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Just looking at the contents on Suprnova makes me immediately think that this stuff has got to be pirated. The other torrent link in the article also looks suspicious too. Do either of these torrents include Creative Commons licenses? I doubt it.

I'd love to download these torrents to see the show, but I'm not sure I should, though saying so on slashdot makes me wonder if I should post as AC.

Is slashdot, as opposed to individual posters on slashdot, actually linking to clearly pirated content? Could this be a legal problem for OSTG?

Note that this is exactly how the Creative Commons folks do things: here's a human readable version of a license, here's the equivalent legalese, and here's what the machine-readable version looks like:

<License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-sa/2.0/">
<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduct ion" />
<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribut ion" />
<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice" />
<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attributi on" />
<prohibits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Commercia lUse" />
<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Derivativ eWorks" />
<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/ShareAlik e" />
</License>

I'm not sure if there is any "robolawyer" software out there designed to parse and pass judgement on the Creative Commons machine-readable format, but I can't imagine it'd be too hard to build one.

Note that this is exactly how the Creative Commons folks do things: here's a human readable version of a license, here's the equivalent legalese, and here's what the machine-readable version looks like:

<License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-sa/2.0/">
<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduct ion" />
<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribut ion" />
<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice" />
<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attributi on" />
<prohibits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Commercia lUse" />
<permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Derivativ eWorks" />
<requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/ShareAlik e" />
</License>

I'm not sure if there is any "robolawyer" software out there designed to parse and pass judgement on the Creative Commons machine-readable format, but I can't imagine it'd be too hard to build one.

Have you seen how Creative Commons does it?
Very plain english to me:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

why can't that be a model for the commercial stuff?

They should use Creative Commons for part of a standardised DRM scheme. The whole concept of having XML data describe different licensing methods so that they can be understood by software would be the way to go.

gnomoradio has music sharing, playback, and recommendation program for Creative Commons licensed songs. peer-to-peer, legal, and free -- what could be better?

Already done:

http://opensource.org/trademarks/

and

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

You mean something just like this?

O'Reilly has released a number of titles under this arrangement.

You mean something just like this?

O'Reilly has released a number of titles under this arrangement.

I find it strange that he argues against copywrite, and yet the first footnote in his writings is his own copywrite. Given that the person immediately following him in the Stanford Law faculty directory is closely associated with a well known intellectual freedom license, I would think that he'd consider practicing what he preaches.

One of the trends I've noticed is that many of the people who advocate against the concept of intellectual property are the ones who have little or nothing to lose from its abolishment. (Yes, there are obvious exceptions, Stallman et all.) In this case, Lemley has little to lose - he has a nice position as a professor, writes $100+ textbooks that are a small enough market that there's little interest in trying to take the niche from his publishers. And yet, he still grabs for the very same rights he argues against.

Here's what I think Atari should do: Create a console on par with the SNES. That sort of hardware should be extremely cheap at this point, and could easily be manufactured for retail prices in the $20-$40 range. Sell simple "smart card" games (or something equally as inexpensive to manufacture) for $5-$10 a piece.

I've been thinking about just such an idea for awhile now too, but with some variations/additions related to my open-system sensibilities:

* Use proven (if dated) technology based on off-the-shelf designs like Z80 and 68K processors. System functions (graphics, sound and I/O) would be handles by separate CPU cores working in tandem--a "quad Z80 system" perhaps. Development costs would be low as a result, and with a good design performance would be quite adequate. One FPGA could even hold most of the logic.

* Not only would it be mini, cheap and cool--it would be non-proprietary at the peripheral connectivity level at least. Games and memory cards would be distributed in the compact flash format, or maybe even on USB ROM keys. Users could connect the system to a PC's USB port like a palm pilot to load in games form the 'net. Same with game controllers--they'd use USB--none
of this oddball crap like consoles have today (blatanly implemented to screw consumers over).

* The hardware architecture would be simple enough (as would the BIOS/OS/API firmware) that hobbyists could develop their own creations. The manufactured device could even come with software along the lines of LEGO Mindstorms programming software, or STOS BASIC from the old Atari days or some such thing. Kids could make their own games on a PC, save them, share with friends, have contests.

* Once the device was released to production with stable specifications, said specs would be released as a gaming platform that could be implemented by other vendors. Hasn't worked for consoles (yet) but it made the PC industry what it is today.

