Creative Commons Salon LA: Share, Remix, Reuse - Legally with Rex Bruce, Holly Willis, Jack Lerner, Chris Weisbart and Michael Wilson :: April 16, 2008; 7:30 pm :: Found Gallery, 1903 Hyperion Ave., Los Angeles, CA.

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.” Rex Bruce, director of the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, will be screening a video he directed that uses public domain imagery from the US Military (also playing at the Centre Pompidou). Continue reading

Disclosures :: March 27 - May 18, 2008 :: Various locations, London :: Organised by Anna Colin and Mia Jankowicz for Gasworks.

Disclosures is a multi-faceted project that looks at the manifestations of Open Source methodologies in fields of cultural production outside of the Internet. Openness – or its technological underpinning, Open Source – here refers to situations in which the viewer, reader, listener or Internet user becomes emancipated through egalitarian participation, collaborative authorship and/or the breaking down of hierarchical and social boundaries. Continue reading

Economies of the Commons: (1) Strategies for Sustainable Access and Creative Reuse of Images and Sounds Online :: International Working Conference :: De Balie - Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam :: April 11 & 12, 2008 :: (2) Seminar on Intellectual Property Rights :: The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum :: April 10, 2008.

A wide range of actors around the globe is currently involved in the creation of unprecedentedly rich and invaluable audiovisual cultural and knowledge resources on the internet. These range from national audiovisual archives, broadcasters, professional cultural producers and institutions to civic and p2p file sharing initiatives. Continue reading

“People Quote People is another valuable fist against that heavy and tired unhistorical giant called authorship, who is still trying to stop the provocative and revolutionary evolution of the network(ed) culture. The project seemingly takes the shape of a very broad collection of famous quotes, sorted either by name and letter: Paolo Cirio, member of the legendary epidemiC clan, and co-author of GWEI and Amazon Noir, has coded a schizophrenic database, which, in a Luther Blissett style, uses the quotations as a tool to spread some plagiaristic panic around famous names like Albert Einstein, Diogenes, Shakespeare and Adolf Hitler. ‘People quote people’ laughs at thousand years of human knowledge conceived as individualistic process, literally embodied into men, things and places of that sort of culture which gives birth to heroes and identity-based mythology, in order to act conservatively on reality and spread hegemony. Continue reading

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is delighted to announce we are partnering with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) for a project funded by the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) on Preserving Virtual Worlds. The two-year $590,000 award under NDIIPP’s Preserving Creative America program will be shared among the project participants. Continue reading

“Challenges to traditional copyright resulting from peer-to-peer applications, free software, filesharing and appropriation art have caused a wide ranging debate on the future of copyright. Dmytri Kleiner brings existing critiques of material property from the left to bear upon the realm of copyleft artistic production and asks how, within the existing copyright regime, can artists earn a living?

In the area of software development copyleft has proved to be a tremendously effective means of creating an information commons which broadly benefits all those whose production depends on it. However, many artists, musicians, writers, film-makers and other information producers remain sceptical that a copyleft based system where anyone is free to reproduce their work, can earn them a living. Copyleft licenses guarantee intellectual property freedom by requiring that reuse and redistribution of information be governed by ‘the four freedoms,’ the freedom to use, study, modify and redistribute.” Continue reading Copyfarleft and Copyjustright by Dmytri Kleiner, Mute magazine. Also see Rhizome Adds Creative Commons Licenses.

