Creative Commons Explained in Video

tola — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 18:53:21 +0000

A new video takes an amusing take on trying to explain Creative Commons licensing.

You have to respect people who put this much effort into making the boring but important topic of licensing interesting. See here for previous videos on the same topic.

Independent artists going big, Creative Commons growing up

tola — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 12:55:52 +0000

Independent artists hit top 40

The BBC report that under new chart rules, Essex rock band Koopa have made chart history by becoming the first unsigned band to land a UK top 40 hit. This is brilliant! It shows what the Internet is doing for Independent artists.

What's really sad however, is that they used their fame in being the first "unsigned" band to get in the charts to... uh... get signed with a record label!

Wonchop hits MTV

On a related note, the animator Ben "Wonchop" Smallman, who first found his home at wonchop.hippygeek.co.uk, has released a music video for Hypocrite by Akira the Don. The video is going to be aired on MTV Europe!

Congratulations Ben! It gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside to know that I made just a small contribution to his success by setting up his first web site, allowing him to share his animations with the world!

Creative Commons 3.0

The Creative Commons 3.0 licenses are now available. It's brilliant to see that they've taken into account the concerns of Debian Legal, which I mentioned to them back in 2004.

However, the "parallel distribution provision" suggested by Debian Legal was not adopted, which may or may not mean that the CC licenses will still not be considered "DFSG free". To be honest, this particular requirement doesn't really bother me. The issue centres on "Technological Protection Measures" or "Digital Rights Management" as the media industry likes to call it. As I see DRM as being flawed by the laws of physics (if it can be perceived, it can be recorded) and economics (this is the information age, not the industrial age) - it doesn't really bother me either way.

Creative Commons make a bit of a jab at Debian Legal by basically claiming that the fact that they're allowing documentation under the GNU Free Documentation License into Debian, means they would now be hypocrites not to allow certain Creative Commons 3.0 licenses.

DRM-free iTunes , EMI++

tola — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:14:18 +0100

Kudos to EMI for their deal with iTunes to offer DRM-free songs on iTunes. It seems Steve Job's has also put his money where his mouth is.

What's amazing is that it's taken this long for the big boys in the music industry to realise that DRM is flawed by the laws of economics and physics. Other companies like eMusic realised this a long time ago.

No matter how they dress it up as a "premium" service, this hopefully signals the end of DRM protected media. RIP DRM.