Image source: Lulu.tv

Text source: Futureofthebook

07-06-2006,

Lulu.tv made recent news with their new video sharing service which has a unique business model. Bob Young the head of Lulu.tv and founder of the self publishing service Lulu.com also founded Red Hat, which commercially sells open source software. He has been doing interesting experiments in creating business that harness the creative efforts of people.

The new revenue sharing strategy behind Lulu.tv is fairly simple. Anyone can post or view content for free, as with Google Video or YouTube. However, it offers a “pro” version, which charges users to post video. 80% of the fees paid by goes to an account and the money is distributed each month based on the number of unique downloads to subscribing members.

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Image source: http://irish.typepad.com/photos/covers/darknet.html

Text source: Bright Cove

June 24, 2005

This past week I spent my time among two disparate crowds — in San Francisco with Supernova’s new media digerati, content anarchists, and self-publishing blogging media visionaries, among others, and in Los Angeles with Hollywood’s “Masters of the Universe”, those responsible for producing the most mainstream of mainstream film and TV, and individuals who are architecting the strategies for media empires making their shift to the Internet.

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Image source: static.flickr.com

Text source: www.archive.org/

1. “Help Me Help Me” – AllThatFall
2. “If You Make Your Bed in Heaven” – Roddy Schrock
3. “Leftover Secrets to Tell” – Pocka
4. “Secret Life Remix” – Stephane Leonard
5. “The Black Isle (Byrne/Eno Remix)” – (dj) morsanek
6. “Hit Me Somebody (Help Me Somebody Remix)” – MrBiggs
7. “Being and Nothingness (A Secret Life Remixed)” – john kannenberg
8. “Somebody Help Us” – My Fun
9. “Hey” – Mark Rushton
10. “My Bush in the Secret Life of Ghosts” – Prehab
11. “Not Enough Africa” – Ego Response Technician
12. “Helping (Help Me Somebody Remix)” – doogie
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Image source: http://www.some-assembly-required.net/
Text source: http://creativecommons.org/weblog

December 7th, 2005

Note from source: This email is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig and others about the history and future of Creative Commons.
Creative Commons is a young organization. And while we’ve been more successful than I ever imagined we’d be, we’ve also made mistakes. Some of these mistakes we’ve corrected. Some I hope to persuade us to correct. But throughout the three years since our launch, we have worked hard to build a solid and sustainable infrastructure of freedoms for creators.

Along the way, we have picked up some critics. I don’t have the space here to address every criticism. In this email, I’ll talk about just two — one directed at our NonCommercial license option, and the other at two of CC’s non-core licenses. But I’ll continue this discussion next year in a new forum that we’ll launch just for this purpose. Mark Shuttleworth is my model here, and I will be a part of that discussion whenever I can.

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Birth of a Nation, Film still. Source: about.com

Text source: Colostate.edu

CCCC 2006

Latterrell defined her role in the panel by explaining her presentation is a collage and sampling of other voices so it is about remix as much as it is a remix. “Remix” is a modern metaphor for revision. She colored this point with examples of customized sneakers, the tuxedo t shirt, the tangelo, sprite remix, and my personal favorite, labradoodles. She then paired a quote by Emerson on quotation and originality with a remix of President Bush’s State of the Union address that reversed his intended meanings. The collage of images and quotes continues with animation of Office Space meets Super Friends in which Superman, Green Lantern, Batman and Robin talk about memos and office procedures in what Latterell called a “classic mash up” or sampling. Next she showed DJ Spooky’s “Rebirth of a Nation” which spoofed D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation by showing clansmen almost dancing to the technorhythms from both soundtrack and visual beats. Sampling, Latterell asserts, implies breakdown. Then she quoted Johndan Johnson-Eilola from his book, Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work where he asserts breakdown and further discussion as the essence of remix. Latterell concluded with the idea that Lawrence Lessig asserted at last year’s conference—everything in life is remix.
James Porter, “Forget Plagiarism, Teach Filesharing and Fair Use”

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Source: The Guardian UK
Thursday April 14, 2005

MP3 blogs are growing in popularity, attracting thousands of users daily. But while bloggers see their relationship with the industry as one of cooperation, it is a legally grey area. Chris Alden reports

The Guardian

“Find a feeling, pass it on.” So sang pop dreamers The Coral two summers ago: these days, it’s the mantra of a new breed of musical bloggers.

