iSummit Call for Abstracts Due

04-25-2008 | 10:57 AM EST | 0 Comments

The First Interdisciplinary Research Workshop on Free Culture will be hosted at the fourth annual iSummit Conference in Sapporo, Japan from July 29 - August 1, 2008. The workshop will allow scholars of Free Culture from diverse backgrounds to present their research to a multidisciplinary audience of academic peers and practitioners. The workshop will focus on "the presentation and critique of work in progress" and will include "both academic researchers and practitioners, so as to produce a holistic perspective on the future of a more participative, open and free information society." If you're interested in presenting, then you have until tomorrow, April 26, to submit your abstract. For more information about the submission process, please visit http://icommonssummit.org/programme/call-for-submissions/research-submissions.html. If you're interested in attending but not presenting, check out the iSummit website. Hope to see you there!

Giving Gates the Benefit of Doubt

04-23-2008 | 08:25 PM EST | 0 Comments

Okay, I'm going to give Bill Gates the benefit of the doubt on this one. Wired reported today that while speaking in Seattle on April 21 at the Institute for Systems Biology, Gates was asked if he would consider "open source uses" in health research when he begins full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on July 1 of this year. Wired's account of his response follows:

"There's free software and then there's open source," he [Gates] suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, "there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

Open source, he said, creates a license "so that nobody can ever improve the software," he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we're aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: "I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them," he said, adding with a shrug: "That may seem radical."

Wired, a lot of bloggers and countless other people have already jumped on this very strange take on open source software hindering software improvement. In general, it's understood that because the source code, the underlying guts of the software, are available for anyone to see and use, anybody can improve the software. What I think is really interesting about Gates' answer, though, is not so much his jab at open source but his conflation of "free" (as in cost) versus "free" (as in liberty) versus "open source" (as in something you can't charge money for).

At this point in time, I would have thought that there's already an overabundance of material explaining that the "free" in free/open source software released under the GPL refers to liberty — the ability for others to modify and share the software's source code. It has nothing do with cost. In fact, the Free Software Foundation covers this quite nicely in their FAQ, " Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?". But, apparently some people have missed this discussion.

Ultimately, my real problem here is that if someone as smart as Bill Gates can't even understand that technical innovations, great software, human liberty, and getting paid aren't mutually exclusive, what hope do the rest of us poor schmucks have?

"Free" As In "Pay for It Later"

04-22-2008 | 12:16 AM EST | 0 Comments

Sony BMG has recently announced that it will become the second major record label to sign onto cell phone maker Nokia's "Comes With Music" handsets. First announced back in December of 2007, Comes With Music will give Nokia brand cell phone owners twelve months of access to Universal and Sony BMG's music libraries at no additional cost beyond the phone/service plan. It's also rumored that EMI will soon be adding its musical catalog to the mix. For their part, the record companies will receive a portion of the sales of each handset. (While the exact details of that relationship are still somewhat unclear, it looks like the agreement might be something like $5 per month per device sold.) For Nokia's part, they'll of course be hoping to retain their position as the market leading handset maker (currently with about a 40% share of the global handset market). And, of course, because the "free" access stops after twelves months, Nokia will be betting that people won't want the music to stop, so they'll purchase a new handset each year. And what about the consumers? Nokia says that you'll be able keep the music on your phone that you downloaded during the first twelve months. But, what they're not drawing a great deal of attention to is the PlaysForSure DRM that your songs will be captured in. According to Engadget back in December, this means that your music will be "incompatible with both Zunes and iPods. Burning a CD will require an 'upgrade purchase' for the tracks you received for free." This is a great example of where, for the consumer, free doesn't really mean free as in speech or as in beer!

Organization Spotlight: Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO)

04-21-2008 | 09:50 PM EST | 0 Comments

The Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO), whose membership "includes 140 large and mid-size companies and over 550 small businesses, universities, inventors, authors, executives, law firms and attorneys," is a trade association that seeks to advocate for intellectual property owners. IPO's work includes making the concerns of patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secrets owners known to the United States Congress, Copyright Office, Patent and Trademark Office, Trade Representative and other agencies. IPO also publishes a daily email, IPO DAILY NEWS^TM, to its members; sponsors meetings, educational and networking events; and seeks to "increase public awareness on the importance of technology and patents to U.S. industry and the national economy." IPO states that its "members file about 30 percent of the patent applications that are filed at the USPTO by U.S. nationals." For more information on this organization, its membership directory, calendar of events, or amicus briefs it has entered into courts on its membership's behalf, please visit their website at http://www.ipo.org/.

NOTE: All quotes above were taken directly from IPO's "About IPO" webpage at http://www.ipo.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=About_IPO.

Reduce, Reuse, Remix

04-19-2008 | 12:21 AM EST | 1 Comments

For artists to be commercially successful (or even just share their work with others at all), they need to make sure that people know about what they're doing. And while getting the word out can be relatively easy with the backing of a major corporate distributor, trying to promote yourself when your skills are really in content creation rather than promotion can be pretty tough. But, for as long as people have been making anything, they've also been finding lots of creative ways to promote themselves and their work. From musicians selling their music out of the backs of their cars (a method that fueled a lot of the early days of hip hop sales) to painters and photographers exhibiting their work in local festivals and gallery walks, artists find a way.

One relatively new way that musicians in particular have been really connecting with and growing their audiences is through remixing. Rather than trying to keep a tight reign on how their music is spread, shared, and related to, some musicians have discovered that by relaxing usage rights, their popularity has soared. Essentially, the musicians release their music into the public and they encourage people to create remixes of their songs (whether by adding to or subtracting from the song, re-arranging the music, or in any other way changing what the original artist created) and then re-releasing the mix back into the public. Some musicians openly allow the remixers to sell, distribute, and otherwise do whatever they want with the mixes while other artists put some stipulations on it — such as, the remixer can sell his or her mix so long as credit is given to the original artist and the remixer allows other people to remix the mix.

So far, the results seem pretty positive really helping some artists gather a bigger following and even sell more of their music. I'd bet there are even people out there who have learned that while they're maybe not so great at creating songs from scratch themselves, they're pretty good at making remixes that other people really want to hear. And that just means that for every song out there that allows remixing, there's an exponential chance for something to be created that someone else will enjoy.

If you want to find out more about the legal aspect of remixing, you should check out the various licenses offered by Creative Commons, because these are the rules that most music remixing seems to follow right now. And, if you want to try your hand at remixing, check out the websites Splice and Jamglue. They both have great, free online tools to get started remixing. It's a lot of fun and, honestly, anybody can do it!

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