Blogging on the Shoulders of Giants

Creative Commons licenses provide the ability to modify the terms of the copyright on your intellectual property.

Some times Copyright can be too restrictive when you would like to share your work with the world.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Creative Commons licensing, this video helps to explain some of the ways in which it allows someone to publish their work somewhere in between All rights reserved and No rights reserved. This method of copyright allows the creator of the work to decide how it can be used by others, if it can be used commercially, sampled, remixed, or built upon.  By using a Creative Commons License creators are able to maintain some rights while allowing others greater access to the work than the regular Copyright would allow.

FairShare is a free online application that allows you to track the usage of your creative commons licensed intellectual property, making it possible for people all around the world to reuse content while still attributing it back to the original creator.  Currently FairShare works for any text based content that is available to the public via RSS feeds.  This means any blog posts, essays, cookbooks, and anything as long as it is text and available as via RSS.  According to Plagiarism Today's Jonathan Bailey, FairShare Developer Attributor is also gauging interest in a FairShare for photos and videos as a possibility for a future service that would allow users to track the use of images and other media beyond just text content.

FairShare begins by asking you to choose from a list of available Creative Commons Licenses.

• Attribution
• Attribution Non-Commercial
• Attribution No Derivatives
• Attribution Share Alike
• Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
• Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

Once you've registered your blog or other RSS feed, FairShare searches to find instances of your content on other sites, and then displays the different pages that have reused your work and how that reuse of your content compares to your license conditions.  The sites using your content are displayed in your FairShare feed that can then be accessed through a feed reader such as Google Reader, or any number of other RSS readers.

This is an amazing new tool that will allow anyone who is concerned about how their intellectual property is being used to track and influence how that content is being shared.

As we go into the weekend, I leave you with this awesome Video Mashup, "The Mother of all Funk Chords"  that was created entirely from clips available on Youtube.

Creative Commons - Building a Shared Culture

A few weeks ago, the topic of Creative Commons came up during a technology workshop I was leading, and a number of attendees were unaware of it and its potential for rethinking the way we approach the copyright of intellectual property. Recently, Creative Commons released 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.  The video “A Shared Culture” uses interview footage with leading thinkers behind Creative Commons to talk about the organization's mission, but perhaps the most impactful aspect of the video is its incorporation of photographs and music with CC licenses.

Next week at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference in Houston, CAMT's own Brad Stephenson will lead a panel session on the ways in which artists and arts organization may benefit from utilizing Creative Commons licenses in their work.  If you're at the conference, be sure to check it out.

Podcasting: Keep it Legal

I was recently directed to a great guide to ensuring that your podcast is legal. The Podcasting Legal Guide is hosted on the Creative Commons wiki and provides an overview of legal information every good little podcaster should know and understand. The Guide was created by the following parties:

Colette Vogele, Esq. Vogele & Associates http://www.vogelelaw.com/index.html Stanford Center for Internet And Society http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/

Mia Garlick Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ Stanford Center for Internet And Society http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/

The Berkman Center Clinical Program in Cyberlaw http://cyber.harvard.edu/

Also, remember that we have a Podcasting Fundamentals Tutorial available that will teach you the basics of creating and publishing your very own podcast.

Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council Presents an Arts Law Clinic

Are you a Pittsburgh-based artist or arts administrator with a legal question about your work? Take your questions to the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council's Arts Law Clinic on Wednesday, July 30, from 3-6 PM. Attorneys from American Eagle Outfitters will be on hand to answer your arts-related legal questions in the areas including Intellectual Property, Corporate Law, Contract Law and Human Resources.

This clinic, the first in a series to be provided by AE staff, is designed for people who have specific arts law questions. Applications to Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts will be available for those who require ongoing assistance after the clinic.

