creative commons through the looking glass

As many people have so adeptly informed me I was indeed on the first episode of the new ABC2 television program The Hack Half Hour. Loosely modeled on Triple J 's Hack radio program (with pictures of course :p), it's a current affairs program which gets a group of young Australians together to talk about different issues. The first episode, on which I was a guest, was called MyFace, and explored the issues of privacy facing social networks, their owners and their users. Check it out below:

Date: Monday, 22 September 2008, 8.30pm, ABC2
Guest: Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia and Research Assistant, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

Will you end up regretting what you reveal about yourself online? We explore why we post so much personal information in blogs, vlogs and on social networking pages and we'll look at what the repercussions and advantages might be for our relationships and career. Will all this information become part of a permanent record? How can it be accessed and used in the future? We hear from Australia's number one YouTube vlogger Natalie Tran (aka community channel), triple j film critic Marc Fennell, a self proclaimed trash-bag from the Gold Coast and even a sneaky hacker and we explore it all through the eyes of 16 year old Sophie.


About Hack Half Hour

The Hack Half Hour is a show that gets everyone talking about the issues that impact on your life. In a comfortable setting like your own local you can be part of the conversation and hear views that explore opinions and experiences you may not have heard or seen before. This is a show about your world and the things around you, so be a part of the conversation!

The Hack Half Hour website will allow you to have your voice. Send us an email, an sms, leave comments on the issues discussed or send us a video. Which ever way you choose - we want to hear from you. Check out our contribute page to see the topics coming up for discussion and have your say.

Each week we'll be posting the latest episode online so if you miss an episode you can always come back and view it on the website, download it to your computer or even take it away on your portable media player.

This is a presentation I gave to Masters students at QUT yesterday.

Date: Wednesday, 17 September 2008
Audience: Masters students at Queensland University of Technology
Presenter: Elliott Bledsoe, Project Officer, Creative Commons Australia and Research Assistant, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

A presentation by Elliott Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia detailing 7 case studies of CC use within the Creative Industries. In particular it focuses on new business models emerging which utilise CC for noncommercial licensing while still finding a way to make a buck.



To view Elliott Bledsoe's presenter notes, please download the PowerPoint presentation from Scribd. If you are linking to or referencing this talk, please link to the official page for this lecture on the Creative Commons Australia site.

As part of the iSummit 2008 Andrew Garton and Pavel Anotov (pictured left) were charged with documenting the proceedings. They embarked on two documenting projects: one was a strategic priority scoping paper for the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) titled Growing the Global Information Commons and a micro-documentary by the Association for Progressive Communications (apc.au) titled Nailing the Commons. I was lucky enough to be interviewed for the projects. Below is a transcript of the conversation we had (be aware that this was Day 3 of conference events for me, so I am not terribly eloquent):

APC: What is your understanding of the commons?

Elliott Bledsoe: Well, the commons comes in many forms. There are many different ideas of what a commons is. Some people think it's anything that's publicly available with limited or no restriction on it. So, everything from public transport to public libraries, that kind of thing.

There's also the legal concept of the commons which is everything that's... where copyright has expired therefore there's no rights attached to that work any more. There's a number of different ways of identifying the commons.

APC: What does the commons personally mean to you?

Elliott Bledsoe: To me the commons is about being able to reuse content and knowing that you can. It's about certainty. And that, you know, things should be available to use... and increasingly that gets narrowed down. So, my idea of commons is that it's actually much smaller and no where near as robust as it should be, but that we can fix that.

APC: Do you see a dividing line between the information and knowledge commons?

Elliott Bledsoe: Not really. One's the natural prior point to the other. Information is the foundation of knowledge. The way that we understand and draw together a number of ideas or pieces of information becomes a foundation of knowledge. How we put that information and how we make sense of that... So, no... I think that one requires the other. That knowledge without information is not particularly useful, but that where knowledge... you know, there's a lot of really good, solid information in it makes it much stronger.

APC: What are the main commons issues?

Elliott Bledsoe: Well, the problem is everybody wants to stake a claim. The user wants to be able to do what they like with stuff that they see and stuff that's around them. The creators want to take advantage of the commons space for promotion, for potential revenue gain and for sharing, for just making their stuff available.
The lawyers want to carve it up, dissect it and state where it starts and where it finishes and what the boundaries are and how you get in... The democracy organisations and large institutions want to fill this space with certain kinds of information on an idea that's going to help further democracy as a concept.
There's a number of different groups who are all trying to stake a claim in this idea of an information commons.

APC: And out of this which one [issue] would you prioritise?

Elliott Bledsoe: I think access is the biggest thing we should be looking at. And if that means that the lawyers need to be what they can to make more stuff available and the democracy organisations need to be doing what they can to make the space as linguistically accessible and, as technologically accessible as they can to the widest number of people... you know, I think that all these kinds of organisations have a very important role to play in making sure that this space is wider, stronger, more robust and is accessible to the widest number of people possible.

APC: Is it the same set of priority issues in the developing world?

Elliott Bledsoe: Well, to be honest I think the developing world isn't quite sure what to make of it. You know, they're already got a barrier. Both, in a lot of cases linguistically, but also technologically and economically and so, as a result there's this very western idea that we need to get the information commons out there for the developing world without giving much of an opportunity for the developing world to stake their claim.

What is and what should the commons look like for developing nations. We very rarely pose that question to developing nations themselves. You know, I do think that it's very important that they have an active and participatory role in the development of the commons, but I'm not quite sure we're there yet.

APC: So you think that if we lift this barrier then its the danger that instead of developing their own commons they will have easy access to ours, to the northern commons?

Elliott Bledsoe: Exactly. If we don't diversify the commons and if we don't input multiple ways of understanding and drawing meaning out of work, which is things like language and file formats... trying to make as diverse space as we can we run the problem of cultural imperialism. We just dump all of our ideas into this space and say, there you go we've given it to you, you know, take what you want from it, without any real analysis of what affect that has on culture and learning and understanding for people who are outside of that context.

It seems like just yesterday I was writing about creative commons and photography. But it wasn't, it was actually the day before yesterday! And now I have another update.

Image identification and visual search software company Idée have added to their Idée Multicolr Search on the exciting Idée Labs, expanding the Flickr Set to include 10 million Creative Commons images from Flickr's 'Interestingness' collection.

I know there has been much discussion about the terms and conditions for Chrome. For the record I was totally aware of them. But I think that some of it was a bit fear-mongering and misrepresentative and some of it was out right wrong. As far as I am concerned a clause like the old clause 11 (extracted below) was nothing out of the ordinary really:

BSD License
Copyright © 2008, The Chromium Authors
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
  
• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
  
• Neither the name of the Google Inc. nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
  

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Choosing an Attribution Licence in the 'Photo Usage & Licensing' section of the Picasa Web Albums settings.

(Thanks to Fred Beneson. I found out about this via his post on the CC weblog)

Have Google released the prince charming of web browsers? As I am sure most of you are already aware Chrome, Google's open source web browser was released 2 September (USA date). It is BETA right now but like most Google things when released it is pretty stable.


UPDATE: I have heard reports from friends that certain features were buggy today. The big one, downloads were not working at all.

Here's some of my thoughts:

You've gone incognito. Pages you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window.

I saw this morning the Google Chrome comic this morning and my interest in the Chrome project has peaked. An interesting marketing campaign by Google:

UPDATE: The comic page has been updated to include a licence notification.