I’m writing an article about musicians who are embracing alternative copyright (Creative Commons, or anything else) in their work. This is not limited to the licensing of their work. I’m also interested in artists who work with Public Domain/CC licensed materials, or who push the limits of fair use. If you ARE these artists, or know any of them, please get in touch with me, on or off list (fred@metalab.unc.edu). I’m putting this piece to print next Friday, so the sooner I can interview you, the better.
Category: Information Commons (Page 23 of 26)
Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other
NOTE TIME CHANGE! NOW at 2:00
Who: librarian.net’s rarin’ librarian Jessamyn West
When: Monday March 21 2:00 (Vernal Equinox)
Where: Freedom Forum Conference Center, 3rd floor, Carroll Hall
What: Postcards from the Other Edge of the Digital Divide. Political Choices and the Information Poor
About the talk: While we read blogs, tag content and swap lifehacks, people in rural areas are still learning to type. Public libraries are making many more technological choices just to provide basic information and Internet resources nowadays, yet the paradigm for learning to work well with technology differs dramatically from learning to work well with books. Jessamyn West will be talking about being a tech-savvy librarian in a profession struggling into the 21st Century.
More about Jessamyn West: Jessamyn West is wrapping up her job as an outreach librarian at a rural public library in Vermont. She has worked in public, special and college libraries and done stints of on-the-fly reference at Burning Man, the WTO and the Democratic National Convention. She has maintained librarian.net, a weblog for radical librarians and other interested parties, since 1999. She is fascinated by the intersection of technology, the public sphere and politics.
That’s us! We are now Laureates! Who knows if we’ll make the next steps, but we’ll find out more as we go to San Francisco on April 3rd. More news as it happens.
Most digital libraries are about digitalized artifacts. Books, images, music, film. Some are about born digital artifacts. Mailing lists, digital documents, annimations, etc.
Monica McCormick notices that the California Digital Library’s Counting California project goes back to what computers used to do — munch and crunch and rearrange numbers. Counting California gives you access to all kinds of databases and spreadsheets that you can download and work with using a variety of applications.
I use a Mac and have for years — and, despite of what this blog may seem to reflect, have been pretty busy lately. Even hiding under my rock hasn’t kept me completely unaware of the stink that has arisen over the Google Autolink feature/bug/spyware that comes with Google Tool bar. Most everyone I know and respect has weighted in on one side or the other. Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, Paul Boutin (in Slate, good article but I donno him), and others dislike AutoLink intensely. Ed Felton isn’t quite sure. Cory Doctorow champions AutoLink.
I use a Mac. I use FireFox. I’ll find out later maybe.
Looking back for new ideas and successes that happened at sunsite/metalab/ibiblio. You can add your own and/or correct me.
1992 – sunsite begun with a goal 10,000 downloads a month; we exceeded that in 2 days before we were officially announced.
Linux Software Archive begun (still ongoing). WebMuseum joined sunsite (still ongoing).
Tim Berners-Lee drops by and we set up a WWW server, one of the first in the US and likely the first outside high energy physics.
1993 – Presidential Archives work with Clinton White House using WAIS.
Linux Documentation Project begun (still on going).
Dr. Fun, first daily cartoon on the Web, begun (still ongoing). CEARCH (Cisco Educational Archive) started to provide information about networking in education.
1994 – WXYC first live 7/24 radio simulcast on the Net (still ongoing).
Virtual Shtetl, the first known Yiddish site on the Web (still ongoing).
Internet Poetry Archive begun with Nobel Prize winner Czslaw Milosz’s contribution in English and in Polish, in audio and in text (still ongoing).
1995 – Henriette’s herbal page is one of the oldest herb sites on the web (still ongoing).
Invited presentation to President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter at The Carter Presidential Library on digital Presidential Library futures.
1996 – “Documenting the American South” begun with first person narratives by enslaved people in the Amercian South (still ongoing).
1997 – Roger McGuinn’s FolkDen joins sunsite and changes to streaming formats for his audio collection (begun in 1995 and still ongoing).
Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy comes to ibiblio. First of dozens of Tibetan-owned sites on ibiblio (still ongoing).
1998 – Nobel prizewinner Aung San Suu Kyi ‘s videotaped address on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (smuggled out from her house in Rangoon where she’d been detained for a decade) made available on sunsite.
Sunsite becomes MetaLab. 50 million files served in the month of October 1998.
1999 – Open Book Project begun (still ongoing).
Presidency Research Group and Pew Charitable Trusts establish web resources to assist the 2001 Presidential transition. (still active whitehousetransition.org) Served two presidential transitions and nine emerging democracies.
2000 – MetaLab becomes ibiblio with large gift from Center for the Public Domain.
Afro-Louisiana Slave Database by Gwendolyn Menlo Hall made available (still ongoing).