Wednesday, July 30, 3-6 pm Benedum Center, 7th Floor, 719 Liberty Avenue, Downtown

Presenters: Neil Bulman, Vice President & General Counsel; Rebecca Bibbs, Chief Counsel; Luke Paglia, Associate General Counsel; Kimberly Strohm, Assistant General Counsel; American Eagle Outfitters

To register visit ProArtsTickets online or call 412.394.3353. Registration Fee: $20 ($15 members)

Splog... Sounds Fun, Is Evil

You arts bloggers out there should be on the lookout for a sinister Web prowler known as the "splog," or spam blog.

Splogs automatically lift the content from real blogs to increase their own search engine rankings and generate advertising opportunities.

Wired.com recently release a How-To Wiki for fighting splogs: Read it now.

And Lorelle on WordPress, a blog about blogging, has a post about identifying splogs: Check it out.

Be sure your blog isn't being ripped off by a splog, as it could be detrimental to your site traffic and Google ranking.

Hodgepodge - CTC Vista, Mobile Giving, and Net Neutrality

CTC Vista - The deadline for non-profit organizations to apply for the CTC Vista Project is February 22, 2008.  Essentially, this program places IT savvy Americorps*VISTA members in non-profits around the country to help with their technology planning and needs.  I've had the pleasure of talking to and working with one such VISTA member, Morgan Sully, who is currently contributing his talents to the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC). Mobile Giving - the Mobile Giving Foundation is working with major cell phone carriers in the US to make donations collected by SMS text messaging more feasible and profitable for non-profits.  Read more here. I think larger arts organizations, who might have the resources to mount and support a successful mobile giving campaign, may want to keep an eye on this.

Net Neutrality - Comcast has admitted to purposefully slowing down internet traffic on its network.  For those of you not familiar with net neutrality, you can visit Save the Internet.com or check out the Wikipedia article.  The FCC's investigation into Comcast's network practices is ongoing.

Fair Use and New Media

A new study by the Center for Social Media at American University examines user-generated content with respect to copyright issues. The study was conducted by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property. The study shows that many online videos using copyrighted material could be protected under fair use policies.

Fair use, a hotly debated concept that lacks clear guidelines, allows for the quoting of copyrighted material without asking permission or paying royalties. The study warns that perfectly legal and valuable social commentary might be curbed by major content holders' (Sony, NBC, Viacom, etc.) new practices for controlling piracy.

The Center for Arts Management and Technology will feature an interview with the lead investigators of this study on episode 35 (scheduled for release on Friday, February 8, 2008) of its Technology in the Arts podcast.

Read the full study.

Let's Take a Moment to Mourn DRM

According to an article in Business Week, Sony BMG Music Entertainment will start selling songs without copyright protection sometime this quarter, a move that will essentially kill the much-loathed digital rights management, or DRM. Basically, this means that songs you download through iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, or any other service will be completely unprotected.

Naturally, the catalyst for this move is money. A company would never do anything out of the goodness of its collective corporate heart. Sony and other labels realized that DRM was not only restricting the illegal distribution of music; it was also restricting the LEGAL distribution of music. With the canning of DRM, we should begin to see a plethora of new platforms for online music sales.

The irony in this story? Well, apparently the music industry is frustrated by Apple's pricing structure and wants a larger piece of the pie from music sales. The funny thing is that DRM was really what led to Apple's domination in the legal download market. When online music sales started to take off, the iPod was the dominant MP3 player on the marketplace (and still is, really, though there are more options now), and the only way you could buy and play protected music for the iPod was from Apple.

The only way for the music industry to cut into Apple's iTunes dominance is to offer unrestricted mp3 sales to retailers like Amazon.com, as MP3s can be played on any digital audio device.

What does this mean for the arts community? In my opinion, it won't make it less likely that an orchestra's performance will be shared illegally. However, it does level the playing field. If music executives - the people with money - have to deal with unrestricted audio being freely distributed, perhaps the strategies they devise to curb illegal activity will help to inform the nonprofit world.

In other words, we're all in the same boat, so the rowing should get a little easier for us artists.

Read the full Business Week article.

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