Voor diegene die interesse hebben in cultuur en auteursrecht is er morgen een vertoning van RIP, a remix manifesto in het Louis Hartlooper Complex in Utrecht.

Na afloop is er een gesprek/discussie over auteursrecht en muziekcultuur. Hierbij zal ik Paul Keller (Creative Commons Nederland) vervangen als moderator. Verdere deelnemers aan dit gesprek zijn Pitto (DJ, winnaar Grote Prijs van Nederland in de categorie dance), Joost Gerritsen (De Gier | Stam & Advocaten) en Mirko Tobias Schaefer (faculteit Geesteswetenschappen UU). Meer info is hier te vinden: http://www.xpertcmkb.nl/?p=1527

“If RepRap is succesfull a number of changes may well happen in society. The principal one of them will be that we have the distribution of the
manufacture of goods. At the moment economics scale it means that it is sensible for goods to be manufactured in factories and then to be shipped to the individual people who wish to have these goods using a complicated transport system. If RepRap takes off and increases its abilities by evolution to manufacture more and more products, then people having these machines in their homes will be no longer a need, or no longer such a big need for factories to make the goods they want. When they want something it will simply be a question of downloading it from the web, in the way they currently do with music, a film or anything else. That downloaded file would then allow them to manufacture whatever object is was they wanted in their own home.[...]”

Check the embedded movie below by RepRap.org from which I took this quote (starts around 5:14) by Adrian Bowyer from. The RepRap raises a lot of interesting questions, such as is personal fabrication another nail in the coffin of intellectual property? Looking forward to this publication: “The Intellectual Property Implications Of Low-Cost 3D Printing by Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer and Patrick Haufe.” which as far as I can see will be available online here, the 15th of April.

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The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns about the openness of the device.

For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home.

Source: http://al3x.net/2010/01/28/ipad.html

This quote (emphasizes are mine), perfectly reflects my concerns with regards to computing, but also our society in general, and the closed, proprietary direction some companies and people want to take us into. I belief that this direction will turn out to be a dead-end street and I hope we can prevent this from happening before causing it too much harm. This also highlights my arguments in favor of: sharing, openness, free software, accessibility and the right to play, destroy(mostly accidentally, sorry), create, tinker and experiment. In my humble opinion that is the only way to learn, innovate and work towards new, sustainable ways of living on this planet.

Cool comic by XKCD documenting the workflow employed by me and most of my fellow geeks/nerds/hackers when attempting to help someone with computer issues while not knowing anything about the application at hand. Learn this by heart.

Nice videoclip combining Lego and chiptunes by Swedish ubergeeks Rymdreglage into something reminiscent of the demoscene. Found at waxy.org

Yesterday Creative Commons Netherlands wrote that the Canadian documentary “RIP a remix manifesto” by Brett Gaylor would be broadcasted by the Dutch public broadcasters NPS and VPRO later that evening. I had heard some good things about this documentary, but hadn’t seen it yet. Since we don’t have television (a subject for another post) anymore I though I might be able to download the documentary instead. After all it’s all about remixing and download culture. At least that’s what they claim on the frontpage of their website:

RiP: A remix manifesto is a documentary film about copyright and remix culture.

So I went to their download website and went looking for a dowload option. Instead I got this message:

I interpreted this message as: the people inside the gated community may download a documentary on remixing and download culture and for those outside you may jump through some more hoops before you will be able to watch the same film streaming. As you might understand I am confused and even insulted by this difference in treatment. Why treat your audience outside (in this case the US) differently from those inside the US? Especially when the subject of the documentary is about remix and download culture. A global culture. Not just a North-American culture. What are the arguments that support this difference in treatment?

Update: Huh? Found this snippet in Brett Gaylor’s bio on the ‘global’ website, which makes the difference in treatment of the audience even weirder:

He is also the web producer of the Homeless Nation.org, a web project dedicated to bridging the digital divide – allowing everyone to participate in online culture.

(emphasis is mine)

Update2: You can find the documentary also here in case you’re not willing to be treated differently from our North-American friends. Yes, controlling downloads based on geography is a failure.

Update3: Brett Gaylor (as far as I can tell it is genuine) responded in the comments and I have responded on his comment.

Update4: Brett’s email bounched. Brett, if you’re reading this I tried to email you at your first name at opensourcecinema dot org and it did not work.

I wrote this summary of the first Creative Commons tech summit in 2008 at the Googleplex, however somehow it ended up in being a draft in Wordpress for more than a year. I decided to add links and publish it although in the meantime two follow up conferences have already been held. Maybe it still holds some value. Enjoy my rather lengthy ’summary’.

Thanks to Creative Commons.org and The institute of Sound and Images I was able to join the first Creative Commons Tech Summit in San Francisco. Since the amount of participants was limited to 100 people I decided to write a summary for those not able to attend on this blog. There have been more people writing about the summit and the whole thing is made available on Youtube as well. I hope this summary will be of use to you. Feel free to comment. More after the jump.. (more…)

Just read this on Identi.ca (free software microblogging service a la Twitter):

Wow! So Ridley Scott of Bladerunner and Alien fame is working on a Bladerunner ‘inspired’ prequels available on the web under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. Can’t wait to see them!

See also the slightly longer announcement on CC.org.

With a name like Truckasaurus an artist cannot do anything wrong. Especially if they blend electro, with 8-bit bleep and more. Check out the whole album after the click.

Thanks to 3voor12 luisterpaal I got to know this band.

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Ver interesting article on access to knowledge, but not in the conventional sense of it. It deals with the historical responsibility some people and organisations (such as the extrodinary Long Now Foundation) take upon themselves to make sure future generations will have access to (some of) our knowledge. Their plan: using an evolved Rossetta stone of the 21st century.

Paper, it turns out, is a very reliable backup medium for information.? While it can burn or dissolve in water, good acid-free versions of paper are otherwise stable over the long term, cheap to warehouse, and oblivious to technological change because its pages are “eye-scanable.”? No special devices needed. Well-made, well-cared for paper can last 1,000 years easily, and probably reach 2,000 without much extra trouble.

We can not say the same for digital storage. Pages stored on plastic DVDs are neither stable over the very long term, nor readable over the long term. Unless digital information is ceaselessly migrated from one fading medium to another new one, it will quickly cease to be accessible. Two decades ago the floppy disk was ubiquitous. Most personal digital information then was stored on this format. Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone.? Imagine the incompatibility of today’s DVD in 1,000 years.

As durable as paper is, its inherent limitations in storing digital data are clear. Pity the person who would need to find something if the only backup of the web was a paper printout that filled several airline hangers.? What we need are media that have the durability of paper and the accessibility of a floppy disk (or better!).

Read the whole article here.