2001 – Interactive Native American Archaeology Project, Excavating Occaneechi Town, made available online for the first time (still ongoing).
2002 – VolunteerTibet officially launched its service on December 10th, 2002, commemorating the date His Holiness the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize (still ongoing).
Mental Health Association in Durham County (NC) founded and joins ibiblio (still ongoing).
A Living Stage: Reflections from South Africa Music and storytellers from the 2002 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa.
www+ftp traffic now averages 3 million files/day.
Data flow averages 150 Mbs.
2003 – Khawa Karpo-Tibet Culture Centre (KKTCC), Dharamsala joins ibiblio (still ongoing).
GrokLaw: Digging for truth: the law and the facts with regard to Free and Open Source Software joins ibiblio (still ongoing).
librarian.net: Jessamyn West’s library themed weblog of interest to rarin’ librarians and other information junkies joins ibiblio (still ongoing).
2004 – www+ftp traffic now averages over 10 million files/day. Data flow averages 250 Mbs.
NASA Educational Video added (still ongoing).
WCPE and WXYC become the first simulcast radio stations on Internet2 usingIPv6.
Institute for Museum and Library Services awards ibiblio and Folkstreams.net grant for digitization of documentaries on American folk cultures.
2005 – www+ftp traffic now averages over 13 million files/day.
Data flow averages 350 – 400 Mbs.
Jessamyn West, librarian.net and an official blogger at the Democratic National Convention, will be visiting us on the Vernal Equinox (March 21).
Jessamyn is also the co-editor of Revolting Librarians Redux.
She’ll be talking about the Information Commons, librarian.net, blogging the DemoCon, and whatever else her little ole heart desires.
Public talk at 3:30 3/21.
More on this as the date approaches.
Bret and TJ are looking at adding a regular podcast to the ibiblio blog and to Bret’s irondog chronicles. Supposedly the support is in WP 1.5, but so far it looks like the way to get an enclosure is to create a custom field. Surely there is a better way.
2002 | 2004 | January 2005 | |
www+ftp traffic | 3 million/day | 10+ million/day | 12.5+ million/day |
data online | 1 terabyte | 5 terabytes | 12 terabytes |
www/ftp servers | 1 large server | 8 server array | 30+ in array and in special use |
data flow | 150 Mbs | 250 Mbs | 350 – 400 Mbs |
Larry Lessig writes to many of us and asks us to pass on his call to bring attention to works that are under copyright, but are out of print and whose owners cannot be found. eldred.cc gives the details and gives a call to action.
Lessig’s letter follows:
Sorry about the intrusion, but an important opportunity has come up for you to have a positive impact on the direction of copyright law and I wanted to let you know about it directly.
Thanks to some prodding by a couple of great US Senators, the copyright office is currently considering whether to recommend changes to copyright law that will make it easier and cheaper for you to use “orphaned works” — works that remain under copyright but whose “owner” can’t be found. As many of you have written me, this is a real problem that affects thousands of innovative people every year. But the copyright office still needs some convincing.
To convince them, we need your help. If you have a relevant story, or a perspective that might help the Copyright Office evaluate this issue, I would be grateful if you took just a few minutes to write an email telling them your story. The most valuable submissions will make clear the practical burden the existing system creates. (One of my favorite stories is about a copy-shop’s refusal to enlarge a 60 year old photo from an elementary school year book for a eulogy because the copyright owner couldn’t be found.) Describe instances where you wanted to use a work, but couldn’t find the owner to ask permission. Explain how that impacted your ability to create. Or pass this email on to someone who you know might have a useful story to add.
The Copyright Office is already overworked and understaffed, so I’m not asking that you stuff their inbox with demands for action, or anything like that. They are not Congress. They are not even the FCC. Their role here is as fact-finder, so “just the facts, ma’am.” (Oops, do I need permission to use that?)
Everything you need to do this is online at http://eldred.cc. We’ve explained exactly what the copyright office is asking for, how and where to submit your email, and provided some examples of stories we’ve heard from others about how their creativity has been stalled when they’ve tried to use orphan works. If you have questions, there’s a contact email there for people who can help you out.
In spite of my usual pessimism, I think we have a real opportunity here to move the law in a positive direction. Please help us “promote the Progress of Science” (and that text is in the public domain), by showing the Copyright Office where unnecessary regulation hampers progress.
David Bollier of On the Commons points us to The Economist (February 3, 2004) where an article in Economic Focus “The economics of sharing” gives the nod to Yochai Benkler‘s more complexly argued piece “Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production” [PDF] in the Yale Law Journal (November 2004).
David tells us that the Economist “expresses some surprise at the idea that ‘social sharing’ via electronic networks has become a potent sector of economic production right up there with markets and the state.”
On the Commons is full of pointers to other good readings in open source and open society.
