Tonight pre-premiere of the successor of Steal This Film:

Distributed entirely through P2P networks, The League of Noble Peers’ STEAL THIS FILM I was one of the most downloaded films of 2006. Its uncompromising take on piracy, media distribution and creativity after networks has become part of the heated ongoing conversation about the future of media. STEAL THIS FILM II, recently released in collaboration with The Pirate Bay and Mininova , goes deeper into what the League see as the historical dimensions of filesharing and peer production.

Waag Society
Nieuwmarkt 4
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

entrance: free
start: 20:00

The title of this post is the translated title of the Dutch article I wrote for the XS4ALL weblog. The article became a bit too long for the XS4ALL weblog so I shortened it a bit and left out the footnotes. A full non-editted version can be found on Netcultuur.nl.

I hope you will enjoy it and I’m curious to hear about your opinion and ideas with regards to this article.

ps: After I finally create some time for this website to be updated I will also add the article to this site…

Henry Rollins, one of my hero’s of the 80′ and 90’s has a thing to say.

I still dig his way with words, some people might find him offensive, but just look beyond it and you’ll see a linguistic artist with a message to convey. He certainly has the same passion and drive as he had while singing for THE punk hardcore band Black Flag and later on The Rollins Band.

Thanks Maarten

Documentary about the current state of copyright and culture. Check out this trailer on Blip.tv.

Download the complete film using Bittorrent (direct link to the torrent on The Pirate Bay) and support the authors here.

If you like these kind of documentries / topics and you haven’t seen it already, you should definately also check out ‘Steal this film’, a documentary also about copyright, culture, filesharing and The Pirate Bay in particular.

image by: mushroom and rooster licensed under Creative Commons BY-ND license

UPDATE: The petition location has changed: http://www.musicfrom.nl/bumawakeup/

Last week, Ard Boer of dutch independent music label RaRa Records and Lopend Vuur podcast co-host contacted us (Simuze) if we were interested in joining his petition to allow for more flexible contracts by the Dutch music rights collecting society Buma/Stemra.

The current situation in the Netherlands is that by becoming a member of the collecting society you’ll have to transfer all your exploitation rights exclusively to them. Any musician or composer that wants to get the money collected in their name has to become a member of this (actually on paper 2 organizations) organization or else they’ll never will get this money. This rights collecting society has been granted the monopoly right to collect rights by the government. Basically this situation stinks and we want to see it changed:

We want to see more flexible contracts (= non-exclusive) for members of the rights collecting society which allows them to choose the conditions under which to release their own music and for instance use CC licenses for this.

So, off course we joined his effort and thus I’m writing this here on my blog. Although there might not be so many reading this blog, I would like ask the few visiting to go an sign this petition:

http://www.musicfrom.nl/bumawakeup/

Ps: For all non-dutch people, it’s a Dutch organization and it would be better for this cause to have loads of affected Dutch people sign it instead of loads of non-affected non-Dutch people. Instead we would like to urge you to start your own petitions, in the hope that we can see a change in the contracts used by the rights collecting societies all over the world and that initiatives like the Creative Commons licenses can be used in conjuction with a rights collecting society membership.

Please spread this message! Contact your Dutch friends, start your own initiatives and raise awarness!

Yesterday was anti-drm day and also a very, very busy day.

We (as in Stichting Open Media) launched a new initiative called Netcultuur.nl. This website is going to be a (Dutch language) website about the pros and cons of our more and more digitized society. Anyone can become part of Netcultuur.nl and share their ideas. All of our own content is copyleft using the Creative Commons BY-SA license. So we’re pretty excited and anxious to see what happens with this new project

So for our launch and being it being anti-drm day, we also took the opportunity to create an informational video and article with the title “Wat is (er mis met) DRM?” which translates to “What is (wrong with) DRM?”. Both, the video and the article are in Dutch and explain what DRM is and why it should be eliminated. I think it does a pretty good job in bringing this across, especially considering this was my first video edit I ever did with software. More than a decade ago I used some hardware editors at high school, but since then I never really did anything with video anymore. Man, it was a blast! I totally forgot how much fun it was to create something like a video. I can imagine myself creating more videos

Seems weird that less than a week ago Netcultuur was merely an idea and a registrated domain name…and yesterday evening we were already mentioned on national radio.

I couldn’t have done this without the help, support and mostly hard work of some great people:

Thanks to: Marten, Marco, Maarten, Hans, Jeroen !

You can also watch the anti-DRM movie directly here (for those without Flash 8 check it here: http://blip.tv/file/81931/

UPDATE: This post also appeared on iCommons.org. See here

Burnstation is about bringing Internet to the streets according to Olivier Schulbaum of Plantoniq, a collective from Barcelona consisting of cultural producers, curators and software developers with a focus on community building tools, social software and networked strategies for public spaces. Last night he and Ignacio Garcia gave a presentation about their project at Tangent_Burn in V2 Rotterdam.

Burnstation is best described as a Jamaican soundsystem combined with a physical p2p system: it allows people on the street to browse through copyleft and open content licensed (such as Creative Commons) music, listen to it, create playlists and burning these on a cd. Difficult? Not really, especially not for those who have been spending their youth playing games, because the main interface is a common gamepad found on your average contemporary games console. Even if you have never touched a computer in your life, you’ll still be able to navigate, select and burn those songs to cd that made you dance.

As you can see in this movie on YouTube (around 2:16), the current system looks like a hotdog stand and consists of two big speakers and two tweeters connected to an amplifier. This makes it easy to use with live performances and attract an audience. An audience member can use one of three computers running GNU/Linux each with the Burnstation software to browse and select some tracks using the gamepads as interface. Finally the selected tracks can be burned on a cd and taken home for free.

If you would like to bring your own music or burn your a cd using the Burnstation you’ll have the come to Rotterdam where they will reside till the 10th of September during ‘De Wereld van Witte de With‘ festivities or at the Wizards of OS festival in Berlin (see for more dates). Off course you can also build your own Burnstation as the software is released under the GPL license.

Perhaps somebody should remix Burnstation with a Freedom Toaster? Now that would be the best of both worlds: Free Software and Free Music!

Quite hilarious film clip on YouTube explaining why DRM stinks, sucks and should be obliterated from this planet, but way better and more humorously said by ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind. Or as the uploader, Kaos127, of this snippet states:

ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind suggests that CRAP or Content, Restriction, Annulment, and Protection, is a catchier phrase than DRM – Digital Rights Management. Why does he think this technology is crap? Once you’ve bought music or other content to play on one device, it won’t play on any other device because of the proprietary layer of CRAP.

Thanks to:
Phlow.de