Ming the Mechanic
The NewsLog of Flemming Funch
Friday, March 25, 2005day link 
 Escaping the Country of the Blind
picture Wade Roush made some thorough Notes from a very nice speech by Lawrence Lessig last week. About how important it is that we're free to remix media, as we always could before the digital age. You know, you could buy a magazine, cut out the pictures and make a collage and show it to people. And you can make a funny hat out of the rest of the magaine. Now, with the internet and lots of new tools, people are doing all sorts of creative things that reuse content in interesting ways. But there are strong forces that are trying to make all of that illegal. If they have their way, you can only use media they've sold you in the exact way they had in mind. You know, you can only watch this DVD twice, and only on your own TV. Or you can only watch this broadcast program on Thursdays and you can't fastforward over the commercials. No getting creative and using it differently.
"We’ve set up a system of regulation so that these forms of expression are illegal. So we can’t teach them to our kids--that would be schools promoting piracy. We can’t promote them with our businesses. All we can do is focus on how to punish those who write with the ordinary tools of the 21st century.

Existing law conflicts with the technology of the 21st century and that gives us a choice: Reform the law or reform the technology. Since 1998 there has been a clear choice—it was made for us by our own village doctors. They assembled in Congress and what they have collectively given us as an answer to this choice--reforming the law or reforming the technology--is to utter the words of HG Wells: To cure them, all we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation, namely to remove the irritant body, the machines, your technology. They want to blind us. To conform us to 18th century law."
He's making a very appropriate reference to an HG Wells story about somebody arriving in a city of blind people, and not quite behaving "right" according to their norms before they got the bright idea of removing what was wrong with him - his eyes.
[ | 2005-03-25 15:35 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 Creative Commons Media
picture Yahoo has a new search feature, for materials with Creative Commons licenses. I.e. typically stuff you can use freely if you just mention where they come from, or maybe that you can only use non-commercially.

Wait, how do they know? I search for my own blog, and it came up with a page here where indeed I mentioned that I consider what I write here to be in the public domain. Really, what I should do should be to put a proper CC image and link here that says so. I've so far labeled it as Primarily Public Domain which really fits best. But I like the idea that a formalized piece of xml will be allow various services to automatically find content with a certain license or dedication. So, I've added the public domain code from CC in my sidebar now.

Anyway, there's a growing number of ways one can search for liberally licensed content.

America Free TV gives you online streaming video programming like that.

OurMedia offers free hosting for CC licensed media.

Of course Creative Commons itself has a search.

Flickr lets you search for pictures based on their licenses. Flickr who btw was bought by Yahoo this week, who promises to let them keep doing what they're doing.

I'm sure there are others.
[ | 2005-03-25 17:00 | 3 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 Banksy
picture Banksy is a renegade artist who sneaks his culture jamming socially critical pictures into places they don't belong, like big museums. To see how long they get to stay before anybody notices. He's getting a lot of publicity recently, after managing to hang his pictures in four prestigious New York Museums. Other pictures he leaves as graffiti on walls, or, eh, on cows. I don't know about the cow graffiti, but the cows probably didn't mind overly much.
[ | 2005-03-25 18:03 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >

Main Page: ming.tv