Roger McGuinn writes to say that all of the over 100 songs in his Folk Den are now converted to mp3 format. When he started in November 1995, we had to use .wav and .ra. This really limited the places you could play the songs. But with mp3 you have a lot of flexibility.
Roger began putting up one folk song every month almost 10 years ago and hasn’t stopped yet. There are a lot of nice surprises along the way including a trio of Roger, Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry playing and singing “Sloop John B” November 2004, Frank Hamilton (once of the Weavers) singing with Roger on “Brazos River” January 1999, and a vintage tape of Roger (then Jim) at age 16 playing “John Henry” August 1998.
All the songs are under Creative Commons licenses.
What: Inside Darfur and the Humanitarian Information Centre
When: Tuesday March 1 at 4 pm
Where: Freedom Forum Conference Center, 3rd floor Carroll Hall, UNC
Who: UNC grad and ibiblio alum Mark McCarthy
I had an idea while reading Dave Winer’s 2001 notes about adding a payload to RSS. Podcasting came about because there needed to be a little more than a payload in RSS, but you had to have that first. Now you can hook the RSS payload into a number of enhanced aggregators like ipodderX and much is made seamless.
We saw that BitTorrent has some pretty big missing gaps and aimed to address several by creating Osprey to add permaseed and managable and searchable and distributable metadata to the BitTorrent bag of tricks.
So far so good. Now if the payload for an RSS subscription were to be the the B/T Download link, we’d have a nice B/T software release service (to think of one use). John says that we already “plan to generate several rss feeds in osprey,
the first batch of which will correspond to the 3 blocks on
http://torrent.ibiblio.org.”
Hmmmm.
Mark McCarthy writes that he’ll be in town mid-day Monday February 28 through the evening of Tuesday March 1 on leave from the UN group in Darfur. This means he will not be here during my class time, but we’ll be working on setting up a time when he can give a talk and share his experiences and insight on running an IT operation in the midst of a serious humanitarian crisis.
Watch this space for details of his upcoming visit/talk.
He writes:
I can discuss my role as the Data Coordinator in the Humanitarian Information Center (HIC) for Darfur. We are part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Our role is to fill the information gaps that are present at the early stages of a humanitarian crisis.
I am the number 2 in the office. My manager deals with all the politics, planning, and headaches that I am glad to avoid. I have a team of 3 internationals and 3 national staff. In Darfur, the most immediate need was mapping. We needed to help the humanitarian actors get to the areas of need. They needed to know where the internally displaced persons (IDPs) were and how to reach them. Then we focused on mapping the needs in different regions and who was working to cover those needs.
The stage of the emergency we are at now has us beginning to take a hard look at information gathering and sharing amongst the agencies. Our mapping is pretty complete and we are shifting as appropriate.
Life is not fair — and it wouldn’t take much to make it fairer. Dave Winer invents the code and the idea of adding a payload to RSS. (in 2001)He and Adam Curry shake down the details and promote the idea as podcasting. Today, it’s a front page story on the NYTimes (Saturday below the fold, but who wouldn’t be delighted with that). And the story only mentions Dave and Adam once in two www pages.
Since August, when Adam Curry, a former MTV video jockey, and David Winer, an early Web log writer, developed the podcasting technology, 3,075 podcasts have sprung up around the world, according to a Web site, Ipodder.org, that offers downloads of podcasting software.
The story is about odd content and about “control” neither Adam nor Dave get a quote. The story may want to be an everyman can do radio, but it’s more of the these silly people who can’t work from a script or edit want to do radio about God and cooking. The Times knows podcasting is important, but they give it the pajama treatment (I am writing this in my pajamas).
So, I have to describe ibiblio.org’s past 12 years and its future communicating clearly what the project is designed to do and how it changes and improves people’s lives while “situating the benefit within a specific business or institutional context” in less than 50 words!
Suggestions are welcome.
My first cut is:
ibiblio.org, which began its life as sunsite.unc.edu in 1992, is a contributor-run digital library and archive serving the world. ibiblio began as a way to share and support all kinds of free software, we now host over 1500 non-software related information sharing projects on almost every conceivable subject.
That’s 48 words.
I wrote about Mercora, the P2P radio application, back in September when I got a tour of it during FOO Camp. I was impressed then and remain impressed. They suck in that they don’t support Mac or Linux, but they are good in that they allow real micro-radio stations on the net interationally.
The Wall Street Journal just published an article (subscription only) covering Mercora and other P2P radio offerings. The big news is that some solid agreements have been worked out with the RIAA.
Disclosure: I was introduced to Mercora by James Lussier, who’s Norwest Venture Partners just ponyed up $5 million in new funds and appointed Jim to the Board of Directors of Mercora.
Larry Lessig writes of what he learned from his West Wing experience. Hint: it has to do with connections, Harvard and others. Brief and worth the read.
Recent Comments