Some commonistas confronted with the exhibition in residence, CC BY 2.0

Shortly before most of my fellow aesthetically challenged comrades arrived in Dubrovnik, whilst the keener iCommoners soaked up the Adriatic sun, a handful of artists in residence were toiling away to produce and curate an exhibition for our benefit. The low level of engagement from practising artists in fields beyond electronica music, academic writing and journalism is a problem familiar to any meeting of free culture communities. So it was a wonderful surprise to sit through a discussion between the artists in residence nominally set-up to discuss their engagment with the ‘copyfight’ and strategies to build sustainability for peer produced free culture, Less surprising was the theme of the presentations and subsequent conversations; their interest in, and engagement with, the ‘commons-based peer production’ ideology was varied and complex. Continue reading

The Art Happens Here

[Image: Nathaniel Stern’s Sentimental Construction #1, part of The Wireframe Series site-specific, publicly performed “spaces,” made of rope (2007). Performers / documentarians / collaborators: JC Bukenya, Tomislav Domis, Joy Garnett, Ana Husman, Kathryn Smith, Tim Whidden (MTAA) and Jaka Zeleznikar.] The Art Happens Here :: Opens 15 June @ 21h30, Croatian time :: iCommons Summit 2007, Lazareti Art Workshop, Dubrovnik Croatia :: Simulcast to Annenberg Island in SL, 12h30 PDT, Second Life.

The Art Happens Here is a contemporary art exhibition and presentation at the iCommons Summit 2007, resulting from an ongoing artist in residence programme. Six international artists and a critic were invited to produce physical and virtual work that engages with fair use, copyright, re-mixing, piracy and/or collaboration on some level - whether directly or indirectly.

Works on show will include, but not be limited to, art books, murals, net.art, sculpture, public performance, video and installation — all conceptually linked by their engagement with the Commons, by the artists’ time spent in Dubrovnik. Participants include: Joy Garnett (USA), Ana Husman (Croatia), Kathryn Smith (South Africa), Nathaniel Stern (USA / South Africa), MTAA (Mike Sarff & Tim Whidden, USA), Jaka Zeleznikar (Slovenia) and blog-critic Paddy Johnson (of artfagcity, USA). There will also be a special appearance in the SL exhibition by Patrick Lichty, aka Man Michinaga (USA).

Artist Discussion Panel on Creative Commons and its potential uses and effects in professional arts practice will be a part of the iCommons main programme in Dubrovnik, 15h00 Croatian time. Continue reading

The Emergence of Open Source Culture

The Next Layer or: The Emergence of Open Source Culture :: Draft text for Pixelache publication, Armin Medosch, London/Vienna 2006-2007

First we had media art. In the early days of electronic and digital culture media art was an important way of considering relationships between society and technology, suggesting new practices and cultural techniques. It served as an outlet for the critique of the dark side of computer culture’s roots in the military-industrial complex; and it suggested numerous utopian and beautiful ways of engagement with technology, new types of interactivity, sensuous interfaces, participative media practices, for instance. However, the more critical, egalitarian and participative branches of media art tended to be overshadowed by the advocacy of a high-tech and high-art version of it. This high-media art conceptually merged postmodern media theories with the techno-imaginary from computer sciences and new wave cybernetics. Uncritical towards capitalisms embrace of technology as provider of economic growth and a weirdly paradoxical notion of progress, high-media art was successful in institutionalizing itself and finding the support of the elites but drew a lot of criticism from other quarters of society. It stuck to the notion of the artist as a solitary genius who creates works of art which exist in an economy of scarcity and for which intellectual ownership rights are declared. Continue reading

Sitting in a Big Chair

Yesterday Creative Commons celebrated its fourth birthday with parties around the world as well as in Second Life. Larry was in Portugal and I was in Japan so we hooked up with the party in Second Life. Board members Hal and Jimmy also joined us there together with a great mix of SL visitors and regulars.

In Second Life, Larry took the opportunity to pass me a digital torch as part of a ritual where he handed on the Chairman position to me after four amazing years as the founder-Chairman of Creative Commons.

When I joined the board in 2003, the licenses had been launched and the movement already had a great buzz of activity and good will around it. A the time, some products like Movable Type had already integrated Creative Commons licenses, but for the most part, CC was a movement of like-minded people with a vision. Since then Creative Commons, thanks to everyone who has supported us over the last four years, has become a standard feature in major search engines, web services, software tools and content libraries. In four short years, Creative Commons has grown from an idea to a basic part of the technical and business infrastructure of the Internet and the sharing economy. Continue reading