A story told in three videos:

1. “Original” Soulja Boy Video **

2. Students for Free Culture board member and friend Kevin Driscoll teaching ROLFcon nerds how to do SouljaBoy:

3. Kevin responding to his Soulja Boy takedown notice:

It seems that Kevin’s video has become the victim of YouTube’s auto-takedown robots. Good thing he posted it to Blip.tv as well. More info on the ROFLcon blog.

**Soulja Boy’s YouTube channel doesn’t allow me to embed his video into this blog, and despite my halfhearted attempts at circumventing this “feature” I wasn’t able to post it with the others. I can’t believe I’m arguing for the right to embed a video, or even that it would be possible to deny me the right to do so, but this is what happens when we rely on proprietary video codecs like Flash.

After receiving criticism for the privacy-violating “feature” of Google Street View that enabled anyone to easily identify people who happened to be on the street as Google’s car drove by, the search giant started blurring faces.

What is interesting, and what Mako would consider a “Revealing Error“, is when the auto-blur algorithm can not distinguish between an advertisement’s face and a regular human’s face. For the ad, the model has been compensated to have his likeness (and privacy) commercially exploited for the brand being advertised. On the other hand, there is a legal grey-area as to whether Google can do the same for random people on the street, and rather than face more privacy criticism, Google chooses to blur their identities to avoid raising the issue of whether it is their right to do so, at least in America.

So who cares that the advertisement has been modified? The advertiser, probably. If a 2002 case was any indication, advertisers do not like it when their carefully placed and expensive Manhattan advertisements get digitally altered. While the advertisers lost a case against Sony for changing (and charging for) advertisements in the background of Spiderman scenes located in Times Square, its clear that they were expecting their ads to actually show up in whatever work happened to be created in that space. There are interesting copyright implications here, too, as it demonstrates an implicit desire by big media for work like advertising to be reappropriated and recontextualized because it serves the point of getting a name “out there.”

To put my undergraduate philosophy degree to use, I believe these cases bring up deep ethical and ontological questions about the right to control and exhibit realities (Google Street View being one reality, Spiderman’s Time Square being another) as they obtain to the real reality. Is it just the difference between a fiction and a non-fiction reality? I don’t think so, as no one uses Google maps expecting to retrieve information that is fictional. Regardless, expect these kinds of issues to come up more and more frequently as Google increases its resolution and virtual worlds merge closer to real worlds.

I’m no longer using CC’s Attribution ShareAlike for my photos, and have switched to requiring just Attribution when my photos are used. This post will hopefully explain why I switched, and present some ideas and critiques about copyleft with respect to photography.

When I first started my photoblog, in late February of 2005, I was releasing my images under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial so that you could use my photos so long as you gave me attribution and didn’t use them commercially:

After working at CC for the summer as their intern, I began to rethink my reasoning for choosing this license. The free software camp adamantly opposed putting commercial restrictions on software in the name of freedom, and therefore some opposed putting NonCommercial restrictions on free culture. Richard Stallman, the progenitor of free software, didn’t oppose CC’s NonCommercial license, so much as our other licenses for more technical reasons. Since CC has retired our Developing Nations License and Sampling License, it remains to seen whether he’ll endorse CC now.

Anyway, Attribution-ShareAlike, Creative Commons’ copyleft license, was the recommended solution to achieving some of the goals that people thought they wanted with CC’s NonCommercial license. Afraid that someone is going resell remixes of your work? If they have to release those remixes under the same license in which you gave it to them (put simply, the principle of ShareAlike and copyleft), then they’ll have no financial incentive to sell it, because the license will allow sharing and future commercial exploitation by the public. This, the reasoning goes, should make authors feel better about their work being commercially resold if and when that were to happen.

Putting aside questions about commercial advertising exploiting copylefted work, I then switched my photo’s Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Many of my photos have been used by mainstream publications without my permission (that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned) because I’ve put them under a Creative Commons license.

Up until today, I had had most of my photos licensed under this license, and found wonderful uses of them by places like Popular Science, the Wall Street Journal, and of course, Wikipedia. It has since become very clear to me that there is a continuum, and that the more liberally you release a work, the better it can flow into the world.

