Why Free Music?
I just received a lovely piano compilation by Michael Crawford, Geometric Visions: The Rough Draft. His music is released under CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported, and enclosed in the CD cover is this beautiful message:
Why Free Music?
I don’t charge money for my music — recordings or scores — and have placed it under the “Free-as-in-Freedom” Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License so more people can get to know my music than would be possible if I sold it, or restricted copying. I actually give a Free compact disc to everyone I meet!
Music makes us human: in its creation, we can laugh, cry, celebrate and mourn. We can love and hate. We can allow our souls to soar. Music speaks to the very core of our sense of Freedom.
Furthermore, setting my music Free is The Right Thing to Do. I am inspired by Richard Stallman and his Free Software movement; my music is “Free” as in “Free Speech” rather than “free beer.” It’s a matter of liberty and not price.
It’s risky. Musicians have to eat. I plan to earn my keep by selling tickets to my shows, as well as T-shirts, posters, and other tokens of our mutual love of music. I hope that by making my music available to you for Free, you can learn to love it as I do, and will be there to attend my performances when the time comes:
I have studied piano intensively for several years, preparing to enroll in music school to study musical composition. I want to write symphonies!
The Recording Industry Association of America has threatened thousands with lawsuits for sharing music over the Internet. But it’s important to understand that, in America anyway, our Founding Fathers created copyright to benefit all of society, not merely copyright holders.
The framers of the US Constitution intended “to promote the progress of science and useful arts” by granting creative people temporary monopolies. But I feel that the power of computers and the Internet to send digital works, created in love, completely and faithfully anywhere
on Earth, at near-zero cost, outweighs by far the benefit to society of work created in order to gain copyright’s monopoly. So enjoy this music, and pass it along to your friends.I love my music, so I set it Free. If music loves me it will return, all the greater for its freedom.
— Why Free Music? by Michael David Crawford is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/
sousveillance: a worm´s eyeview
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us.
– John Berger in About Looking
What do you get when you inverse surveillance? A neologism: sousveillance.
For those of us who don’t speak français as well as we ought, at least we can decipher that sousveillance is not describing the “traditional” perspective of an observer, i.e. someone perched sur (above) looking down. Instead, sousveillance is about the worm’s eye view; it refers to observation rooted from sous (below) looking up. So while sur-veillance is a model for “top-down” observation (think burly authorities monitoring the streets from tinted control rooms), sous-veillance is an inversion of that standard structure, and it happens when the camera is directed away from the streets towards the tower.
The result? The observed become observers.
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? [photo of Bansky graffiti] by nolifebeforecoffee licensed under CC BY 2.0
By some interpretations, sousveillance is “watchful vigilance from underneath.” It has the noble ring of camera-empowered citizens who by virtue of recording images, are able keep the higher-ups in check. The cameras, once distributed into the hands of dutiful civilians, are aimed at under-observed subjects: the police, military, public servants, the milkman, you name it, and any cheating or unlawful actions are brought to light.
Well, does this really happen when any camera carrying kid can record and observe anyone and anything? Are people taking pictures of the police? Geotagging security cameras? Video taping mistreatment by public officials? Yup. It turns out they are. And it turns out to be a really fascinating form of citizen participation.
Anecdote: When in Mumbai, I was told that the city was toughing up on obese policemen. As an incentive for the force to lose weight, the government was offering a cash reward to anyone who submitted a photo of a fat policeman. Motivated to do my part for society, I tried to take a picture of a rather big-boned copper. He won’t let me.
However, with sousveillance today, it’s turning out to be more than just ordinary folks keeping the boys in blue honest. Nowadays sousveillance is ubiquitous disclosure. With constant camera uploads, live streaming, moblogs, tagging, etc., we are living a level of sousveillance that is beyond the structure of bottom –>> up. It’s peer <<–>> peer. That is because with each of noble act of internet collaboration, we are contributing to what Jamais Casico colorfully called the particpatory panopticon. Every time we upload a photo, live blog a conference, tag a mail box, we are adding to these network of peer-over-peer surveillance.
Please don’t get me wrong. All of this online participation is unquestionably useful and fun and enriching to our common digital culture. It is an invaluable way to share and build upon knowledge. No doubt about that. But I can’t help imagine that as we approach total lifecasting, it could be that in the future, municipalities won’t need to install security cameras. All of us will be pitching in already. We’ll be streaming in family picnics and neighborhood snapshots into some grand searchable geotagged database. Then some upright netizens (us again) will comb the results for any noteworthy sightings. And once they’re found, we’ll go report them to the nearest overweight cop.
More interesting links:
Lifecasting on Wikipedia
International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance [Joi Ito was on program committee]
Tracking Transience Hasan M. Elahi’s copious documentation of “20,000 images stretching back three years…posted copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when…the perfect alibi.”
