Awesome funny pic of me by the talented Ida Benedetto.  Taken at #SXSWNYC last night at Purpose headquarters.  Full set on Flickr.  We will be submitting these to TED Prize winner JR’s Inside Out project.

I’m wearing a Creative Commons Limited Edition SHARE t-shirt.

Description

Copyright, copyleft, copy-what? We will discuss the various copyright/intellectual property issues faced by artists, designers, and other creators of content. Learn how to use Creative Commons and other open licenses to share and protect your work.

Notes

Start with a video: A Shared Culture

What is “intellectual property?”

Is it like real property? Or is it a “mirage”?

Copyright, Patents, and Trademark

What is copyright?

A restriction on free speech?

A temporary monopoly on the use, reproduction, and transmission of a creative work?

Copyright vs. “Right of Authorship?”

The current copyright system is broken

Copyright can be an incentive to creativity, but copyright can also get in the way.

Copies vs. Use

Atoms vs. Bits

Fair use? Free use?

Solutions? Creative Commons is one possibility.

What is CC?

How to use CC licenses

How to license your work

How to find CC-licensed work

What I did last summer – OpenEd

Learn More

Online Resources

Creative Commons – Learn more about Creative Commons the organization, find out how others are using CC licenses, and license your own work

Digital Copyright Slider – tool for determining whether works first published in the US are protected by copyright based on date of first publication

Fair Use Evaluator – online tool to help you better understand how to determine the “fairness” of a use under the US law

Public Domain Sherpa – online “calculator” helps you determine if a given work is in the public domain

Copyright, Commerce, and Culture – NYU course taught by ITP alum and Creative Commons Product Manager Fred Benenson. Lots of links to articles and discussion about copyright.

Video

Good Copy/Bad Copy – Danish documentary about the current state of copyright and culture

RiP: A Remix Manifesto – Canadian documentary film about copyright and remix culture.

Steal This Film – a series of documentaries about the movement against intellectual property

Books (free digital downloads)

CONTENT: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future, Corey Doctorow

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Lawrence Lessig

Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, Lawrence Lessig

Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law? – comic book that explains copyright basics; Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins

Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own – historical overview of the “digital commons” from GNU/Linux to Creative Commons, David Bollier

Glossaries and Terminology

Brown University Copyright Glossary

Cornell Law School US Copyright Law Definitions

US Copyright Office Definitions

Credits

Video: A Shared Culture

I borrowed some slides from Fred Benenson for my presentation

Here are audio recordings I made of the speakers from last night’s ccSalon SF at PariSoMa.  Right click or control-click on the speakers’ names to download the MP3s.

• Chris DiBona, Open Source Program Manager for Google, Inc.
• Evan Prodromou, co-Founder of WikiTravel and founder of Identi.ca
• Nathan Yergler, Creative Commons’ Chief Technology Officer

More photos on Flickr.

Asian Variations

The Asian Variations album is a collection of remixes produced by MoShang in his Chinese Chill style of downtempo electronica, melding deeply laid-back beats with Chinese traditional instruments. Some of these remixes were solicited by the original artists, two were done for remix competitions, and in some cases MoShang approached artists directly requesting permission to remix their work. The artists represe nted on the album are literally from all over the globe; The U.S.A. (Fort Minor, Toao, Lovespirals, Brad Reason), Taiwan (Kou Chou Ching, Chang Jui-chuan, Viba, Andre van Rensburg, MoShang), South Africa (Gordon’s Suitcase), Japan (Akihiko Matsumoto & Chage), Italy (Tafubar), and Slovenia (PureH) and for the most part the collaboration with MoShang was via the web. With the exception of Fort Minor and J-pop star, Chage, none of the artists are signed to major labels and all are working hard to be heard.

More about MoShang and the remixed artists on AsianVariations.com

歡迎來唱我的歌 (Welcome To My Song)

An eclectic collection of Taiwanese music commissioned for the launch of Creative Commons Taiwan.  The title track is by Taiwanese pop icon Yue Hsin Chu.

Download MP3s and song lyrics at CC Taiwan (in Mandarin and Taiwanese)

See also: Launching Creative Commons Taiwan: Background, Experience, and Challenge

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

[...]

In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this summer announced an initiative that would replace some high school science and math texts with free, “open source” digital versions.

