The UK has launched an initiative to release materials from the archives of the BBC, Channel 4, the Open University, and the British Film Institute in a form of the Creative Commons. The Creative Archive Licence will make materials available to the British public to remix and use in noncommercial projects. The terms of the Creative Archive Licence are no commercial, share alike, give credit, no endorsement, UK only. Within those stipulations, materials including 100 hours of of radio and television from the BBC and silent comedy and drama from BFI are being released for the British public to “Find it, Rip it, Mix it and Share it.” Although it’s a shame that the Creative Archive Licence will be UK only, the release of these and other materials should be a boon to artists and educators. It also makes a great deal of sense to me that publicly funded work should be made available for reuse by the public that funded it. One can only imagine the benefits that artists and educators would reap should NPR and PBS launch a similar initiative.
Debunking Urban Legends
I ran across the amusing Urban Legends Reference Pages from a link at Lawmeme about an attempt by Corbis to track down somebody who mashed together a photo of John Kerry and Jane Fonda, in violation of copyright. Corbis includes watermarks in their images to try and derail this sort of prankster malfeasance.
Imitation a Form of Flattery?
One of my students ran across the site of a teacher in Texas who's using the same weblog review assignment as the one my new media students did last semeseter. I don't really mind — it's a good assignment, and I like for all of us academics to share and share alike. The only trouble is she copied it verbatim and left my students' names next to the sites they reviewed (as if they were the authors of those sites) — which might make for some awkard explaining to her students when they get around to doing the assignments. A little bit of closer reading might have been appropriate 
At Law Meme, James Grimmelman has written an excellent article in the wake of the State of Play conference: “Free as in Gaming?.” Grimmelman’s article follows up (extensively) on a question posed by Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler at the conclusion of the conference, after Second Life had announced its decision to allow players to retain copyright to in-game intellectual properties:
“You’re creating this world in which people come to play and be creative, and yet you’ve given this world a system that has been extensively criticized as limiting creativity. Haven’t you just given them a new set of hurdles to creativity?”
This post originally published on Grand Text Auto
The Market in Unrealestate
On his weblog, Julian Dibbell chronicles his life as a seller of virtual goods and properties from Ultima Online. He claims that “On April 15, 2004, I will truthfully report to the IRS that my primary source of income is the sale of imaginary goods — and that I earn more from it, on a monthly basis, than I have ever earned as a professional writer.” Dibbell is a the author of My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World, and has been writing essays on digital culture since 1993, several of which are available on his site.
Also on this topic, an abstract of the talk Dibbell presented last week at the State of Play conference in New York: Owned!: Intellectual Property in the Age of Dupers, Gold Farmers, eBayers, and Other Enemies of the Virtual State and another, more substantial piece, Virtual Property by Dan Hunter and F. Gregory Lastowka.
Lawmeme reports that Second Life, an avatar game discussed in recent posts, has made a decision to let player-characters keep the intellectual property rights they create. Players, for instance, have the right to sell movie rights for their character. See Participant Content under the Second Life terms of service agreement. Of course, the player also grants Second Life nonexclusive rights to the content, but nevertheless, this is a fascinating decision with regard to virtual property. I think it also has some interesting implications regarding the idea that games can be a creative environment, in which players actually make new “works” that could have some economic value.
This post was originally published on Grand Text Auto.
McDonald's sues the dictionary
Claiming tradmark abuse, McDonald's is trying to censor the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which includes “McJob” in the latest edition of the dictionary, where the term is defined as “low paying and dead-end work.”
Leave Nick's Mind Alone!
Nick, in response to the recent Copyright and the Network Computer: A Stakeholder's Congress conference, asks the DRM-obsessed of the world to Stop Handcuffing My Mind. Nick has a good point — most digital rights managements schemes are “code” for “we're working with congress to make your computer less useful than it is today. Darn it!” Which reminds me of a recent comment on GTA, by an unemployed recording industry middle-manager (I assume). Nick describes a world in which the general purpose computer might become the restricted-use computer, via legislation (set your time machines several weeks into the future).
Just to followup on my earlier post on intellectual property: The EFF has launched a campaign to encourage the WIPO to reconsider its opposition to open source and collaborative approaches (actually, even worse, its US Patent and Trade Office-led refusal to even discuss open source and collaborative models). If you disagree with this decision, you can express your opinion by sending a letter to the USPTO through the EFF.
This post originally published on Grand Text Auto.
I recently read Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, a properly alarmist text about the Internet, the law, copyright, and the slow steady creep towards a future in which every text, film, song, picture, and thought that runs across your consciousness is licensed property, in which the spectrum is owned by highest bidder, and in which innovation is patented to such an extent that new innovation becomes nearly impossible.
Lessig is a constitutional scholar, a Stanford law professor who is scared shitless about the poorly-thought controls currently and relentlessly being placed on our intellectual lives by “the extremists in power.” Lessig was the chief architect of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the legal action which attempted to overturn the Copyright Term Extension Act, and the chair of The Creative Commons Project. I won’t give Lessig’s book a proper review in this forum, but I would like to highlight a few points, and suggest that, as new media creators, many Grand Text Auto participants and readers might want to take some proactive steps contra the current intellectual property paradigm.
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Creative Commons
I just added a creative commons license symbol to this site, inspired by Jamie Boyle's superb presentation at the e(X)literature conference. CC licenses are legal documents that permit content creators to state explicitly how they are willing to let others use their content. The license I chose permits noncommercial use with attribution and allows derivative works. In other words, anything I write on this site may be used by anyone for any noncommercial purpose provided there is some form of attribution. No one need ask for my permission to do so.
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