Creative Commons Newsletter #6: Int’l Edition
I’ve been working with CC Philippines and CCHQ’s Alex Roberts to publish a 50-page image-laden, info-rich Creative Commons Newsletter, which highlights the remarkable work carried out over the last year by volunteer CC project leads around the world. It is very much worth its weight in electrons
Cover: “Airborne.” © 2008. Berne Guerrero. Some Rights Reserved. Except when otherwise noted, this work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ph/. This remixed image includes images from glutnix / Brett Taylor. “Cooing Commons” CC BY 2.0 and paparutzi / Christina Rutz. “hot air balloon.” CC BY 2.0.
slide rulz: a librarian’s best friend?
For anyone that mourning the death of slide rulers rules, dry your eyes because the OITP Copyright Slider is alive and on the market!
While the slider vaguely recalls the horrendous Mathland modules I suffered through in Department of Defense Dependents Schools, it does indeed seem like a useful tool for establishing the year in which copyrighted works (in the US) enter the public domain.
I personally am often befuddled by all these term extensions and multiple international harmonization treaties, so this copyright geek tool from the Office for Information Technology Policy might indeed be worth the $5 investment.
This single, sturdy product provides instant access to copyright laws and guidelines. Simply align the arrows by date of publication and determine a work’s copyright status and term. And the “Permission Needed?” box provides a quick answer to this very important question.
a true friend hangs up at 0:59
A friend of mine and I recently had an enlightening conversation about cell phone minutes. And about the fact that each new minute of the conversation is charged at a full minute price, even if you only talked a few seconds over.
This lead us to the inescapable conclusion: a true friend hangs up at 0:59.
[citation needed]: on truth and trust
A clever Wikifitti artist recently hatched a real world mash-up inspired by Wikipedia’s ubiquitous quality-control phrase, [citation needed]. The phrase was printed on stickers and cheeky citizens pasted them next to bold and outrageous statements, particularly in advertisements, in order to demand, albeit mockingly, some reputable and factual evidence for those claims.
Burgers built with what you love [citation needed], photo by mmechtley licensed under CC BY-SA.
The phrase [citation needed] is a brilliant and subversive call for truth in our daily lives. It addresses the civic obligation to back up one’s assertions with legitimate source material. In the context of the stickers, it is an apt real world analogue lifted from Wikipedia’s discussion pages. [citation needed] reminds us that we have the ability, if not the obligation, to participate in our “real” physical space, just as Wikipedians do online, to both support our own statements, and, in turn, challenge any unfounded proclamations we encounter. [citation needed] stickers are an edit function of meatspace.
Beyond its role as tongue-in-cheek protest, [citation needed] encourages us to consider the sources of our information. It is a great epistemological investigation into what we know and how we know it. What statements do we acknowledge, accept, or even perpetuate? Where do our beliefs come from? What information contains “truthiness,” and where does it originate and how is it transformed?
speaktruthiness, image by stricklin_family licensed under CC BY.
As noted by Stephen Colbert, sometimes the easiest way to convince yourself of something, to believe something is true, is to consult a trustworthy, dependable source of information. Like your gut. After all, “That’s where the truth lies.”
On the one hand, [citation needed] does indeed evoking the sometimes circular form of epistemology that is academic citations. It hinges on the notion that if you gather and point to enough respected sources, your assertion is valid. It builds upon the model of a “citation currency,” which gives more merit to frequently cited sources, which in turn helps them gain more merit. In the digital world, this appears as trackbacks and the like. In academic circles, it’s about citation counting in journals. The criticism I see in the citation currency model, however, is that too much weight is giving to the mere number of references, and not to objectivity or thorough review. In this manner, a statement is neither true nor false, but linking makes it so.
The more interesting side of [citation needed] is to me its more subtle challenge: to define where exactly our truth comes from. Where did you get your information? Why do you believe it is accurate? What is the role of trust in acknowledging a source as accurate, as true? How do truth and trust reinforce or undermine each other?
extensive philosophical digression.
Well, there was going to be a rather winded example to illustrate what I consider the necessary interdependency of truth and trust. But, alas, internet attention span is short, and I’m please if you’ve made it this far. Perhaps for another day…
So to conclude abruptly, truth and trust interrelate in that they complement each other by delineating and then anchoring our perception of reality. To accept a statement as true, you commit one of the greatest acts of trust. You indeed say, “Yes, I agree with this statement. Therefore, I align my reality to it, and it in turn shapes my perceptions, my truth.” What can demonstrate the link between truth and trust more than that?
Ok. Nevertheless, regardless of the philosophizing above, there is at least one clear and indisputable lesson we can gather from this post. That is, no matter what you accept as true, never, ever trust advertising. [citation needed]