It is for this reason and the ones below, that I am now removing the “copyleft” requirement of my photos. That is, I am removing the ShareAlike condition on my work, and releasing them under purely Attribution. This means you can mash up my photos, remix them, use them commercially, and do basically whatever you want, with absolutely no obligation above giving me proper attribution and stating that the original was released under a CC Attribution license.

Here are some more thoughts on why copyleft and photography aren’t a great fit:

• Copyleft is difficult to explain for most people unfamiliar with software, much less licensing, and it imposes a further transaction cost on people using my work. When I’m negotiating with people who hire me to take photos for events or portraits, the basic notion of attribution is very easy to explain. However, copyleft takes precious time and negotiating energy to further explain. Since I’d rather have my work used than not, most of the time I just waive ShareAlike anyway. This is the standard complaint levied against copyleft in the decades-old war between permissive licenses and copyleft licenses. Google, for example, chose the permissive Apache license (basically the software equivalent to CC’s Attribution license) for their Android platform because it not only allows the codebase to be open source / free software, but because it encourages other companies to adopt it without further complications to their work flow and software stacks.
• Similarly, most people ignore copyleft when they don’t understand it. I’m torn about whether this should be a distinct point from the one above, but I think there’s a difference between the cost of explaining copyleft, and the cost of using copylefted work. I have found numerous examples of when people use my images, and either don’t want to pay attention to the ShareAlike condition, so they just ignore it, or they don’t understand it in the first place. Besides having to explain copyleft, this forces me to punish the reuser with more work, something I’m not comfortable with doing when I should be the one that is thankful that someone else is reusing my photos.
• The legal ground for what constitutes a “derivative” of a photographic work is less than clear. Therefore, it is unclear when parent works must be released under the ShareAlike license when they use my photo. For example, if someone takes my photo from Flickr (which was under a BY-SA license) and uses it in a mainstream newspaper, are they obligated to release the article that uses the photo under BY-SA or the newspaper or neither? The license states that derivatives must be licensed and shared in the same way, but there is a split circuit decision on whether a derivative is created by re-contextualizing a photo. Wikipedia has a “Reusing Content from Wikipedia” page that basically dodges the question.

  More importantly, its not just the courts who are split on this decision. Some people believe that copylefted material should not place an undue burden on mainstream press when using photos, and others believe that the press shouldn’t be allowed to use work without giving up something a little themselves, namely the exclusive rights monopoly over the encompassing work.

  Needless to say, this is a frustrating fact of copyleft for photography that blurs the lines in a way similar to the NonCommercial issue. Deciding “What is a derivative?” looks, in some cases, as challenging as deciding “What is NonCommercial?“

• Copyleft for photos doesn’t make as much sense as it does for software. Richard Stallman’s idea behind copyleft was to not only protect his work from becoming proprietary (and therefore locking him out of his own work), but to encourage people who built upon it to release those modifications back into the community. Building upon the work of others in photography does not require access to the source, even if you make the crass analogy that negatives (or RAW files) are the photography equivalent of source code, because all you need to learn and build upon photography is visual access to the final works. When I as a photographer, build upon the work of Diane Arbus or Andreas Gursky, my community does not need to have access to my negatives or RAW files to benefit from the changes I made based on an original photographer’s work, all they need is visual access to my end result. And I don’t buy the argument that access to my negatives or RAW files is just as valuable as access to a software application’s source code, because the negatives and RAW files are essentially unedited and unprocessed. I also don’t buy the argument that compiling a program is like exposing a negative. Where a compiled application fundamentally obscures the underlying source, an exposed negative only partially edits the underlying source — you can still learn from the photo and build upon it, and even arguably share it.

So with that, all 3,330 of my flickr photos are now under CC’s Attribution 2.0 license, and all photos on my photoblog are as well. Enjoy!

Someone submitted my FREE BEER photo from Sapporo to the FAIL Blog:

Here is my original from Flickr:

There are a couple of things that are frustrating about this. For one, they didn’t follow my CC license and attribute me and release the modified version under the same license. That’s forgivable because I made the photo basically impossible to find via a text search (so this person could have found it through an intermediary) because I hadn’t tagged it.