MP3 bloggers, as they are known, are people who hunt down and post musical gems — usually hard-to-find or niche MP3s — for others to discuss and, for a limited time, download.

Simon Pott from Bristol is one. As main contributor to Spoilt Victorian Child, a group blog named after a 1993 B-side by The Fall, he thinks of himself as a kind of DJ for the internet.

“I can’t help it,” he says. “If you pick a record up or are listening to something great, you can’t wait to play it out and share your excitement. When I’m at home listening through my records I get the same feeling.”

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Source: We Make Money Not Art
December 30, 2006

A short recap of Creative Commons-founder Lawrence Lessig‘s evangelization talk (or rather motivation session for the converted) at 23C3 in Berlin about the differences between culture and code.

The fundamental change is the fact that code had been used to create things like printer-drivers and such. But – since a few years, code, or rather the tools that had been coded have become a main element in the creation of culture as we use and witness it today. Especially the whole mashup-culture is heavily relying on the techniques and the mindset of digital creation and open access to other’s works for sampling from and building upon, etc. Popular examples are the anime music-clip subculture like the Muppet Hunter, the Jesus Christ the Musical-clip or lots of pieces that borrow from news networks’ footage to make their own suggestive edits.

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Source: Los Angeles Times

Promises were not honored, a report says, raising the threat of economic sanctions.
From the Associated Press
December 12, 2006

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration Monday criticized China’s record on opening its markets and said the U.S. would not hesitate to seek economic sanctions if that record did not improve.

Calling China’s performance “decidedly mixed,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab released a 100-page report that accused China of failing to live up to commitments it made five years ago, when it joined the World Trade Organization.

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Image source: olerkiilerich.dk
Text source The Pinocchio Theory

December 1st, 2004

A Night at the Hip-Hopera, by the Kleptones, is the best mash-up I’ve heard, at least since Strictly Kev’s Raiding the 20th Century. (The Disney Corp. is taking legal action to suppress Hip-Hopera; the Kleptones are no longer allowed to host the mp3s on their own site. But they list other sites that carry the files; these won’t go offline until Disney gets around to contacting each of them individually with cease-and-desist orders. And if these don’t work, Google has a lot of links to it too).

A Night at the Hip-Hopera consists of music by Queen (whose copyright is owned by Disney, hence the cease-and-desist orders), together with vocal tracks taken mostly from various hip hop artists (both current and old skool, ranging from Afrikaa Bambaataa to Vanilla Ice to the Beastie Boys to Grandmaster Flash to Dilated Peoples to Missy Elliott) together with a few non-hip-hop bands (Electric Six, Morris Day), plus a montage of soundbites from (real and fake) news broadcasts, interview tapes, and old low-budget SF movies (not to mention attacks on copyright law and exhortations in favor of piracy/sampling/remaking). (There’s a fairly complete list of sample sources here).

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Image source: blogimg.goo.ne.jp
Text source: Apophenia

October 08, 2005

After great comments and good conversations, i want to take a second stab at explaining the shift i was asking for wrt copyright and remix. My argument is that we stop thinking of remix as production, but as active consumption. Remix happens as a bi-product of consumption. What we’re remixing is culture and the active consumption of culture is part of identity development and living as a social creature in society.

Think about clothing consumption. Few people buy all of the items on the mannequin. You buy different pieces and mix and mash them. You might even decide to alter them by adding patches, by dying them, by cutting them up. You make the clothing yours. And then you share your consumption with the world by parading on the streets. In this way, you make the clothing tell your story. (tx Kevin Bjorke)

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