With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Among the article’s interviewees is Neeru Khosla, co-founder of the non-profit group CK-12 Foundation, which develops “flexbooks” that can be adapted to state educational standards.  (Khosla has also been featured on OpenEd and on the Creative Commons blog.) Khosla explains the virtues of the flexbooks:

You can use them online, you can download them onto a disk, you can print them, you can customize them, you can embed video. When people get over the mind-set issue, they’ll see that there’s no reason to pay $100 a pop for a textbook, when you can have the content you want free.

The article uses terms like “digital textbooks,” “free courseware,” “open source,” and “open-content,” but what exactly do these terms mean? While there is reference to the adaptability and customization digital texts, the article does not explicitly mention copyright.  While digital delivery of educational materials may solve some of the cost barriers of education, without an explicit understanding of terms like “open” and “free,” legal and social barriers remain.  As far as I am concerned, government-funded “digital textbooks” or “free courseware” should be as free as possible from copyright restrictions (licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution license, the least restrictive of CC licenses) or in the public domain.  Only then will they be truly available for sharing, collaboration and reuse.  The fact that they are simply “digital” or “available on the Internet” alone is not enough.

The road to a digital future for education is not without its bumps.  Lewin brings up the issue of a the digital divide: “Not every student has access to a computer, a Kindle electronic reader device or a smartphone, and few districts are wealthy enough to provide them. So digital textbooks could widen the gap between rich and poor.”

The increasing adoption of digital textbooks may save on some costs, but will also require additional investment in computer hardware.  But the real issue at stake is not just the economic costs of education, but instead the need to focus on increasing the accessibility of knowledge.  In order for learning resources to be truly accessible, the issue is not just online vs. offline, digital vs. print.  To reach their maximum social and educational potential, learning materials in the digital future  will need to free from excessive copyright constraints (with clear open licensing like CC-BY or public domain declaration) in order to allow teachers and students the maximum freedom to legally share, modify, and improve upon them.

Also check out Jane Park of ccLearn’s post from last September: “Back to School: Open Textbooks Gaining in Popularity.”

The cringe-worthy Cobb salad scene where Julie Powell has lunch with her friends made me strangely homesick for NY.  The depiction of Julie’s shamelessly ambitious, cell phone-tethered friends was pretty-right on.  They represent all that is terrible yet strangely charming about NYC (or maybe it’s just because I’ve been away for the too long).

Watching all that French food being made and eaten on the big screen piqued our appetite, so I busted out the iPhone and found Le Charm French Bistro in SoMa.  The restaurant is a charming, old-school French bistro, with a very reasonably-priced $30 three-course dinner prix fixe.  I had the French onion soup, a seafood bourride, and the strawberry tart for dessert.  Yum!

One more week to go for my ccLearn internship.  The rest of the ccLearn crew will be in Vancouver next week for the Open Education Conference, while I will be sticking around SF wrapping things up and documenting my work.  Then back to NYC next Friday.

Although the Cunningham living legacy plan aims to preserve its founder’s vision intact as custodian of his intellectual property, that does not mean the choreography will be frozen forever, like an artifact of the past. As a choreographer, Cunningham always welcomed new technology and pioneered countless innovations. Collaboration, chance, and change were the very cornerstones of his approach.

Although the sun has set on his career, a new dawn inspired by his achievement may follow. “Ideas,” as the artist Robert Rauschenberg, Cunningham’s collaborator, said, “are not real estate.”

Neither is intellectual property. It could be a site where past art is not just preserved but fertilizes future growth.

“Dancing is a process that never stops,” Cunningham said when announcing his living legacy plan, “and should not stop if it is to stay alive and fresh.”

There was a mention of Creative Commons in the article’s discussion of copyright issues.  Cunningham was one of the few major choreographers to have licensed his work under a Creative Commons license.  As an advocate of Creative Commons licenses, I applaud Cunningham’s generosity to our collective artistic heritage.  However, I should also note as a comparison that in most folk dancing traditions, sharing and open collaboration are the norms– the idea of ownership is fluid and oftentimes forms and techniques are owned and transmitted collectively.