Whats more annoying is that the FAIL blog seems to have posted this because people think its an example of Engrish in Japan:

That’s my only theory, really. Poorly chosen Engrish name. Then again, I’m also curious as to what the orange text reads – I can’t quite make it out on my own.

Someone named “Stallman” seems to have attempted to correct all of the failures of communication towards the end of the thread:

To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”

But something tells me its not really RMS, as he doesn’t use a browser, so I don’t think he’s submitting comments on FAIL blog.

This doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence in possibility of a future world in which “free” suddenly means “libre” and not “gratis.”

Creative Commons is in the midst of its 2008 fundraising campaign. Find out how you can support Creative Commons at our support site.

To celebrate the campaign, Creative Commons has released “A Shared Culture,” a short video by renowned filmmaker Jesse Dylan. Known for helming a variety of films, music videos, and the Emmy Award-winning “Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign video collaboration with rapper will.i.am, Dylan created “A Shared Culture” to help spread the word about the Creative Commons mission.

In the video, some of the leading thinkers behind Creative Commons describe how the organization is helping “save the world from failed sharing” through free tools that enable creators to easily make their work available to the public for legal sharing and remix. Dylan puts the Creative Commons system into action by punctuating the interview footage with dozens of photos that have been offered to the public for use under CC licenses. Similarly, he used two CC-licensed instrumental pieces by Nine Inch Nails as the video’s soundtrack music. These tracks, “17 Ghosts II” and “21 Ghosts III,” come from the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV, which was released earlier this year under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

What’s fun about this project is that I used two new sites in the commons space, ImageStamper.com and LegalTorrents.com. Legal Torrents has the original file here, and you can see all the proper attributions for the photos used in video at the bottom of the main page, where each has a link to a permanent time stamp that lives on the ImageStamper site.

Indulge with me in a thought experiment.

Suppose you download thousands of MP3s over filesharing networks, and then, one day, you get nailed with the threat of a lawsuit from the RIAA. The RIAA then asks you to pay a fee to settle it now, so that you don’t face huge infringement costs. You agree to do so, using your credit card, over the phone with an anonymous settlement representative (not actually a lawyer).

How is this that much different from collective licensing like ASCAP? The idea behind collective licensing for file sharing is to enable users to share files freely while paying a fee, similar to how radio stations and restaurants pay a fee to play whatever music they want. The details might get hideously complicated and I have serious reservations about adding more taxes to my ISP connection, but I do believe collective licensing is the only way out of the woods for those in the entertainment industry not interested in real sharing.

Anyway, what is the difference between how the RIAA is implementing their lawsuit campaign, and the way collective licenses might work for file sharing? You’re paying a ‘one-time’ fee to settle your debts to the recording industries for revenues they think you cost them while downloading and sharing files.

There are some differences. For one, the settlement fee the second time around is likely to be a lot higher and perhaps the RIAA won’t even offer you the right to settle the next time they contact you. You would probably end up in court facing massive statutory fines with no option of settlement. Second, the settlement fee is probably a lot higher than what the market would decide on. And finally, the settlement fee is being extracted by threat of impending lawsuit, not subscription obligation.

But the fundamentals of the transaction are very similar: users are already engaging in filesharing, the RIAA threatens with large fines if they don’t pay a fee, and then, when they do pay the fee, they’re off the hook for the time being.

The RIAA, knowingly or not, has effectively painted their way into a corner supporting collective licensing as the future of their business model. Whether or not the campaign is profitable is a matter of debate, but with fewer than 1% of RIAA victims choosing to fight the lawsuits, the math is in their favor: 30,000 lawsuits multiplied by a conservative $2,500 per settlement garners the RIAA at least $75,000,000 over the course of their anti-filesharing inquisition. While the payouts do not exactly make up for lost revenue from the death of their cash cow, and granted the settlements have been totally ineffective stopping file sharing, someone at the RIAA must have done the math and realized the settlements are now a full fledged revenue stream.

So while the RIAA may huff and puff and say the lawsuits are about punishing people for ‘making available’ (an specious legal argument to begin with) and exposing the rampant theft of our cultural heritage perpetrated by America’s youth, we should really see them for what they are: an adaptation by a business to secure a new source of revenue.

