Category Archives: Creative Commons

Aaron Swartz Day 2018, Creative Commons, History, Music, Transcripts, Video

DJ Spooky’s Talk and Performance From the Creative Commons Launch in 2002

TICKETS

Aaron Swartz Day 2018: The Inside Story – Part 1: DJ Spooky At The Creative Commons Launch (2002)

Complete Transcription, Video, and “Trailer” of “Rebirth of a Nation”

DJ Spooky at the Creative Commons Launch, in San Francisco, December 2002. He is holding up an “Ad busters” flag.

From the transcription, DJ Spooky, Creative Commons Launch, 2002:

To make a long story short, when they asked me to do a piece for this, I was thinking about it. I am in the middle of about three different projects. One of them is “Birth of a Nation” I am remixing that. It’s an early D.W. Griffith film. And many copyrighted works that are pre-1920 are still accessible. The film makes kind of a statement about the ownership of culture, and of course, about ownership of memory. Collective memory.

So that’s the project that’s going to be associated with Creative Commons. What I’d like to do is show a snippet of it. I presented an early work in progress of it at the Castro Theater.

Essentially whenever you hear something and the idea is made, it’s always a sense of playing with memory. What I’m fascinated with in the Eldred case, is the idea of who controls memory. How can you recall an image or a sound that’s essentially part of a collective unconscious. How we think of things that just go through your mind every day and how you externalize that. That’s what DJing is about. It’s playfulness. It’s reverence for controlled memory. Reverence for the found object.

So essentially, that’s what DJing has become. It’s almost a basic fabric; part of the the fabric of contemporary culture. So, there’s that kind of thing, which to me it becomes kind of what I like to call 21st century – a new form of folk music or folk culture…

these issues, always migrate. You control one thing, the net will thread its way around it. And so on and so on.

That sense of control, one of the terms Larry always uses a lot, in his great book “The Future of Ideas” – if you haven’t read it yet; you should – is the idea of “creative co-authorship.” Being able to actually reach into a text and reconfigure it. And if there’s something we’ve seen throughout the 21st century, whether you are looking at the outside of things, or the underground or overground, it’s that sense of; whether you are looking at William S. Burroughs or the Jack Kerouac and the beats in the 50s, or the Dada scene in the 20s, or the early cinema people working with that, is that America has always been the place of “the mix.” But somehow, I think in the 19th century we were a net importer of intellectual property, whereas after a certain point we became a net exporter, and that’s when all these kinds of control issues come up.

Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Creative Commons, Internet Archive, Tor Project

OpenArchive: A Mobile Application That Saves To The Internet Archive

A photo of the OpenArchive App on a Nexus 5 phone.Interview with OpenArchive’s Founder, Natalie Cadranel.

OpenArchive is a free, open-source mobile application dedicated to
maintaining the privacy, provenance, and preservation of audiovisual civic media. Conceived during the Arab Spring and Occupy, and currently available in beta for Android, it unites the efforts of Tor, Creative Commons, and the Internet Archive to foster a virtual commons where civil liberties and digital rights are protected.

Founder, Natalie Cadranel, and supporters of the OpenArchive project will be at the San Francisco Hackathon this weekend, ready to collaborate with folks. This is your chance to get your hands on the code and contribute to the Internet Archive’s first secure, open-source mobile application. You can join the beta-testing community here.

Natalie is an archivist, researcher, and independent media advocate.  After finishing her master’s at UC Berkeley’s ISchool, she launched the OpenArchive App. The background and inspiration for the project is highlighted in her journal article Preserving Mobilized Culture. She will be engaging with the community at the San Francisco Aaron Swartz Hackathon, on Saturday from 10am – Noon, and looks forward to sharing it in the venue and spirit it was conceived.

Citizens armed with mobile devices are becoming history’s first
responders, amassing rich, contextualized, and crucial records of
their movements and breaking news. However, most of these recordings presently reside on social media platforms that can chill free speech and are subject to government censorship, privacy breaches, and data loss. While social media is an acceptable distribution platform, it does not provide sufficient privacy protections or archival preservation of this vital media.