Don't kow how well it would go over in the industry, given its MPAA/RIAA closed, protectionist culture. It basically takes the floor out from under the games software industry as it is now so I wouldn't expect publishers to clamour to develop for it. However, unless Atari or Nintendo or Microsoft or Sony made it getting developers on board would be a struggle regardless of how open the system was (hence the strategy for making development appealing to the mass public).

I think that even though it might be much harder to make billions with this strategy, I think that we've lost a lot in terms of creativity in computing since the "good old days" just prior to the shakeout in the 80s when computers were not only cheap but simple and oriented towards development (it's been a long time since you could boot into BASIC and create). It'd be great if somehow we could re-ignite that hobbyist culture again. Such a culture is barely a flicker now--and it exists almost solely because of Linux and the Free Software movement. I'd like to think that there are millions of geek-parents with a mindset similar to mine who'd put down $39.95 for a cool little digital camera-sized box that hooks to a television to play and can be loaded with little Johnny's latest creations.

Anyways...just in case someone DOES try to take and pervert this idea and patent the crap out of it, etc, I hereby copyright this idea and grant use under the Creative Commons License on this day, the 7th of September 2004 ;-)

...licence it as Creative Commons. The courts will have to issue jaw slings to stop the judges' brains from running out of their mouths and ears. (-:

What we need to counter this is a way to teach kids (and adults) to look for the Creative Commons "copyleft" symbol so they'll know that whatever they're using is contributing to the progress of arts & science, etc.

How about a Creative Commons Mascot? (OK, so maybe they're not any less mockable than a ferret/weasel, but that was all I could come up with on short notice.)

I do a lot of kiosk and interactive exhibit work that utilizes magnetic stripe readers for a variety of purposes, from Fujitsu and NCR ATM machines, to POS systems from Symbol and @POS, to serial readers from MagTech to off the shelf keyboard wedge readers from ID Tech, and I never managed to run across Acidus' site when doing research. His app StripeSnoop looks fairly interesting as a tool. I wanted to point out that there is in fact a TON of information out there available from vendors and standards organizations from credit card track formatting, to ISO specs to you name it, they are all online. Its been said before, but you just need to spend a few minutes with google or talking to your hardware or software vendor and you can find what you need, you just need to dig around a bit. As an example, I recently spoke on the topic of Kiosks and Interactive exhibits at FlashForward 2004 in NY and along with some other things, I demonstrated an application for capturing track data from a keyboard wedge based card reader, and used the freely available specs from AAMVA (American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators) http://www.aamva.org and their specs available here to decode drivers license information that conforms to their standard of encoding. I have used this in a couple of recent applications. I'm about to post up a version that decodes the most useful bits of credit card info (name, card number, expiration) that would be useful for integrating into POS systems, kiosks, etc. The source files (everything is done in Macromedia Flash Mx 2004 - yes not a lot of Flash fans on slashdot - but this is another example of how to use Flash for REAL applications) and more information can be found here: http://www.impossibilities.com/blog/entry_blog-155 .php - everything is released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License - so have at it and start experimenting. It should be fairly simply to add in support for just about any type of track data you want to work with, at least data types that are compatible with keyboard wedge devices - its really just string manipulation and all you need to know are the rules for decoding the data. I use ID Tech's Omni Reader - a USB device that supports all three tracks and barcodes (including infrared barcodes) in one simple USB keyboard wedge device. In the example I put together, youll also find an application for using off the shelf bar code scanners like Symbols - that also hook up via a keyboard wedge interface - to look up UPC info from the free UPC Internet Database. Enjoy! -Rob

Good to see someone gets it.

The key thing that needs to be realized is that the current situation CANNOT continue. The "piracy" of filesharing is not the basis for an economy of information which is what we need. (DRM is not a basis for it either).

Check out the Creative Commons for an attempt to make things like fair use an explicit right rather than an implicit one under current law. Ultimately we will need some sort of change.

This also has some really far reaching consequnces. I am involved in Web archiving - these DRM laws may prevent us as a culture from archiving our history. Which quite simply means we will not exist in history. I don't know about you but one of the things that motivates me is that I am contributing to something bigger than myself or my peers (or at least attempting to)

Indeed it has. Get it here:

Night of the Living Dead - (Creative Commons license: Public Domain)

Then do something about it. If you're going to give away your work, don't give it to these private journals. Give it to Public Library of Science or Creative Commons or Free Software Foundation. If there isn't a suitable journal, one can be started.

