Open Source/ Commons in multimedia

Lately I encountered more and new Open Source Developments. And I am quite happy about this, though I do see some difficulties as well.

That one can publish photos, texts and presentations under an open license is obvious. That one want to share free website templates (1) I can (kind of) grasp. Though via Legaltorrent (2) one can download many different things, many times under the creative commons licenses.


Open Source Games(3)?

As far as it comes to games I kind of understand the cooperative part. Many (good) games are available online as free/ share ware or nowadays under a public license published. Everyone can join, contribute, share to e.g. TuxKart. Most of the games are made public under GPL or at least a very open license, no attribution is required.

Open Source Films

"The 100 Second Film Festival is “a collection of short videos presented to an audience in person or through the medium of cable television or the Internet” with the only requirements being that the films are 100 seconds long and are released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. This allows the film festivals - the screenings are decentralized - to pool past submissions as well as new ones for their lineup. Whoever is curating a specific festival can put together the lineup in any fashion they see fit, although ideally, each screening will contain at least a few works produced by the local audience where the screening is held.

This year’s call for entries was just announced, with the deadline to submit a short extended to Dec 15th, 2008."

SOURCE: Cameron Parkins, http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/9521, last viewed: 29th september 2008

Open Source Music?

Creative Commons licensed music is just great. I download and I know that I am totally allowed to do this, and I know that I can legally use, and maybe even remix and re-use the music for a powerpoint/ Simpress presentation.

One of the most succesfull musician publishing under the CC-licences is "Genreal Fuzz" with its fifth release “Soulful Filling”, it has released 5 albums already under the CC-licence. Note that Creative Commons is only existing for 5,5 years now. The most re-mixed musician is "Brad Sucks", on his site he also offers all of his sources for free.


This can't work!

Additional to this CC-licensed music possibility, there an initiative of which I think: THIS CAN'T WORK! Freesound.org is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Sounds, you may think? Yes, simply noises: police cars, barking dog, scratch on a glass table, rain, dub, etc.

But how does one attribute when you use such a work?

I mean, try to attribute when you have mixed 20 sounds in a sampling mixer. If sounds, and that could be the sound of a falling paper cup, are editted, mixed, remixed how can you still recognize and distinguish them. So far as I know sampling is "legally" tolerated because of this reason.

Imagine that you are at a live remixed party, does the dj name attribute all sample providers? Does the dj wrote our every single sound and published the names of the original authors on his homepage? How does this work?


Open Design

Another Initiative I'll leave the questions to you: Open Design: Industrial Design under CC (4)!

Please give comments how YOU think CC works out for industrial design!

“Flat Knot - stainless” by Ronen KadushinCreative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. available under a

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(1) Flickr.com or Youthphotos, Open Source Templates: http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/
Youtube videos like Lawrence Lessigs are on Creative Commons licenses: http://www.youtube.com/user/lessig
(2) http://beta.legaltorrents.com/
(3) Free culture game: http://www.molleindustria.org/freeculturegame
(4) http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/9285

(Re-)create the internet use

Since I am inspired and always on the hunt for new initiatives, and now I have realised that sometimes I have thought about some new potential initiative or issue, made presentations and see others get inspired by it and I re-inspire myself by that as well.


Creative Commons

I have very big interest in Creative Commons, founded by Lawrence Lessig. I have seen many potential variations and use of works of art published: literature, music, samples, and even games and film-samples. Because I have tried to use the creative commons community in all of my work I am well aware that there are a lot of people who share the same principle: share, and not in a way that communism does, but in a creative and attributive way.

I will keep on fighting for the use of creative commons licensed materials as well that I will promote to share as well, it is just a fair thing to do, since you'll get exposure anyway if you share. Maybe this interest could result in a master thesis, will start writing in January 2009. At next Thursday I'll have a meeting with a good friend of mine who is interested in this concept from a legal point of view and he asked me to brief him :-) .

I thank, Dr. Cathrina Maracke, Director of CREATIVE COMMONS INTERNATIONAL for the letter of recommendation I got for my succesful job application.


Human Rights - Search Engines/ Internet

Another example is the presentation I have done in Thessaloniki, Greece (1). The Lecture I have given, Lessig-style, was about two different sides on the freedom of expression: the constitutor and the receptor. How people mainly in the Europe and America use the internet on a daily base, in daily life and how we get our (anti-) information... Via the internet!

I concluded with a statement:"This presentation could contribute to a worlds right on free or easy available internet access. Barriers shall not be there and not prevent people from writing, expressing, telling about their worlds, experiences and therefore contribute to a vibrant intercultural internet culture"

InternetForEveryone.org


A few weeks ago I experienced that there is a new American Nationwide initiative about exactly this. It is called internetforeveryone.org. The Introduction of the Project (2) was done by a panel of some prominent individuals and representatives of some major organisations.


Key words:
1. Access
2. Choice
3. Openness
4. Innovation


Speaker at the Launch:

• Josh Silver, Free Press
• Brad Burnham, Union Square Ventures
• Robin Chase, Meadow Networks, Zipcar
• Jonathan Adelstein, FCC commissioner
• Michael Winship, WGA-East
• Jonathan Zittrain, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• Tim Wu, Columbia Law School
• Vint Cerf, Google (this title is not new (3))
  
• Larry Lessig, Stanford Law School
• David All, TechRepublican.comVan Jones, Green For All
  

Mission of GOOGLE


...to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.