<tangent>Another scenario to consider: Michael Jackson “owned” the moonwalk in the sense that it is a dance move popularly associated with him.  But what if he literally owned it as intellectual property?  Would the Jackson estate be going after the unauthorized moonwalkers in the Eternal Moonwalk tribute site? </tangent>

The CSM article did not mention Cunningham’s life partner and frequent artistic collaborator, composer John Cage.  The two men’s work similarly combined demanding detailed instructions with indeterminacy and chance operations such as the rolling of dice.  The Cage estate has recently gone after what it considered copyright infringements against Cage’s (in)famous 4’33″ (“The Silent Piece”).

The big Zen koan question then becomes, is randomness and silence copyrightable?

The score of 4’33″ instructs the performer(s) to not play their instruments for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.  But the piece is not really silent.  As I have previously written:

The piece is made up of the hum of the air-conditioning in the hall, the ruffle of programs, the coughing of an audience member; it is an invitation, an invocation, to listen to the ambient sounds all around us.  Cage rejects the distinction between musical and non-musical sounds, and embraces all sounds, regardless of the performers intent, to be potentially musical.  In doing so, Cage completes the break from the history of classical composition and offers up a new model for music in which the primary act of for the composer and for the performer is not to make music, but to listen.

When a critic told Cage that anybody could have written 4’33″, Cage responded with his usual charming wit, “but nobody else did.”  There is no doubt that the provocative and performative nature of 4’33″ is an act of creativity, if not genius.  At the same time, one could also argue that because the piece is about listening to the sounds that exist in the performance space even if no instruments are being played, then David Tudor’s “non-playing” of the piano at the premiere, as well as the noises generated by the audience members present, were all integral parts of the piece.  In that sense, the performer and the audience share a kind of authorship of the piece.  They all ‘performed’ 4’33″ and made it what it was.  By elevating the role of listeners, Cage was in effect bringing back a participatory, interactive element that had been lost in Western “classical” music.

Cage’s 4’33″ also represents a break from the idea of Romantic authorship, where “an author is perceived to be the source of original ideas, transforming the world around him through his own genius” (Authorship Collective).  Romantic authorship would claim that the roll of the composer is to create music out of silence. But Cage’s point is that silence does not exist.

One of the inspirations for 4’33″ was Cage’s experience in an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a soundproofed room designed in such a way that all the surfaces in the room will absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes.

Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he “heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.” Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no sound, yet sound was nevertheless discernible. He stated “until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.” (Wikipedia)

Composers cannot create music out of silence because silence does not exist. Even if it did, unless we are deaf, it is impossible to perceive it.  Cage’s 4’33″, like Duchamp’s ready-mades, is a kind of “found art,” comprised of environmental sounds that already exist.  We are all constantly surrounded by sounds, they are unavoidable elements of our environment.  The role of composers and musicians is to organize and present those sounds, which is exactly what  remix and mash-up artists do today when they create new music from the found sounds and cultural artifacts found in our environment.  In a way, the “found-sound” composition 4’33″ is an Ur-remix, a remix of (non)silence and of reality itself, and John Cage an avant la lettre master of the mash-up.

All of this has inspired my latest composition: 433 trees falling in the forest with nobody to hear the sound. (C) 2009 Lee-Sean Huang, published by Hepnova Multimedia LLC.  All Rights Reserved.

Tonight Creative Commons co-hosted a San Francisco screening of RIP: A Remix Manifest, a documentary about remix and copyright.  The movie features interviews with remix culture pioneers and opinion leaders like Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil, and Cory Doctorow.  RIP was on my summer viewing list.

I went to check out the screening with Michelle, another Creative Commons (and lurking reader of this blog).  Filmmaker Brett Gaylor did a Q&A after the screening.  He also introduced special guest Dan O’Neill of Air Pirates fame, who was profiled in the documentary.  You can download the film online under a pay-what-you-want model.

After the Q&A came the dance party. DJs Adrian and the Mysterious D and VJs Eclectic Method rocked the house with their mash-up madness.  I haven’t danced that hard in years. Awesome!

Also check out Best Shots, our best songs from the 1998-2003 “Ronald Raygun” era.

Both albums are DRM-free and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, so feel free to share mp3s with your friends and strangers and remix to your heart’s content.

More music on Hepnova.com.  Follow us on Twitter: @hepnova.

P.S.  There is also Hepnova music on other music sites online, but Bandcamp is my favorite so far, with a simple, clean interface and support for higher-quality audio.