The pity it in all is that the RIAA is ruining lives by doing so. If they were to just embrace collective licensing as a legitimate form of revenue, there would be a lot less friction in the marketplace for music and filesharing.

*Note that this post doesn’t take into account the differences between collective licensing and voluntary collective licensing, and over simplifies the whole topic quite a bit, and for that, please accept my apologies.

I came across a new ‘industry initiative’ called Arts + Labs to campaign for content filtering on the Free Culture discuss list and Wired Blog. While not traditional astroturf (the fraudulent masking of corporate agenda as a grassroots movement), because they admit that its funded by the telecoms, the campaign language and aesthetic insipidly borrows quite a lot from the Web 2.0, and free culture movements. Can you tell which of the following statements are from Arts + Labs and which are not:

The internet has become our community, our marketplace, our digital neighborhood. The internet connects us to our friends, to culture, to entertainment, to ideas, to the entire world. But the internet doesn’t just bring the world to us; it also brings each of us to the world.

OR

As creators and as consumers, each of us should be free to participate and prosper online.

Sorry, trick question — both sections are from Arts + Labs.

Anyway, what is more curious is that “The ArtLab” blogroll links to sites like TechCrunch, The Register, IP Democracy, Wired Threat Level, etc.

These are all blogs that have covered (and in some cases skewered) the efforts of telecom to filter the internet at the cost of network neutrality for the sake of appeasing big content. This is a brazen and sad attempt at blog diplomacy. It’s as if DailyKos added InstaPundit to their blogroll in some effort to be increase bipartisan communication on the blogs. While commendable on some level, does anyone really think that the shills who are writing the blog are going to even mention what GigaOM has to say about Network Neutrality?

I’m not saying someone paid by the telecoms can’t write blog posts linking to pro-network neutrality articles. That might even be a good thing. But what I am saying is that statements like this:

Arts+Labs is a coalition of Creative and Technology communities committed to a better, safer internet that works for both artists and consumers. At The ArtLab, we offer our information and ideas; our contribution to the conversation about the future of the internet.

come off as wholly disingenuous because Arts+Labs really represents the interests of a few corporations looking to end network neutrality. This is where the campaign is essentially astroturf and engaging in the kind of “fair and balanced” rhetoric that FOX News and Bill O’Reilly have pioneered. By putting links to blogs that sometimes carry critical (but not too critical — no links to Slashdot or BoingBoing, mind you) opinions of telecoms they’re trying give the false impression that they are interested in discussing things and engaging within a community.

They are not.

Viacom, NBC Universal, AT&T, Microsoft, Songwriters Guild of America, Cisco (don’t forget Cisco also makes and sells the routers to China that help block ‘dissidents’ from accessing western media) don’t want to talk about network neutrality with you. They want to end network neutrality.

They don’t want to think of you as the creators or the editors or the musicians. No, Viacom, NBC Universal, AT&T, Microsoft, Songwriters Guild of America, Cisco, think of you as the consumers. Why else would they have a page of “creativity” and only link to content friendly and corporately funded startups sites like NBC, MTV, and Comedy Central?

Why don’t they have Wikipedia, YouTube, or Flickr on there?

Its because those sites wouldn’t have existed in their view of the Internet. In Arts + Labs’ universe there is no amateur as creating professional media. There is no free culture, no free exchange of content, and no network neutrality. Their Internet is a Premium Content Destination® where we stayas consumers and they stay as the producers.

Notice, also, how in the above screen shot how they distinguish between “Creativity Online” and “Premium Sites.” This is a common tactic when arguing against network neutrality. Content company incumbents like to argue that abolishing network neutrality will encourage development of “premium” content channels on the Internet. That sounds good, right?

But what happens when Wikipedia gets classified as “premium” content and local ISPs, users, and most destructively, the Wikimedia Foundation, all have to start paying premium rates to reach their audience? That’s not so good. Wikipedia runs on a shoe string and would likely not be able to raise the exorbitant fees that big telecom would ravage them with. Who knows, maybe it would be time for Encarta to make a comeback. Surely, Microsoft has enough money to pay AT&T to push Wikipedia off the net.

So until Art + Labs adds Wikipedia (or some other actual source of creativity online) to their list of “Creativity Online” I’m classifying this campaign as 100% astroturf.