If these private journals paid for work, that'd be different but far from it. No, if your work is accepted, then, unless you skip it, you've got more giving to do to pay for the outrageously expensive conference, which is held at a ski resort, or at a very expensive hotel in a big city that wants in on all this and will sock you with a special 15% tax on the room, car rental, airport usage, etc. The usual way to get the money is to fill out a grant and expense form which demands justification (in triplicate) for every expense however petty, and it doesn't look good when the name of the accomodation is a well known and expensive resort. The journal gets money, the tourist industry does all right too, and what do you get? No money. May get some reputation of uncertain value. You get to feel grateful that your successful publication helps you hang on to your low paying postdoc job that is temporary anyway. And you may get an all expenses paid trip to somewhere, but that doesn't put food on the table. At worst, you may get grilled and denied further funding, for wasting taxpayers money, and treated with suspicion that all you're doing in your "cushy" job is making up barely enough bs for your special friends to vanity publish in their stinking excuse for journal that has almost no legitimacy. That a very few of your colleagues do exactly that doesn't help.

Wish we could focus on our areas of expertise instead of dealing with these constant attempts to create new or keep existing expenses that are no longer relevant, and the efforts to divert our attention from "why is this an expense" by such ploys as wrangling over who pays, but there's always someone out there looking for an angle. It gets real tiresome when it's not once but the same old deal, over and over, like reading and rejecting yet another copy of a Nigerian scam.

It doesn't have to be like that. Drain the swamp. Starve the beast. Don't go along with these questionable arrangements. Don't make yourself a part of the question. There are alternatives.

Not so much E-V-I-L... the book is licensed under Creative Commons, so you're completely allowed to convert it.

Tune: "This Land Was Made For You And Me"
Tune (c) 1940, Woodie Guthrie
As of 2004, the rights to Guthrie's tune are administered by The Richmond Organization, located in New York, NY.

The following is a parody of the dispute between The Richmond Organization and Evan and Gregg Spiridellis of Jibjab.com surrounding JibJab's 2004 hit "This Land," which parodies the US Presidential Race between Republican candidate George W. Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry and which uses Guthrie's tune "This Land Is Made For You and Me."

"This Song We Sing For You and Me"
Lyrics by David W. Richardson

Chorus:
This song is your song, this song is my song,
From A. P. Carter, to his "Little Darling,"
From the Babtist Hymnal, to the "Lovin' Brother,"
This song we sing for you and me.

A man named Guthrie, he had a vision.
He wrote a folk song, and shared it with us.
He sang a tune that was familiar, thinking
"This song I sing for you and me."
(Chorus)

Two men named Evan and Gregg Spiridellis
Sat down to write a song about Bush and Kerry.
They borrowed music, from Woodie thinking
"This song, he sang for you and me."
(Chorus)

"Stop!" said the Richmond Organization.
They own the rights to Guthrie's music.
Evan and Gregg, they called it humor, saying
"This song, we sing for you and me."
(Chorus)

The two famous brothers, they filed a lawsuit
To preserve our rights to use Guthrie's work.
The judge will say that it is okay, saying
"This song, you sing for you and me."
(Chorus)

But it may happen that they lose and then their song will die....
Since this can happen, I put pen to paper
And write these lyrics, daring them to sue me, for
"This song, I write for you and me."
(Chorus)

These lyrics are copyright (c) 2004 David Richardson (davidwr.geo -at- yahoo.com), posted to Slashdot.org under the Creative Common License Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0, as found on http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/.
P ublication date: July 31, 2004, on Slashdot.org
Slashdot.org is not responsible for the content of this post.

Sources:
John Dowdell's commentary on this issue
Woodie Guthrie Lyrics

Nah. They will merge. You see blog give a personal prospective. Now sum blog with creative common, http://creativecommons.org/, with wiki and with reblog http://www.reblog.org/, and what do you get?

A distributed wiki. Distributed across the whole wide web.

A person starts an article in his blog. It is copyrighted with creative common share alike, copyright. That is everybody can copy it in their own blog (reblog it) and modify it (since the license permits it). Through trackback and technoraty you canmove to the following versions, and through the beck link that every reblog entry has, you can go back to the previous one.

The only difference being that there would not be a central service that has to "pay" and control.

I wrote an article on my blog on this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/fool_in_spirit/31 5620.html

An excerpt from my Virtual World Bylaws (rules to live by). This exact scenario fits the bylaw perfectly.