Masnick talks about how “free music” business models can allow musicians to connect with fans and give them reasons to pay the band in other ways. Using NIN as a case study, Masnick also gives examples of how “free” models have worked for less-established artists. Note the mention of Creative Commons around 6:45.

Also be sure to check out Trent Reznor’s thoughts on what to do as a new/unknown artist on the NIN forums. (Thanks to Parker for the link.)

The Creative Commons summer interns gave their midsummer presentations to the CC staff yesterday.  Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito was in town, so he sat in on our presentations and gave feedback.  I talked about my main project for the summer: coming up with an internationalization strategy for ccLearn’s OpenEd project.

The OpenEd site (currently in beta) is:

for anyone interested in open education, from Open Ed experts to those new to the field…

This site should help you arrive at a variety of information, whether you are looking for an organization contact, a particular report, guidance on how to license your educational work, or information on where/when a particular conference is being held. However, please keep in mind that thought we host some of these resources (such as event data), most of the information on this site is linked to other sites. Rather than duplicate efforts, we choose to drive traffic to the many excellent, existing resources out there. The goal is for everyone to contribute by adding information and links to sites we have not yet discovered.

OpenEd is a point of departure for people to understand some of the issues and aspirations related to open education, and we expect it to drive interest in creating new forms of media and outreach to help more people understand open education, CC licenses, and hopes for the future.

In related news, the CC interns have been participating in periodic lunch talks with interns from other tech-related non-profits in the area.  Previously, we have “done the Google” and also gone down to Stanford to hear a presentation by Ryan Calo, a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society.  Today, we are headed to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for a talk by Seth Schoen called “Information Security Discovers Physics.”

At the time of writing, all of the works are available for free (legal) viewing or download online except for Food Inc., which is now in theaters around the US – and a must see for EVERY American.  I know I have kind of geeky interests, and not everybody cares to read 300+ page books about copyright, but everybody eats, so go see Food Inc already!

Books

The Wealth of Networks
How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Yochai Benkler

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace 2.0
Lawrence Lessig

Free Culture
How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Lawrence Lessig

Remix
Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy
Lawrence Lessig

The Pirates Dilemma
How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
Matt Mason

The Public Domain
Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
James Boyle

Viral Spiral
How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own
David Bollier

The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It
Jonathan Zittrain

Music and It’s Reflection on Society
Catalan: La Música i el seu reflex en la societat
Spanish: La música y su reflejo en la sociedad
Edited by Indigestió
A collection of essays about the role of music in contemporary society. Only in Spanish and Catalan for now though.

Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law?
“Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic’s heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean ‘Rights Monster’ – all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.” -Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online

Documentaries

Good Copy/Bad Copy
A Danish documentary about the current state of copyright and culture

Rip: A Remix Manifesto
A Canadian documentary film about copyright and remix culture.

The Future of Food
An in-depth look into the controversy over genetically modified foods.  Watch it online at Snagfilms.

Food, Inc.
Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.

The Legend of Leigh Bowery
The Legend of Leigh Bowery explores a life lived as if it was a performance. Leigh Bowery was a costume/clothing designer, nightclub impresario, performer, and musician whose vision influenced many of today’s most important artists. He later became known to the world at large as the muse and subject of preeminent British painter Lucian Freud.

The Creative Commons Salon San Francisco took place on June 24th at PariSoMa, “a coworking space that provides desks, wi-fi, coffee and community to independent professionals.”  The theme of the salon was “[t]he digital intersection of art, history, and culture, and how CC can play a defining role in enriching all three.”  Videos after the jump.

Part 1: Francesco Spagnolo

Francesco Spagnolo, Director of Research and Collections at the Magnes Museum. Francesco will explore the sharing and marketing of cultural heritage through the lenses of the Magnes’ “Digital Narratives,” a project that seeks an alignment between a narrative approach to history, a collaborative practice in the interpretation of cultural history, and the uses of technology and online social media.

Part 2: David Toole

Dave Toole, CEO and Founder, Outhink Media, will present on how storytelling bridges the cultural and business arenas, outlining the challenges posed by the new social media and the crucial role played by research in information technology.