(photo of Astroturf by Scott Ogle under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution License)

I started Free Culture @ NYU as an undergraduate during my senior year at NYU. I had actually wanted to start a similar club in high school. I was so engrossed in the 2600 DeCSS case at the time that I thought I needed a venue to discuss such things, and philosophy (my father’s focus as an academic) seemed like a decent front to talk about the 1st amendment and computer code. I actually ended up attending the 2600 appeals trial at the Southern District Court of New York, and getting interviewed by the Wall Street Journal:

I should have actually started Free Culture @ WHS, but things in the copyright activist world were just beginning, so starting the Philosophy Club had to do.

When I got to college, as an April fools prank in 2004, my Junior year, I made this poster:

The RIAA’s lawsuits against music fans had just began and the idea was to prank people into believing that they were coming to campus in order to offer immunity. Students could attend and ‘turn in’ any media with MP3s and receive immunity against copyright infringement suits. The conceit of the prank was that MP3s are not like physical objects, say guns, and even if you turn in a CD with MP3s on it, you could have just as easily made backups  beforehand. This was meant to demonstrate a) that the RIAA was stupid and didn’t understand this fact and b) that this problem was an intractable fact about digital media.

After staying up all night plastering the posters on every floor of my dorm at NYU my roommate and I crashed. The following day we didn’t hear or notice much, we asked our roommates what they thought about them and they told us what they thought — having not been in on the joke, their responses were quite colorful.

But a funny thing happened.

The following week, and the week after that I noticed people in my dorm’s court yard still talking. It had resonated to a point where it was actually a topic of conversation. I wasn’t sure if my peers had actually understood it as a prank or not, but one thing was clear, they were annoyed with the RIAA and thought the fake campaign was stupid.

At this point I realized that this subject was inherently political and that I should do what a lot of college students do at my age, and radicalize. I would start a club, a political club. I could do what people did on campuses in the 60s and 70s and protest and stuff.

Around that time I finished my copy of ‘Free Culture‘ by my future boss Lawrence Lessig and also read the NYTimes article about the Swarthmore students who had sued Diebold over a copyright battle, and who were also planning on starting a movement based on what they had learnt about the copyright world.

We’d name the movement after Lessig’s book — the free culture movement. We’d focus on liberating culture from the strongholds of a maximalist and litigious copyright regime designed only to protect corporate revenue and stifle innovative evolutions of culture.

Over the summer of 2004 I joined the newly launched and soon to be legendary fc-discuss list and got in contact with Nelson as well as many other budding activists. By the Fall of 2004 I was in contact with a friend of Nelson’s, Inga, who would be a freshman at NYU that Fall, and we decided to start Free Culture @ NYU. (Inga is now at Harvard Law school).

We protested DRM with Richard Stallman, ran Creative Commons art shows, screened public domain films, held conferences, invited speakers, organized film remix contests, got fired from our jobs for civil disobedience, organized panels with some of the best people in our community, and generally had a great time educating and building out the free culture community on campus and in downtown NYC.

Now, Free Culture @ NYU is no longer my project, and there are no original members left. But this is how it should be.

The club is now lead by Parker, John, Max, Aditi, Wesley, and Gabe. These are photos from their most recent OSA club fest tabling event:

They’re also having a club meeting on Monday at 8pm, so please visit the site and attend if you’re interested.

Reaching sustainability of a project through people you know, trust and like, is the really the ultimate goal of a project like this, and now that I’ve moved on from NYU, I couldn’t be happier leaving it in their very competent and energized hands.

Good luck guys!

Spore, the long awaited evolved version of Sim City by game genius Will Wright has a DRM problem. As of this post, there are 14 “1 Star” reviews versus six 4 and 5 star reviews, by people who said that they won’t buy it (which admittedly isn’t quite the same as a review of the game itself) because it has DRM:

Thus Spore now has an average of 2-stars on Amazon. The game as gotten good but not excellent reviews, so this is surely of concern for the makers as people will probably take the Amazon rating seriously and might not buy.

Is this a concerted campaign to shame EA (Spore’s publisher/distributor) or a distributed disorganized consumer reaction against DRM itself? I tried Googling for “Spore DRM campaign” thinking I’d find a Defective By Design campaign about it, but couldn’t find anything.