The world must be able to exist when the vendor loses interest and shuts down the hardware.

Peer-to-peer networking is an excellent example of letting a good thing keep running even when somebody wants it to come down. The same resiliency should be applied to virtual worlds. Distribute the servers that manage the virtual areas or worlds and localized hardware problems only mean a degredation in service.

Likewise, folks who are open with their underlying engine will find their technology replicated so that the world continues without them. Find a balance with openness and intellectual property or risk having your worlds be meaningless six months after creation. Note the difference between a graphics engine and an object interaction/scene description engine.

Vendors around the world will testify that customer service is the hardest part of MMOGs. No vendor wants to keep a customer support team paid and trained for 300 total players. If the technology is open, then those 300 players can play when they want and they will be expert enough to keep it running.

But what about artwork and the licensing that goes with it? Yes, that is a troubling sticky point. So what I recommend is that at the moment the vendor decides it's time to abandon, they exercise a clause they signed with all the graphic artists that says all royalty payments stop when the support section for that world closes. The artwork should then be released under something like the Creative Commons License. This ties the company's profit line to the royalty distribution, if one exists at all, and as long as the venture is profitable to someone, the artists involved should be compensated.

oops i messed up the link here is it

FYI, it's called Creative Commons.

I'm sure you have heard of Creative Commons. Get a license, let somebody hang it in his/her server, and send an e-mail to Anthony from iRATE Radio. Bingo, people like me will hear, enjoy (and rate) your music :)

You don't release articles under the GPL, by and large - though it can be done, there are better ways: you use one of the Creative Commons licenses or possibly the GNU Free Documentation License, like Wikipedia.

I don't mean to sound like an ass but as a musician why the hell should I give-up my creative secrets so that someone else can use them?

Believe it or not, some people enjoy contributing to the community. Look at sites such as these for example. For the vast majority of musicians, playing and recording music is not a spectacularly lucrative endeavor.

Is there really any logical reason as to why music should be open source and why I shouldn't make money off my hard work.

Some artists release their work under less restrictive licenses to gain exposure and accolade.

What the hell is the point anyway, the whole idea behind open source software is so that if a coder missed a bug or a feature wasn't included (and that the community wants) it can be fixed or included

You seem to have a very limited conception of the merits of open source. One of the things that motivates me to use open source software is the fear of planned obsolescence. I don't like to have my data at the mercy of a single software company. I'd prefer to at least have the option of employing my fair use rights to customize commercial software. As a consumer of music, wouldn't you like to have multi-track versions of your favorite songs?

THIS COULD NOT WORK WITH MUSIC by it's very definition music is done when it's done.

It does happen, I've already shown you the evidence. The links that I've posted will take you to sites where patch and sequencing data are legally shared among communities of musicians. Some programs, such as Reason, are particularly suited for this kind of sharing. Both the musicians and their audience benefit from this open exchange of information.

We all have taken something from the commons. Would you have been a musician if you had to invent your own instruments, scales, and time signatures?

The parts you left out were not written by me

Then why do you care?

you really have no authority to cut anything out

Actually I do. The content on groklaw was posted under the Creative Commons License which states:

You are free:

• to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
• to make derivative works (I think this applies)

• Attribution. You must give the original author credit. (I did so by linking to the original article at the top with source's name included)
• Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. (if I make any money from posting on slashdot please let me know)

I did (see above) and I explained what I did in the subject line and in the first line of the body. However I did neglect to include the Creative Commons License in my original post but a helpful person did point out and correct my oversight in a follow-up.

so I'm glad you made a note to show the parts you edited, even if after the fact

Huh? I didn't show them all, only a couple choice ones. Do a diff to find the 10 edits.

I am used to unkind and unfair criticism, personally, so I don't much care, but there is no reason to write nasty things about two people

HUH??? Then why are you posting to my obscure post on slashdot if you don't care? I didn't even attack (if you can call it that) or say nasty things about either you or eggplant37 (assuming you're different people). I don't even know who you are. I was communicating my opinion on the content of the report -- I didn't say word one about any of the people involved. So what if I find distracting subjective commentary cruft to be annoying? Apparently others do too. It isn't a personal attack nor is it nasty. We're all free to disagree with each other and express our opinions. Don't take it personally. Sheesh.

