openeverything focus + CC Salon

Last night we kicked off the openeverything focus series, a Berliner initiative to explore and promote “openness” in a range of fields and applications. About 30 guests joined us in christening oefb, which willl be held regularly every fourth Thursday of the month in newthinking store.

Jonathan Gray (UK) from the Open Knowledge Foundation wowed us with the depth and breadth of his organization’s work, a non-profit championing open knowledge from “sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata”. OKFN excels in demonstrating how information, when licensed openly, can be remixed in unexpected and stunning ways. My favorite was the sculpture of crime statistics, but Jonathan also mentioned the great visualization work of OKFN board member Hans Rosling and the UK’s impressive neighborhood watch system FixMyStreet, as prime examples of mashable data sets.

OKFN is also generating public domain calculators designed to tell you in a mouse-click the copyright status of a particular work. These calculators are based on simple flow charts provided by legal experts in various jurisdictions. Jonathan told me all they need is a skeleton of the legal structure scribbled on a napkin, and OKFN will build the code around it. So if you’d like to get involved, join the list!

Sebastian Moleski also took the stage to tell us about the unprecedented 100,000 image donation from the German Federal Archive to Wikimedia Commons, which marked the largest contribution to the Commons to date. The photos are truly breathtaking, varying from not-so-ordinary street scenes to famous German sights and figures. All of the photos are high quality and licensed under a CC BY SA 3.0 Germany license.

We summed up the evening by announcing the fusion of oefb and the CC Salon Berlin. As was discussed, a lot of high-profile adopters are opening up their content and platforms, like Al Jazeera, whitehouse.gov, and YouTube. And some in cases, these works have monetized in unprecedented ways; Amazon.com reports that NIN’s Ghosts I-IV beat out chart-toppers Coldplay and Death Cab for Cutie for the  best selling mp3 album in 2008…and you could have downloaded the whole thing for free.

So there was a lot to ponder and a lot to celebrate at the first openeverything focus + CC Salon. Come join us for the next one on March 26 in newthinking store, where we’ll be talking about Open Design.

To conclude, I’d like to give a shoutout to the fabulous people behind openeverything in Berlin; thanks for *everything*! Andrea Goetzke, Martin Schmidt, Christine Kolbe, Linda Löser, Cecilia Palmer, Nicole Ebber, Kai Uhlemeyer, and newthinking for always giving us a place meet!

Image: “Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1987-0704-077, Berlin, 750-Jahr-Feier, Festumzug, Computer“by Thomas Uhlemann, made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License by the Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 183-1987-0704-077

HOPE on a Slippery Slope

The most iconic 2008 U.S. election image is under fire. Shepard Fairey’s Obama “HOPE” poster is getting heat from Associated Press, the news agency that claims Fairey’s work infringes on AP’s copyrights.

For months, the internets have been a-buzz trying to identify the original photograph used in Fairey work. On January 14, netizen investigations led many people to believe that the original photo was taken by Reuters photographer Jim Young, who later admitted he hadn’t even recognized Fairey’s alleged spin-off of his repertoire.

A few days later, however, the dust seemed to settle on the origins of the mystery photo. Flickr user stevesimula, among others, argued to have found a better match: an Associated Press photo from October 2006.

Image origins aside, the HOPE posters have certainly generated a remix phenomenon far beyond Fairey’s initial piece. The portrait, and its many mutations, appeared on t-shirts, banners, screens, and pretty much everywhere else throughout the election. Obama supporters and critics alike found expression in the image, brandishing, commenting, and rallying behind the poster at innumerable occasions. What’s more, in our era’s true participatory fashion, the election saw countless spin-offs of HOPE, including the popular Obamicon.Me, which cleverly renders user-submitted photos into the now classic HOPE design. Some of the more popular images are worth a look:

This whole wave of remixing, kicked off by Fairey’s poster but part of a longer political tradition, is an exciting and positive thing, demonstrating humor and parody and all the other important layers of cultural commentary that we as citizens are by law allowed to enjoy. Fortunately for Fairey, and for all us, really, Stanford’s Fair Use Project will be representing the artist against infringement claims. Let’s *hope*, for the sake of our collective sanity and cultural freedom, that AP sees the light and drops its charges.

Images: “Obama “Hope” source.” by MikeWebkist and “fairey poster photo source?” by stevesimula, both available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. Screenshot from “Obamicon.Me“, created by author for the purpose of commentary under the provisions granted by fair use.