Pictures can do this. It can send lawyers to Marvel and Marvel will send its lawyers back to Sony. Everyone gets to sit at a long table and hammer out the deal, then they issue a press release and go into production.

But little Timmy can't do it. He never could. And yet when you talk to comic book creators, they'll tell you that they got started by drawing copies of other peoples' work.

Musicians start by playing the music they love. Painters start by copying other painters. Filmmakers try to recreate the effects and scenes they've been inspired by in big-screen releases.

Aping each other

This seems pretty basic: even primates watch each other and copy (or, if you will, "ape") each other, so when one monkey figures out how to improve a potato by dipping it in salt water, the whole gang follows suit.

We copy each other to learn and to improve - it's one of the things that makes us human, because we're a lot better at it than chimps.

It's not just Timmy's Spider-Man comic. The babysitter brings over a bag of DVDs to keep the kids quiet; you organise a singalong at the pub; you make a mix tape as part of an awkward teenaged mating ritual: all these uses fall on the wrong side of copyright law unless they are preceded by a complex legal dance of the sort that mere mortals rarely even glimpse, let alone partake of.

Through most of copyright's history, we had two de facto systems: industrial regulation (governing what big companies did with each others' stuff) and folk-copyright (the rules of thumb that most of us understood to be true).

Spider-Man knock-off

This meant that it was OK to photocopy a Dilbert toon for your cubicle wall, make a copy of a record for your pal, or publish your own low-rent Spider-Man knock-off in the school newspaper.

Folk-copyright didn't have a lot of legal authority - it was completely backwards on any number of subjects - but it worked. The likes of Time Warner, Sony, Universal or EMI weren't going to bust you for what you got up to at the OAPs' campfire singalong, and not just because they'd look foolish for doing so.

It just wasn't cost-effective to hunt down all the kids flogging fan-fiction Star Trek episodes in the dealer's rooms of small regional science fiction conventions. Aside from the negative PR, there was the sheer cost of wasting billable lawyer-hours on something that couldn't possibly make you any money.

Then came the internet, which introduced two critical changes: it made it easier for folk-users of copyright to find each other and spread their creations and copies farther than ever, and it made it easier for enforcers to find them and threaten them, especially once tools like the "notice and takedown" regime in the European Union Copyright Directive and the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act came on the scene.

YouTube dance

Now you have billionaire media empires behaving as though parents should get a licence for a Prince song before they upload a YouTube video of their adorable toddler dancing to it.

They are also acting as though fan fiction writers should be applying for a licence too - along with karaoke singers, would-be painters and, yes, the OAP picnickers who've uploaded the shakycam video of last weekend's knees-up in the church basement.

This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it, is it?).

It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not going to stop doing culture.

New regime

We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what's fair and what isn't at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.

A diverse and extremely sensible group of people are doing just this: the Access to Knowledge (A2K) treaty is a proposal from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to set out the rights and responsibilities of archivists, educators and people who provide access to disabled users of information.

The drafting group - which is open to the general public - includes representatives of creators' groups (tellingly, no one from the corporations that buy creators' works have taken part), disabled rights groups, technical standards bodies, civil rights groups, even medical rights groups like Médecins Sans Frontières.

A2K is at the top of the WIPO agenda. It's the first breath of sanity in the copyright debate. Let's hope it's not the last one.

Wendy Seltzer on Mukurtu Contextual Archiving

My earlier post on this development sparked a lively discussion on the icommons list. Here is a great post on the topic by Wendy Seltzer :

reblogged via WendySeltzer.org, 1/11/08:

Mukurtu Contextual Archiving: digital "restrictions" done right

Filed under: culture, commons — wseltzer @ 10:37 am

I'm accustomed to thinking of digital restrictions in the U.S. intellectual property context. We’re told that DRM use restrictions are trade-offs for getting material in digital form, but generally, the trade is a bad one for the public.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive Kimberly Christen helped the Australian Warumungu community in Tennant Creek to construct puts digital restrictions in a very different light. 

As Kim described when I met her at a conference over the summer, the Warumungu have a set of protocols around objects and representations of people that restrict access to physical objects and photographs. Only elders may see or authorize viewing of sacred objects; other objects may be restricted by family or gender. Images of the deceased shouldn't be viewed, and photographs are often physically effaced. When the Warumungu archive objects or images, they want to implement the same sort of restrictions.

They wanted an archive that was built around Warumungu protocols for accessing and distributing materials (in many forms). One of the first mandates was that everyone had to have a password so that they could only see materials that they were meant to see based on their family/country/community status.

Kim's response was to help construct a digital archive with access controls — ACLs based not on copyright but on the various elements of a person's community status. Your identity sets your view-port into the archive; the computer will show only items you have permission to see. The community can thus give objects context in the online archive similar to that which situates them offline. As an object’s status changes, the database can be updated to reflect new rights or restrictions.

Yet the Mukurtu's form of "DRM" is fragile.  Users are encouraged to print images or burn CDs, which have no controls built-in.

People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu's development was that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.

Unlike copyright-DRM systems, which fall back to the most restrictive state when exporting or communicating with "unsigned" devices (such as blocking all copying and breaking or lowering playback resolution on high-definition monitors), this one defaults to granting access.  It's up to the people using the system to determine how new and unknown situations should be handled.

Because the Murkurtu protocol-restrictions support community norms, rather than oppose them, the system can trust its users to take objects with them. If a member of the community chooses to show a picture to someone the machine would not have, his or her interpretation prevails — the machine doesn’t presume to capture or trump the nuance of the social protocol. Social protocols can be reviewed or broken, and so the human choice to comply gives them strength as community ties.

