Creative Commons

Today I had a long and very positive meeting about software patents and the NZ Patents Bill with Commerce Committee chairperson, Labour party's Lianne Dalziel, as well as Drupal-peers Dave Lane and Jonathan Hunt.  Dalziel, Christchurch East MP, was well-informed about the Patents Bill, the Ministry of Economic Development's Patent Review and the insufficient attention paid to software patents (thanks to our emails and exchange of documents beforehand).  She was not so well-informed about software patents and the harm that they cause – as would be expected given the complexity and obscurity of these issues for those who do not work in the software development.

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The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit -- the leading intellectual property court in the US -- has delivered a major victory to the Free and Open Source Software (“FOSS”) movement by explicitly holding, for the first time, that FOSS licensors are entitled to copyright infringement relief.

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Larry Lessig, founder and CEO of the Creative Commons and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Software Freedom Law Center has launched a great site with a powerful message... He's concidering IF he is going to run.

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Stanford professor and copyright activist Lawrence Lessig, has formed a bipartisan alliance petition asking the Republican and Democratic National Committees "To Ensure All Presidential Debate Video Can Be Legally Put On Sites Like YouTube." Specifically, it calls for the use of the "Creative Commons" license. The petition was signed by the who's who of tech and politics, including Jimmy Wales, Craig Newmark, Eli Pariser, Markos Moulitsas, Arianna Huffington, Roger Hickey, Micah Sifry and many others. Creative Commons is a proud client of CivicActions!

Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons has been coming up on my radar alot over the past few weeks. Now, Creative Commons happens to be one of the clients I manage, so I guess that's not too surprising, but I'm talking about outside of work. For example, this blog post at World Changing is an interview with LL about CC's Developing Nations License. As usual, innovative and thought-provoking ideas from CC. The idea is this: keep your copyright in the "developed" world while distributing it freely (with attribution) in the developing world.

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A brief look at YouTube's most popular videos of the day, and what do you find? Cingular with the #1 video?! (391,397 views today alone!) Yep, the name of the video is "Cingular presents: YouTube Underground!" Cingular nabs the "Viral Day Action" award (VD Action) with this clever bit of marketing... a video announcing a YouTube contest for the best band, video or song on the hugely popular video social networking site. And, only a day after Warner Music signed a deal with YouTube - agreeing to a new royalty-tracking system... A good week for the 'Tube.

Recently, I finally saw the movie "The Corporation" [ 1]. After seeing enough movies critical of modern life to not get too depressed, the movie did leave me with a somewhat balanced combination of fear and disgust. However, I realized there must be a way to improve on things. Yes. I am an optimist [2]. When I first studied sociology I learned that social structures can take people and make them into who they are. A prisoner and a prison guard [3] were normal people created by experience is one of the best known examples of institutions creating kinds of people. In relation to the movie, a central theme was that because corporations are legally considered human beings with all the same rights as flesh and bone human beings, and because corporate laws require profit, expansion, and self preservation, corporations [and therefore people] behave in a psychotic manner.

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We at CivicActions have helped clients to develop "Social Media" websites which enable members of a community to bond around shared media for fun, learning, advocacy and transformation. One of the principal aims of this development has always been the empowerment of individuals and communities to rise above the echochamber of monolithic media channels by accessing wider sources of content and even by becoming the media makers themselves. Now YouTube, the current granddaddy of Social Media sites in the videosphere, and best known for "America's Funniest Home Videos"-style fare, seems to be growing into a role of crucial and transformative importance: leveling the playing field for presenting disparate eyewitness views of something as profound and inflammatory as the current Hizbollah-Israeli conflict -- unfiltered by editors, advertisers or even production values. It's chaos, but somewhere in the triangulation of a million lens-eyes, we can hope that the complex truths of such difficult circumstances may be brought to light in ways that don't fit neatly in between car commercials.

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I came across this today and really enjoyed it: 95 Theses of Geek Activism. Perhaps it helps that I identify as a hacker in the manner described in the first thesis. Geek Activism is really all about being smart, thinking for yourself and not simply accepting what others say just because they happen to be on TV or run the corporations or government (the differences between these are fading). Read them. Follow the links. You'll learn a little bit more about me - and maybe a little bit more about yourself, too. I'll end with a quote that comes to mind, perhaps because activists are geeks, too (though they may not know it).

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