So in general I am very big fan of this whole concept of promoting the internet use, the creativity, the lawfully re-creation & attribution. It is actually the basis, that one will be acknowledged for what one does: Everyone, including e.g. photographer, I want my work to be known in the world, on the internet, via google and maybe even the constitution (4) can create such an exposure.
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(1) D.J.R. Sterenborg, Search Engines & Human Rights, a closer connection to a better world, available for download at: www.djrsterenborg.eu, published April 2007, under the Creative Commons licence: BY-NC-ND and please SA - Attribution: state my name and homepage clear, Non-Commercial Use, Derivative Works are not permitted and please Share under the same license Alike.
(2) InternetforEveryone.org Launch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=726e5Nhh-Mk
(3) Vincent Cerf, RFC 3271, http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3271.html published April 2002.
(4) Like I have mentioned: internet is important and I might do some Master thesis research to support the thought that "a free or easy available internet access" is a constitutional human right.

Web 2.0 generate Kids Creativity

Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends in the use of internet technology and web design that aim to enhance Creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web.(1)

And it is great, it generates creativity! It is also unpreditable! We will not know what the Web 2.0 will bring, and exactly that is so exciting. Unpredictability (anti-information) is something that we can call creativity, something that we need according to the theory of anti-information.


But do not forget
"Creativity: we get educated out of it!"

It is Something that we have as children, though the entire educational system, anywhere in the world will teach you how to shut up and prepare yourself for an academic career. Sir Ken Robinson has given marvelous lectures about this, which I truely Recommend: click on photo or here.

I claim that the Web 2.0 with all its User Generated Content, end-users possibilities to upload something to 'their' page, is a perfect tool to regain that creativity at a very young age. I mean kids today do watch YouTube-Videos, they might have access to open source software like GIMP, a Flickr account, their own blog, website, use RSS-Feeds, MySpace, Facebook, etc..

All of what they can find online is open to them, they easily know how to download, to share with others (email, msn, skype, blogs, rss-feeds, online recommendation pages), to adept it and find a platform to publish it again. They are creating their own world, recommendation and they have the possibilities to find out what they like. They can become fans of films, music, poetry, news sites...

They discover, create and share!

And I know many people are critical about Google, but google acknowledge this as well:
Doodle: Kids competition
www.google.com/educators

See, all what google does is to provide tools and stimulate creativity and through the Teacher Academy influence the creativity with the digital world that children can create.


This posts theme does not sufficiently explain my vision on Google nor its tools. As well as that I did not mention anything about the current copyright system in the web 2.0 digital world. This might be something that I'll discuss later.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 (as viewed on 9th September 2008)

Trademark Protection unregistered TMs

Today, or actually tonight I was approached at a little party I attended in Brussels about the issue of (trademark) protection of unregistered trademarks.

The issue was about that JADE, European Confederation of Junior Enterprises, has members in 15 countries in Europe. JADEs members encounter a quality check before they can call themselves a "Junior Enterprise". So a "Junior Enterprise" will do as much as possible to be granted with this status, since that means a lot to potential client and thus to them. It is like a quality trademark for clients.

The Executive board, or more specifically the Vice President of JADE International, Florent Barel, asked me some questions if they can prevent someone using the term "Junior Enterprises" although they did not came through the quality check or not even related to JADE at all...

My answer was that here you have the typical "grey" and disputable area of intellectual property law.

Known is that if you have a strong and well-known brand within your area of operation (which is a definition issue) one can get trademark protection if one can proof that the brand is used and known continuously and seriously to the public. So, does a trademark registration really give you some benefits? Or can you just leave the registration and trust on the strong brand name?

First: a "fake-Junior Enterprise" offers similar products or services, it COULD infringe the trademark. Yes, it could! Law can also be flexible and unclear, you might take a risk if you do not register.

Second: Consider that if one applies for a Trademark in all the 15 countries JADE is established, you'll spend quite some money on annual fees in each different country, possible (in court) protection, research and hunting for potential infringers.

Third: What benefits, except for evidence and proof does one has for registration of a trademark, considering all the costs possibly related to each bureaucratic national system?

I will be in contact with JADE in the upcoming weeks about what their real questions are, I will keep you informed!

Disclaimer, these are non-legal advices and I will not accept any claims based on this information. I am just a law student and starting blogger who is wondering about certain practical issues in the area of IP Law protection.

Content Blog?

Dear Readers,

The first post is about the intentions I have with this blog.

I might tell something about how I walked my imaginary dog today and that it started to fight with the neighbours cat. Though it is more appropriate for me to talk about something more academic.

So, I intend to write about aspects that concerns me: IT, Intellectual Property related, sometimes with a human rights hint, maybe making some current news related articles will be blogged here too. We'll see!

It might be that through writing out some issues here that I might come up with some nice Master thesis subjects. Since that I am still at the university some questions will be directly from one of my Master courses that I'll follow next semester at the Erasmus University Rotterdam:

• Minor: Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Law
• Law & Informatics
  
• Computer Law in an international perspective
  
• Law & Technology
• Advanced Public International law
• Law of the EU: the internal Market

I hope that you'll subscribe to my blog and give me feedback once in a while about some content I wrote. The content will be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Derivative licence. Be sure to refer to my blog and homepage: www.djrsterenborg.eu .