Copyleft: the magazine

Borrowing aspects of Hungry Hungry Hippos, Creative Commons’ promotional materials and McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, the Free Culture Game by La Molleindustria has succeeded in doing what few have tried: simplifying the complexities of the debate over intellectual “property” into a flash video game. Your job is simple, just use the blue copyleft symbol to feed an information hungry populous fresh ideas from the Commons before the evil “Vectorialists” pull those ideas into the Market and rot the brains of your little people with copyrighted, commoditized ideas (turning them into grey automatons, it seems). Overall, the game play is relatively simple and keeps you on your toes, particularly for a game that’s so obviously an attempt to push ideology.

The Free Culture Game: only you can save the world from mind-numbing copyrighted content.

While we here at Copyleft: the magazine are all for attempting to change people’s perceptions of intellectual “property”, it is clear that the Free Culture Game has its downsides. It clearly promotes the theory of the Commons, that the free flow of ideas will create more innovation while commodification of information stifles creativity. However, the game definitely simplifies the idea of copyright, stigmatizing a concept which is, essentially, the basis upon which Creative Commons licenses are based. Without copyright law, there is no way to enforce Creative Commons licensing (or GPL, GNU or any other of the myriad free licensing regimes out there right now). So, while we applaud the effort as another fine attempt at cultural hacking (and a well crafted time waster), we wish there was a better attempt to push people toward more solid information, instead of putting something out there that, if the RIAA had done it, we would have immediately labeled propaganda.

(via Boing Boing)

There appears to be a new standard emerging for tagging documents and extracting real information that is usable across different platforms. The World Wide Web Consortium has put forth GRDDL (and yes, it is pronounced “griddle”) as a sort of Rosetta Stone for translating all the different flavors of microformats, XML, RDA, HTML and many other acronyms as well.

Interestingly, Creative Commons has jumped on this little innovation as a new means of embedding copyright information in a widely readable fashion. Could this be the end of all those little links to CC’s licenses? We doubt it. But GRDDL does hold the potential to allow for searching via embedded tags, allowing the possibility of searching the entire web for Creative Commons licensed content (instead of having to search tags on every individual site). The implications are intriguing, but we’ll have to see how quickly this new scheme is adopted.

(via Creative Commons and W3C)

Street Tech recently reported that members of the iCommons project are planning on launching a service for creating and remixing t-shirt designs using Creative Commons licenses. The idea came out of a fund raising project by Creative Commons Japan that proved so popular, they decided to launch the app, called Ximer, for general consumption. No official date has been set for C-Shirts or Ximer to go live, but they are hoping for sometime before the end of 2007.

While the Web 2.0-iness of it all seems promising, Ximer’s biggest plus will be its Creative Commons licensing offerings. In the t-shirt biz, there are plenty of competitors out there, including giants CafePress and Good Storm, that have well established designers and client bases (as well as production and shipping facilities). So, as cool as the idea of easily sampled and remixed t-shirts is, the implementation and physical product quality (i.e. the print quality on said t-shirts) will have to be stellar in order for this to be a successful commercial venture.

However, the Ximer concept could be revolutionary in that it moves beyond licensing and remixing of non-physical media (text, images, music and video) and toward the ability to offer actual physical items that are remixable using the copyleft standard Creative Commons license.

(via Street Tech and iCommons)
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Citing very low demand and conflicts with other projects, Creative Commons has decided to retire its DevNations and Sampling licenses. Lawrence Lessig, who wrote the notice of the change on CC’s website, specifically mentioned that the DevNations licenses, which gave individuals in developing nations a wider range of copying and usage rights than those in the developed world, lacked provisions for worldwide redistribution. So, someone in Uganda (for example) could use a work however they wanted, but someone in Spain had no copying options, which is antithetical the Creative Commons mission. Creative Commons is looking into incorporating an option into its standard licenses that allows users to offer wider developing world freedoms while maintaining a basic, world-wide copying provision.

The aforementioned Sampling license had the same problem: anyone could use the licensed work, but there was no way of sharing it once you did. Again, kindof goes against the whole “Free Culture” thing they’ve got going, so they scrapped it. Which, we might add, we at Copyleft: the magazine applaud. Creative Commons has done really well in offering a range of licensing options to allow creative types (like yours truly) to offer our work freely to the world. However, licenses that allow an individual to copy a work, but not do anything with it (share it) don’t make sense.

All of you out there who had DevNations and Sampling licenses, never fear. The links to your current licenses will remain live, CC just won’t be offering any more.

(via Creative Common’s Blog)