One of the lessons of the recording industry lawsuits and growing shift from DRM'd music is that community norms don't support current copyright law. Rather than fight copyright norms with bad code, we should learn from the Warumungu and build code (and law) to support social practice.

Further good news: Kim says she and Craig Dietrich will be releasing the archive's code as Free Software.

Copy our records for your friends, please!

There (finally) seems to be a growing trend to ditch DRM (Digital "Rights" Management) in favor of new business models and perhaps even new licensing practices in the music industry that are more in tune with the culture and technologies at large (file-sharing, etc.) -- read about Radiohead and their decision to release In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-wish basis -- or free -- download. Of course, these decisions are being initiated by the artists not their labels...

via Henrik Moltke's Blog:

Tone: Please copy my CD (You won' t get in trouble, promise!)

Tuesday, January 15, 2008, posted by Henrik Moltke at 11:03 PM

This is big. On january 21st, the extremely charming Aalborg-based indietronica artist Tone (Sofie Nielsen) releases her new album, "Small Arm of Sea", under a Creative Commons license.

Her label, Urlyd, says Copy our records for your friends, please! and the danish collecting society KODA backs the release, making sure commercial uses are covered by the usual compensation scheme. This is historic, and I am extremely pleased to see this happen for the first time in Denmark.

Oh, and did I mention - Tone's music is GREAT. I had the pleasure of listening to it last summer, live, on a lawn in copenhagen - and the bits I've heard from this release are very very promising. You can count on me at the Copenhagen launch at Gefährlich, Fælledvej 7, 2200 København N, KBH jan 22nd 2008, at 21:00h (map)

Tone website and Myspace

Also, check out this news piece from Tv2 News (in danish)

...

 

more via HM, iCommons list:

I hope to release a statement soon on behalf of CC Denmark, but since both KODA and we were taken by surprise when this surfaced on national TV news yesterday (the formalities on this agreement are not  fully done, but KODA confirms) it' ll be a couple of days. Guess rock n' roll (or in this case indietronica) couldn't wait :)  

PS: They've picked the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Denmark license for the album
...

PRESS RELEASE for immediate release
Wednesday, January 16 2008

DANISH LABEL: PLEASE COPY OUR RECORDS FOR ALL YOUR FRIENDS!

Danish label Urlyd announces the release of the world's first Creative Commons-licensed physical music album, backed by Danish copyright collecting agency KODA. Consumers are free to copy and redistribute the album legally – and are encouraged to do so by the record label. "In the past allowing your fans to share your music meant waving goodbye to an important revenue stream for the artist. URLYD is the first label to offer the artist and fan the best of both worlds" say the founders.

We're all familiar with the classic "All Rights Reserved" notice in books, music and film recordings stating that copying is prohibited. Yet today, sharing a musical work is easier than making a phone call. Illegal filesharing of copyrighted works has been a major concern for record labels and publishers since the advent of Napster. "Music wants to be free", computer-savvy teenagers argue. Now an alternative path that is both legal and free is emerging – from the music industry itself - in the shape of a small Danish independent record label, Urlyd which uses the Creative Commons licensing system. On Monday, January 21, 2008, the labels' first release, Small Arm of Sea by female indietronica singer, songwriter and producer Tone, will be available for purchase in Danish record stores. With her abstracts beats, unique voice and hypnotizing lyrics, Tone makes her debut after little more than a year spent lurking in Denmark's musical underground and on MySpace. Printed on the CDs and vinyls are the words "Copy this album for your friends, please!". We really mean this. On the same day the album will be available for download – freely, at no charge and without Digital Rights Management (DRM) – at the record label's website, urlyd.com.  Anyone can download it for free or pick up the album in-store.

"Music connects directly with feelings, things you experience. We believe music in best when shared and this perfectly natural behavior should be encouraged, not criminalized", say the founders of Urlyd, Christian Villum and Sune Petersen. "We cannot tell music lovers how or whether to support the artist, so we give them the choice between donating online, going to a live performance or purchasing the album in-store where it is sold as a limited edition. We believe this positive approach will benefit both artists and consumers".

Innovative audiovisual album format
Urlyd launches a new audiovisual format combining traditional CD/LP with the DVD format – at regular CD price. In collaboration with Danish VJ and video artist Kristian Ravn-Ellestad, Tone (Sofie Nielsen) unites music and video intro a mesmerizing audiovisual experience – an important element of Tone's live performances.

Creative Commons and KODA
Until recently the use of Creative Commons licenses was incompatible with services provided by collecting societies such as KODA (KODA administers Danish and international copyrights for composers, songwriters and music publishers when their musical works are performed in public). If a singer, musician, publisher, or producer wanted to distribute her work for free online under a Creative Commons license, she was forced to give up the right to receive compensation through royalties collected by the collecting agency. As a consequence, mostly bands without a recording contract and outside of the collective rights management have used the Creative Commons model.    "The novelty here is that our artists can collect commercial royalties through the traditional model while fully using the potential of the internet - giving fans the freedom to do what they ultimately do best."

For more information, contact URLYD
Christian Villum - [email protected] - (+45) 2087 7153 or Skype: christianvillum

(Christian Villum is currently in New York City, available for interviews)

urlyd.com - press photos in high resolution available on urlyd.com/press

For more information about Creative Commons, see http://creativecommons.org