If you are the person who put that all together then I'd like to say thanks. Reading the reports brightened my day. This thread however, has not. Cheers and have a great rest of the week.

So, direct them to Creative Commons, walk them through picking a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. That means that people can freely download and listen to their music, but not use it for commercial purposes. When their music takes off and becomes wildly popular, they will still be able to license it to record companies, commercials, movies, and so on.

So, direct them to Creative Commons, walk them through picking a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. That means that people can freely download and listen to their music, but not use it for commercial purposes. When their music takes off and becomes wildly popular, they will still be able to license it to record companies, commercials, movies, and so on.

There are many "some rights reserved" Creative Commons licenses. Some of them do not distinguish between commercial and other reuse. The one closest in spirit to the GNU FDL appears to be Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.

Simply put - No, the CCL prohibits commerical re-use, which is something that we do not want to prohibit.

The "Choose License" page defaults to "Allow commercial uses of your work", btw.

-F

In response to the grandparent post, creative work without pay is ridiculous. So authors shouldn't expect to get paid for commercial publication of their stories? Or we just shouldn't try to make money off of our work at all--since, god knows, no one else on earth gets paid for the work they invest in whatever it is they happen to do. Books should be published for free, without any regard for paying all those involved and the cost of production? Please. Maybe it would work for someone who is creative as a hobby who just posts stuff on their geocities site, but not for someone like me who, uh, wants to avoid getting a "real" job. (Coincidentally, suggesting that ALL programmers should do open-source work without pay of any kind is also ridiculous for all practical purposes, and seems to be what is being advocated here.)

Now, adopting a more open-source approach to creative works IS a good idea and one that I strongly advocate. In fact, I license all of my publically-available work with Creative Commons, and if you haven't heard of them, it's much like the GPL adapted for creative works. (Images, text, and even music now.)

As a writer and artist, I want money for COMMERCIAL uses of my work. I don't want people taking credit for my work itself, either. The only copyright violations that upset me are the use of my work for commercial purposes without my permission and other people taking credit for my work. If someone's making copies for personal use, to share with friends, or making a derivative work (using an image in a collage, fan fiction, quoting me, whatever), I'm frankly flattered and I don't care. That's not the same as just giving it away free for anyone to do what they want with it, but this attitude is not shared by some (very famous and successful, by the way) authors and most big publishers, which I think is sad.

That's just my take on the issue, and I think it's a nice compromise between idealism and the fact that you actually need to make money in order to survive, and of course, to afford the materials necessary to make creative works to begin with.

Kindly point me to a napster-style (i.e., search and download) P2P app that includes a working and used feature whereby the copyright status of any given file can be verified before I download it.


Not all are production code yet, but they are working on it:

Creative Commons Technology

RDF enhanced Search Prototype

How to Tag HTML pages

How license embedding works in MP3s

Applications integrated with Creative Commons

Kindly point me to a napster-style (i.e., search and download) P2P app that includes a working and used feature whereby the copyright status of any given file can be verified before I download it.


Not all are production code yet, but they are working on it:

Creative Commons Technology

RDF enhanced Search Prototype

How to Tag HTML pages

How license embedding works in MP3s

Applications integrated with Creative Commons

Kindly point me to a napster-style (i.e., search and download) P2P app that includes a working and used feature whereby the copyright status of any given file can be verified before I download it.


Not all are production code yet, but they are working on it:

Creative Commons Technology

RDF enhanced Search Prototype

How to Tag HTML pages

How license embedding works in MP3s

Applications integrated with Creative Commons

Kindly point me to a napster-style (i.e., search and download) P2P app that includes a working and used feature whereby the copyright status of any given file can be verified before I download it.


Not all are production code yet, but they are working on it:

Creative Commons Technology

RDF enhanced Search Prototype

How to Tag HTML pages

How license embedding works in MP3s

Applications integrated with Creative Commons

Kindly point me to a napster-style (i.e., search and download) P2P app that includes a working and used feature whereby the copyright status of any given file can be verified before I download it.


Not all are production code yet, but they are working on it:

Creative Commons Technology

RDF enhanced Search Prototype

How to Tag HTML pages

How license embedding works in MP3s

Applications integrated with Creative Commons

There is a barn raising for the creative commons wiki going on now.

