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)

Bringing together activists from across a wide spectrum of left-leaning causes, the Free Software Foundation has launched an open letter to the world condemning Microsoft Vista as not only socially irresponsible, but environmentally dangerous. Yes, the FSF and its not-so-militant wing DefectiveByDesign.org recruited a host of environmental organizations including the Friends of the Earth International and the Green Party of the UK because, as the letter puts it:

“… the Green Party and Greenpeace issued warnings about the tremendous threat posed to the environment by the disposable computer mentality promoted in Microsoft’s $500-million Windows Vista marketing campaign. Vista’s steep hardware requirements mean that to use it, most people will have to throw their current computer into a landfill and buy a new one.”

Further, they argue that Microsoft’s DRM associated with Vista blocks your legal rights to make copies of your own media files and publicly available information. This, they suggest, is in direct opposition to the work of grassroots activists and environmental organizations that both depend on the free flow of information and are so often opposed to mechanisms of control like Vista.
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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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In a move that should really have surprised no one, Microsoft made claims this week that its sales of Novell’s SUSE Linux do not constitute acceptance of the Free Software Foundation’s new GNU GPL v3 licensing scheme. The argument goes something like this: coupons for SUSE Linux that Microsoft sells just won’t offer any support for GPL v3 governed code, so the software (and Microsoft) is still covered under the older GPL v2. Which is probably true if Microsoft states as much in its sales contracts, since Linux is itself distributed under the older license and the implications of new code are not entirely clear. Odds are good that there will be alot of busy lawyers over the next several months. In the mean time, Microsoft’s Linux customers appear to be in legal limbo, as it is unclear what happens when they try to get tech support for the Linux servers if they have GPL v3 code, even if the problem is with the GPL v2 parts. So if this affects you, you might want to start talking to your copyright lawyer right about… now. As always, more on this as the story develops.

(via Engadget and Microsoft)

It has been a busy week or so since the launch of iPhone, with apparently every media outlet, corporation, non-profit organization, hacker, nerd and average schmuck on the planet clambering to say something about the device. Coverage has definitely been mixed, particularly in the open source and fair use communities. Some, like the Free Software Foundation and their militant Apple-hating wing Defective By Design (we joke, they’re a fun bunch of guerrilla marketers) have come out firmly against the iPhone on DRM and end-user licensing agreement grounds. The hacker community, on the other hand, has been on the all over the device like ants on a picnic. Apparently highly educated, determined, individualist and extremely willing-to-void-warranties ants, but we stand by our metaphor. Click the read link for all the gory details.

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After a month of comment, the Free Software Foundation has launched the final version of its GNU GPL version 3 license. As we reported a month ago, this new version of the public license is more international and more restrictive with regards to deals like the Microsoft/Novell patent sharing fiasco (but, ironically, allowing that deal). The open source community still seems relatively unsure of whether they like the new document, and both Sun Microsystems and the creator of Linux have expressed misgivings. However, change is inevitable, and it remains to be seen how the new license will affect the open source community once people start actually using it (or refusing to do so). We’ll keep you posted.

(via Wired and the FSF)

The Free Software Foundation has released the fourth version of its GPLv3 license. GPL, for those of you who have been living under a rock for the last decade or so, is the license that lets you download and modify Linux, FireFox and most any other open source software you use without asking permission and (frequently) paying. However, the importance of the actual text tends to be less important to the average user than it is to the developers and programmers that build software based on open source standards.

That said, this draft of GPLv3 does represent some changes from previous versions. First, FSF is still making it very difficult for companies to make “discriminatory” patent deals (like the one Novell did with Microsoft in November 2006), but is making this rule affect deals that occurred after March 28, 2007. So Novell is in the clear-ish, as should be, theoretically, its Linux customers. The FSF also hopes to force Microsoft into distributing software with GPLv3 (specifically, Novell’s SLES GNU/Linux). Kind of sneaky, but as we said before, it at least keeps Novell’s Linux customers free from prosecution.

More important for the general population is that this version has been made much more universal, with U.S.A. specific legal language having been stripped in favor of more universal and specific guidelines for keeping one’s software free.

So far, the public reaction seems somewhat mixed, with many wanting to punish Novell, while at the same time reacting generally positively to the rest of the draft. The FSF is only taking comments on this draft of the license until June 28, so all you open source developers and programmers out there should check it out and post your major gripes, criticisms and/or praises on their website.

(via the FSF)

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)

After one of the shorter debates we’ve seen in recent months over fair use, Viacom has settled with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MoveOn.org, Stanford’s Fair Use Project and Brave New Films (did we miss anyone? no? good.) regarding one or more of their use of footage in a parody film. At the heart of the issue was a short spoof of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report called “Stop the Falsiness” posted on YouTube. The offending film sampled clips of the Report as a commentary on what MoveOn.org and Brave New Films saw as Colbert’s “shrill, partisan anti-bear” extremism. Viacom (the parent company of Comedy Central) originally denied filing the DCMA take-down notice with YouTube to remove the film, which came on the heals with a much larger complaint against Google and YouTube in which Viacom has asked the courts for $1 billion in damages for what it claims are 160,000 “unauthorized clips”.

Viacom, for its part, is playing down the settlement, saying that it is simply applying its rigorous standards for protecting its copyrighted material and this all wouldn’t have happened if someone had just asked them permission first, according to the Associated Press. While we at Copyleft take no official stance on Steven Colbert’s politics, the fact that Viacom has come clean on at least one of its take down attacks. One clip back up on YouTube, 159,999 to go.

(from EFF and AP)