Part 3: Nancy Van House

Nancy Van House, Professor, UC Berkeley School of Information, will respond to the other presenters by reflecting on the way in which academia is looking at social media and personal/historical digital archiving, exploring the human interactions that populate the online world.

This is an update on my internship with ccLearn, a division of Creative Commons,  a non-profit organization dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources. Our mission is to minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials.

We are working on a site called OpenEd, a site for the Open Education Community and are looking for input and participation from past and present JET Programme participants (I’m a JET alum and webmaster of the JET Alumni Association of NY) as well as other members of the ESL teaching community.

The JET community already has a history of sharing lesson plans and ideas. On a more global level, educators and and institutions have being contributing content (lesson plans, worksheets, multimedia, etc.) to the pool of Open Educational Resources (OER), a kind of educational commons that fosters collaboration and yields greater flexibility and creativity in education.

OER are openly licensed educational resources for teachers and students. All materials that are licensed with a Creative Commons license are OER. OER are “some rights reserved”, meaning that you are free to use a CC licensed work without asking permission as long as you adhere to the license terms. Depending on the license used, you can access, share (copy, distribute, display), adapt (perform, translate), or derive (modify, remix) OER. The openness of a resource increases with the uses allowed.

The OpenEd site is a wiki, so like Wikipedia, anybody can edit the site.  We welcome members of the JET community to add to and edit the site.  We would love to see more links to educational resources as well as personal stories about how you have used open educational resources.

We invite you to take a look at the JET Community page on OpenEd.  You can set up an account on Open Ed and edit and add content.

Creative Commons interns do the Google.

The architectural story says “suburban high-tech campus.”

The architectural story, continued.

The mythic and cryptic Google whiteboard

Lunch@Google: Sushi, curry & Chinese food in one cafeteria = my kind of celebrating diversity

Honest Tea imparts ancient wisdom of the Orient.

Google’s dirty laundry.

Download ZIP of my self-introduction Keynote presentation.
Download PDF of my presentation (no multimedia).

All original Content on LEESEAN.NET by Lee-Sean Huang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.  The license information and license links will live permanently on the About page and on the footer of the site.

My Flickr photos have been under CC licenses for a while now.

I got up this morning and headed to my first day at my internship;  except I couldn’t find the bus stop that HopStop told me to go to.  I ended up walking to work instead.  It only takes about 40 minutes, and it’s mostly downhill or flat, although it takes me through an ugly, mostly industrial part of San Francisco.

I get to the Creative Commons office and meet the other interns and staff.  We spend the morning getting an overview of what Creative Commons is and an overview of the organization the staff.  We also get set up with our email and wiki logins.  After a short office tour (it’s a small office), we headed out to lunch and socializing at Primo Patio Cafe.

Back in the office, we filled out some administrative and got set up on various email lists.  I met with my supervisor, Ahrash Bissell, Executive Director of ccLearn, and talked a bit about my project for the summer.  In the next few days I am going to get up to speed on the Open Education movement and doing some user experience and internationalization stuff for the OpenEd community beta site.

My ongoing SF photo set on Flickr.

After work, I met up with Elizabeth (pictured above and of Herbivores and Noir fame), who is in town attending the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.  We headed to Chinatown for dinner at House of Nanking (pictured below), which a bit of a tourist trap but a particular guilty pleasure of mine.  Love their fried rice!  We got there right before the crowds lined up outside, so we had zero wait time.  Just avoid anything deep fried there and you will be fine.

A quick SuperShuttle ride to the Potrero Hill neighborhood, where I am renting a room for the summer. Still in the process of unpacking and settling in.  Had dinner at a Japanese restaurant called Live Sushi at the bottom of the hill (less than 5 minute walk).  The food at the sushi place was average, but it’s close to where I’m staying so I’ll probably be back.  Then I got some provisions at Whole Foods, which is right across the street from Live Sushi.

The uphill walk home from sushi/Whole Foods was a bit tough on my veal-like legs that have attrified in the last couple weeks lounging around the house and the pool in Arizona, but no doubt by the end of the summer I will have calves of steel.

Internship at Creative Commons starts on Monday.

In other news, Nicholas and I wrapped up the latest HEPNOVA album yesterday. A few more finishing tweaks and we will officially release it. In the meantime, you can check out the “soft-launch” mixdowns on ReverbNation.