The audioscrobbler database is available under a creative commons license.
http://www.audioscrobbler.com

Audioscrobbler is a computer system that builds up a detailed profile of your musical taste. After installing an Audioscrobbler Plugin, your computer sends the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler Server. With this information, the Audioscrobbler server builds you a 'Musical Profile'. Statistics from your Musical Profile are shown on your Audioscrobbler User Page, available for everyone to view.

This is a simple idea, and a useful, community editable database of geographically linked information for London already exists in The Open Guide to London. And it's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license which allows commercial usage. So all you'd need to do is implement some way of searching by OS co-ordinates (most nodes in the Guide have this information) which should be pretty trivial, and you're away.

When looking into metadata, people should probably be sure to check out XMP

It's from Adobe, and whereas RDF just says how to format metadata, XMP addresses what to include in your RDF, and how to place it into different types of files. They have free libraries, but it's simple enough to follow even with your own code. And... given that it's how all Adobe products are doing metadata, at least in the publishing world it will probably stay something to pay attention to.

Creative Commons has addressed this, and I first hit it in researching implementing metadata support for Inkscape.

CC is interested in desktop metadata developments. See this CC weblog post from a few days ago.

You have another option -- put the RDF in a separate file and reference it with a link tag. See http://creativecommons.org/technology/metadata/ext end#link

--

It's copyright infringement (and if there's a rule against camcorders in cinemas, then it's also a form of NDA violation), but it's not theft.

The difference is that if you steal something from me, I don't have it anymore. If you infringe my copyright, I still have my creative work, but I'm likely to make less money from it.

If you steal my car, then tomorrow I can't use it to go out with my famaily. The time that I could have spent in a nice place with my family will never come back, hence it is possible that I may suffer harm of a kind which cannot be put right with money. The point here is that even if I had insurance against car theft which pays me the exact value of the car that was stolen from me, I'll still be very annoyed about the car theft, because I have suffered a kind of harm that cannot be put right with money.

Copyright infringement and NDA violations on the other hand result in damages which consist only in lost profits. (Of course in principle, lost profits can also result in damages of the kind that cannot be put right with money, for example if because of losses you have to lay off employees. However, this type of problems can be avoided by being aware of the risks and buying appropriate insurance.)

I'm really sick of this 'I want it for free' mentality

I'm not saying that it should be impossible for movie studios to enforce a "no camcorders" rule. I just say that if they want such a rule, they should pay for the cost of enforcement.

I seriously think that it would be a worthwhile experiment to start a "creative commons movie company" which releases all their movies under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

This choice of license would reserve all commercial rights (including commercial screening in cinemas, selling DVDs, etc.) but people would be free to use camcorders and share the results noncommercially via P2P filesharing and also create creative derivative works and distribute them noncommercially. I think that through encouraging creative derivative works, movie studios might well be able to increase the long-term revenue form their "intellectual property".

I don't think that all movie studios should be required to use this model. But those which wish to use such a strategy should be able to do so with a level playing field against their competitors. If enforcement of the "no camcorders" rule is financed by taxes, that's a subsidy which specifically helps only those movie companies which do not want to license their works in a "creative commons" way.

If only the book was published under an open licence then I could modify it to suit my Fedora Core 2/GNOME using mum, and others could modify it to suit there Mandrake 10/KDE using moms. The author would get the benefits of others keeping the content up to date, and off the shelf sales (assuming the source was released under a non-commercial licence). The rest of the community would benefit from a book that would better suit our needs.

You can start by browsing already "open sourced" works at opart.org and opsound.org. If you cannot find anything pre-existing to fit your needs, you will at least find a community of artisans who embrace open source principles. You'll also want to consult creative commons for the various free asin speech liscenses for the various mediums of art you'll be using.

I think you'll find that most open source artists, as with most open source developers are not seeking to be financially compensated directly, though are open for donations.

I myself am an "open source" musician and have contributed music to a few open source projects: SonarBuoyix and Tong.

I was thinking a Theora+Vorbis encoding would be interesting to compare with (now that Theora I is finalized, it's safe to encode movies in it). But I don't have the video file from which the WMV was made, and transcoding won't show off Theora or Vorbis. Perhaps someone who made the movie will read this and make a Theora+Vorbis encoding (it would be even nicer if it were licensed under a Creative Commons license and packaged with a copy of the applicable license so we know we can legally share it with our friends).

We put up some sample video torrents including the three winning Creative Commons videos and a full length independent film called "Honey". All of them are made available under Creative Commons licenses. Free videos in a free format, fancy that? Share and enjoy!