OpenArchive’s mission is to preserve, amplify, and route mobile media to user-created collections in an accessible public trust (The Internet Archive and beyond) outside the corporate walled gardens currently dominating the online media ecosystem.

Lisa: So, is the idea that, while you are posting something to Facebook or Twitter, you might also post it to the Internet Archive, for safekeeping, for future generations?

Natalie: Definitely. This application is an alternative to social media and intended to meet the needs of three primary groups:

1) citizen journalists who no longer trust social media and want to share their documentation with organizations that respect their civil liberties and are committed to preservation and contextualization

2) archivists who are looking for effective ways to collect and preserve community media while respecting the media-creators’ intentions, and

3) those interested in using and remixing the media like news outlets, researchers, scholars, and artists.

Lisa: What gave you the idea to build this?

Natalie: As a former journalist for IndyMedia, an archivist, and digital rights activist, I became increasingly concerned about the lifecycle of sensitive mobile media during global uprisings starting in 2010. I interviewed citizen journalists, archivists, and refugees from Iran’s Green Movement about the challenges surrounding their information gathering and distribution processes.

The ethical collection, contextualization, and amplification of citizen media are issues that crystallized during these conversations. Privacy and authentication emerged as critical concerns for people who had very sensitive media on their phones, which often included documentation of human rights abuses. Popular social media platforms were not secure enough to protect users’ identities or conducive for long-term preservation and there were no alternatives at the time.

Lisa: Explain more about this problem of our social media-filled world that could just be deleted, should a corporation, such as Facebook, get bought and disappear someday.

Natalie: Companies are committed to their bottom line, not long-term preservation or user privacy.  While they are currently fantastic distribution platforms, users cannot rely on them to safeguard and preserve their content.

This platform is facilitating a timeline of a “people’s history” that
preserves and respects contributors’ content. Another benefit of
contributing this media to an archive is that it increases the
interoperability of it for future use and makes it widely available without betraying user identities or intentions.

Lisa: So when you upload to the Internet Archive, you are adding it to a personal collection at the Internet Archive, as if you had uploaded through its website?

Natalie: Yes. Exactly.

Lisa: What kinds of things might people be able to help you hack on at the hackathon?

Natalie: We currently need help with some usability and design
refinements. There are open issues on the GitHub site.

 

 

 

Creative Commons, Takepart.com Articles

Creative Commons Licenses Are An Elegant “Hack”

lisareinHow to Celebrate Aaron Swartz’s Legacy? Go to a Hackathon This Weekend

By Lisa Rein, Coordinator of Aaron Swartz Day, for Takepart.com

Remember to RSVP for tonight’s event if you want a spot. I’ve also printed a small amount of limited edition posters. (Many thanks to artist
Ryan Junell!) They will be given away to at least the first 150 people who arrive.

It’s been really hard to watch this story unfold over this last year. At first it seemed like perhaps Aaron’s actions had crossed some kind of legal or ethical boundry. However, now, after more than a year of careful analysis, the evidence suggests that Aaron most likely was not breaking any laws at all. He was just doing something innovative and unexpected. This is one of the main reasons we need to protect young innovators like Aaron from misguided government prosecution in the future.

I was Creative Commons’ first technical architect, a job I got upon meeting law school professor Lawrence Lessig at a conference in Washington D.C. in 2001. When I told him that I was an XML geek who’s obsessed with copyright law, he closed his laptop and said that he had a job for me. When he explained what that entailed—expressing licenses in RSS, a simple XML format usually used for news feed syndication—I said that it couldn’t be done, that it was too simple of a format and copyright law was too complex.

Aaron showed me a way to do it. I knew him from his online activity, so I was sure he was the right person to help me—even when I found out that he was only 15.

His viewpoint towards simplicity influenced our entire online model. We decided to create a simple deed, in non-legalese, saying what a license meant. (Our lawyers still created lengthy legal documents for each license, using existing copyright law, to cover all the legal protections we wished each license to afford.)

Our team created a web site where a person could answer a series of yes or no questions to pick a license. At last, our dance of simplicity was complete. With Aaron’s help, Creative Commons licenses have become a truly elegant hack.