by Fred -

Free Culture @ NYU Moves On

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!

by Fred -

Spore losing the DRM Fight


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:

by Fred -

Outsource Your Plagiarism with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

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.

by Fred -

Noneck, The Peoples Republic of China and Fair Use

My friend and fellow-NY-techer Noel “Noneck” Hidalgo was deported from China last week. He got rounded up as one of the people documenting the “Free Tibet” protests in Tienanmen square. Here’s the video he shot:

What’s interesting is that Facebook seems to be censoring Noneck’s posts about his deportation — his original status updates were deleted but the comments referencing them stayed. My friend Elizabeth observed that all of Noneck’s Facebook status updates that referenced “deportation” have been changed to

a:6:{i:0;i:672053;i:1;i:672054;i:2;i:672056;
i:3;i:672057;i:4;i:672058;i:5;i:672059;}. 10:08am Co

Anyone familiar with what this could mean? At first I thought it was geo-coordinates, but that doesn’t seem likely as they aren’t recognizable longitude / latitude numbers. Update: Here’s a screenshot:

Olympic Rings from Wikipedia

In other news, the IOC is now using copyright to assert ownership over their trademarked logo. They have sent a take-down notice to YouTube demanding that video of a demonstration in NYC be removed since it uses their logo. YouTube is in the habit of taking any videos down if there’s a copyright claim, so it is not surprising they obliged the IOC. But what’s not clear is why the IOC thinks they have a copyright claim over their logo. Usually the only infringement claims regarding logos are founded on trademark law, not copyright law.

Copyright is designed to restrict use of creative original works by granting a limited monopoly to the works creator. In the United States any work copyrighted prior to 1923 is in the public domain. Even if the Olympic ring logo was copyrighted at the time of its inception (1913), it would now have lapsed into the public domain, so the IOC wouldn’t have a copyright claim to it.

Wikipedia seems to have come to a fairly schizophrenic conclusion about this. On the one hand, it states that the logo is in the public domain. But on the other hand, it says the use of the logo is restricted by the IOC’s manual, which is a whopping 105 pages. Pages 20 and 27 have information about how the logo is used, but it’s not totally clear to me what laws the IOC believes protects their copyright in a logo created prior to 1923. Wikipedia also states that the logo is an insignia and its use is restricted and is independent of any copyright claims. I’ve heard that the IOC will simply refuse to allow a country to bid in the city-selection-process if they feel that their rights are not being protected there.

If anything the logo is protected by trademark law, which is designed to give legal recourse to manufacturers and corporations against counterfeits and confusingly similar marks. Typically use of logos for journalistic purposes or even incidental use by anyone else, is not grounds for claims of trademark infringement. Thus, it makes little sense that a video could infringe on trademarks (so long as they weren’t using an NBC logo in the logo in the corner, etc.).

My feeling is that the IOC likes to squash Tibet-related videos involving the IOC’s logo. Their dubious DMCA take down notice is a clear example of a corporation using copyright to stifle free speech.

Anyway, I am not a lawyer, so this is shouldn’t be construed as anything but a lay opinion.

by Fred -

iSummit 2008

iCommons iSummit 2008 Panoramic

So I figured I’d do a little follow-up on my trip to Sapporo for the iSummit. As with most conferences the action was really in the hallway chats and impromptu meet-ups over dinner and FREE BEER, but there were some highlights in the sessions and  keynotes.

CCi legal day was very productive and had a lot of jurisdictional leads talking and sharing notes. . Prodromos Tsiavos’ presentation about the participation cc-licenses list kind of blew me away, but that’s mostly because I’m a license / list junkie. Giorgos Cheliotis’ graphs about license adoption were sobering as well — license “liberalizing” tends not to happen as much as we might think or hope, but there is a lot of data to parse (he doesn’t, for example, look at individual users’ choices to modify the licenses of their work over time) but he’s on to something good and is really leading the way for commons based research. Later in the conference he announced plans for a “Commons Research” conference in 2009 and it sounded like space and funding had also been secured.