The moment concentrated actions like protests lead to dis-organized collective action and rebellion en masse is very exciting. If these are actual consumers acting in concert but without prompting from a centrally organized campaign then it means that our efforts at establishing DRM as an anti-feature have been successful.

UPDATE: BoingBoing and Kotaku both linked here (thanks) and Spore now has 144 “1-star” reviews, but is #1 in games:

I saw “Amazing but True Cat Stories” on BoingBoing the other day and it inspired me to come up with some Amazon Mechanical Turk Human Intelligence Tasks. I’m looking into actually implementing some right now and will probably start running them soon, so I’ll write about them here when I have them up.

The Mechanical Turk is a web service run by Amazon that allows you to pay hundreds, if not thousands of people to perform menial tasks that computers are not capable of. It takes it name from the true Mechanical Turk, a hoax from the 18th century that could play (and beat) people at chess, when in fact the pieces were being ingeniously controlled by a midget. But I digress.

I’ve been investigating the HITs that are already on the site. I had looked through a lot a number of months ago, but they have only gotten better.

This one struck me* as interesting:

Rewrite 5 Sentences

Please re-write the below sentences 3 times each.

You should always start and end every meal with a flourish, and a delectable dessert is sure to make a splash. Now is the time to enjoy those tempting food baskets you have on hand, to sweeten up your dessert offerings. Try using the goodies from a gourmet gift basket.

A fruit tart with a tender, buttery crust is a perfect complement to imported chocolates from a chocolate gift basket. Whichever gift baskets you decide to use, your picnic will sure to be delicious.

A good rule of thumb is to start your meal with a bang and give it an impressive finish. A sumptuous gift basket dessert is just the finishing touch that your picnic needs. Gourmet gift baskets are filled with decadent goodies that you can pull out and use anytime.

Tasty treats like imported chocolate gift baskets and fruit baskets, with a flaky, buttery crust will satisfy the love of your life when you bring them for the dessert of your next picnic. Whatever the menu you ultimately decide on, your picnic will be the most delicious part of your day!

Otherwise, you can have fresh fruits, salted nuts and cheese after the meal. Nachos and crackers dipped in sweet sauce, likewise, complements your wine. Wine baskets or Fruit baskets tend to be the most impressionable!

Please upload .txt file when submitting.

The writer, by accepting this HIT agrees to extend an exclusive unlimited term license to the purchaser to use the original content developed. Once the article is accepted by the purchaser and paid for, the content written for this HIT may not be sold, traded or given away to any other individual or company, nor used for any other article writing assignment elsewhere. Moreover, the writer agrees that the purchaser has full rights to amend and modify the content at will and to use it wherever the purchaser deems fit.

At $3.50 this was the most expensive HIT on the site as of this writing. Why would anyone need such mundane cooking copy rewritten?

I’m certain its because someone is rewriting a cook book to resell commercially. But why is it just the text about a recipe and not the recipe itself? Recipes can not be copyrighted, so the actual ingredients and list of steps to make a dish can be freely copied.

Thessaly and I have discovered many, if not all of our favorite chef‘s recipes are available on line gratis from various spammy recipe sites. This is convenient when we’re cooking at friends or away from home and don’t have access to her cookbooks but know the recipe we want to cook.

The part of a recipe that isn’t copyable, however, is the text surrounding it or introducing it, or anything minimally creative about the recipe. This means that if Alice muses about how she came to discover the fact that grapefruit and avocado (can you tell I love this salad?) make a great combination when paired with a white wine vinaigrette and curly endive, you can’t copy that part.

It’s pretty clear that this HIT is designed to route around this “feature” of copyright law by hiring a massive horde of re-writers to do the dirty and boring work of plagiarism. I tried Googling some of the original phrases supplied by the HIT’s creator but nothing came up. Let me know if you recognize any — I’d be curious to discover the source material.

So just remember, the next time you want to blatantly plagiarize a book (or a college essay if you’re so inclined) you can hire hundreds of anonymous web users to do it for you.

*UPDATE: Monday AM my example HIT no long seems active. I’m going to search a bit more for similar ones and try to get a screen shot but I’m sure more will crop up soon.