During the iSummit, individual tracks had varying degrees of cohesion. Aside from the keynotes, I was personally only able to attend the DIY Video Session and Open Business. The Video Session started off really great — Mimi Ito (Joi’s fantastic professorial sister) made a solid point that we shouldn’t really confuse DIY Video with Open Video. The desire for definitions ran throughout most of the conference sessions, and the DIY Video track was no exception. But Mimi suggested that we mark a clear boundary between the idea of Open Video (or content for that matter) and DIY Video. Like Free Software, Open means something and implies an orthodoxy, something Mimi thought  might be in conflict with the style of the communities of practice she studies. That is, it is all fine and well to have a defintion of Open Video, but don’t try to apply it directly to DIY Video, which generally involves people who only have basic understandings of the copyright issues implicated by their work. Trying to encourage Vidders or AMVers to use open licenses might be barking up the wrong tree.

Nevertheless, the open video definition evolved into something relatively obvious — created by open tools, released in open formats online in such a way that the source material is reusable and meaningfully licensed for such future use. People seemed to be interested in encouraging video makers to release “b-roll” footage or stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor as much of it goes to waste sitting on hard drives. One of the best features about the Video session was that everyone there had ‘skin in the game’ as producers, directors and so on. This meant that they were able to speak well and cogently about the challenges they face.

Henrik Moltke & Jamie King

Later on Jamie King (Steal this Film I + II) and Henrik Moltke (Good Copy Bad Copy) went back and forth about the economics of releasing work for free and what an ethical ask is — whether Radiohead / GirlTalk / NIN’s approach for selling access to free work was reasonable. Henrik thinks if he made another film he’d be open to something along the lines of what Radiohead did, whereas King thought this was unethical.

What was interesting is that King felt that for the most part, putting any terms on the distribution of a work is unethical. Henrik later showed numbers of income for how GCBC did and the results were a little surprising. Most of his revenue came from traditional licensing deals with larger networks, and very little came from donations. It’s been a long time coming, but I now feel that donations-based revenue streams are a very weak business model and free culture has a lot more potential looking elsewhere for innovative models.

One of the big issues we debated is the “novelty” or “scene” factor inherent to making these films. Even though STF and GCBC did well (though not outstandingly so) they depended on a particular community that had access to BitTorrent and the Pirate Bay. What happens when someone releases a Golf Documentary? Peer distribution and support for non-tech-niche video may be difficult for a long time.

Anyway, later on I visited the Open Business track which promptly broke into two groups. Jon and I were supposed to give a CC+ presentation but that somehow got taken off the docket. Our groups had to answer the question “What is Open Business?”

Almost totally independently both groups to came to the conclusion that the term is nothing more than a marketing ploy (see: Amex Open Business Card) in the vein of “green business.” The overwhelming feeling was that business is business is business and that you cannot survive now without being a little open. Whether this means letting people share your content, access your API, or just understand your finances, openness has become a market constraint and it behooves consumers (users? citizens?) to put even more pressure on businesses to open up.

Here are some random observations that may or may not be interesting:

  • The conference hall was actually really nice and comfortable. If anything it was too much space, but I didn’t get that “worn out” feeling that was happening a lot at previous conferences.
  • The green tea ceremony was awesome.
  • The t-shirt printers (C-Shirt) were awesome too.
  • Paul Keller’s collecting Society keynote was fantastic.
  • Sapporo is ridiculously far away.

More photos are here.

Next I’ll post a story about finding a wonderful Italian restaurant in Sapporo via Chow Hound.

by Fred -

Jeffrey Lewis is a Rip-Off Artist

Or so he admits in his NYTimes column on “Measure for Measure”:

Thus so many of us snobby “real” artists are just cover artists in disguise, taking various devious steps to confuse our listeners into praising our “songwriting.” Perhaps what I do should be called “song-composting,” “song-mulching,” “song-smoothie-ing,” something like that. Or you could just call it “ripping off” and take me to court. I’d probably lose.

Jeff’s column speaks to an inherent tension all artists accept in their own work. Just when they’re about to click “save” or “publish” or “send” we think: Did I really make this? Will people realize that I’m merely doing … ? Or that I’m a poor man’s … ? It’s a wriggling acknowledge in the back of our mind that we’re stealing something, or not attributing properly, or that we might not be as original as everyone thinks we are.

But what I find most interesting about Jeff’s column is his begrudging acceptance that while this is a necessary process all artists endure there’s some legal fear, uncertainty, and doubt inherent to creativity that’s just inevitable and unavoidable. As someone who works for an organization that tries to encourage the very appropriation Jeff sees as essential to creation, it worries me to observe this kind of resignation.

Anyway, here’s Jeff doing his thing: