Creative Commons

The American Society for Information Science and Technology has just named The Public Domain Book of the Year for 2009.  I am really honoured.

As part of its on-going activities, COMMUNIA is now hosting a series of meetings devoted to Public Domain Calculators - a task carried by the Working Group on Mapping the Public Domain.

The goal of such workshops is to try to determine whether or not a given work is under copyright in a given EU jurisdiction. The first meeting was co-organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation in association with the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge, UK.

The purpose of this workshop - held at the University of Cambridge on 10-11 November - was to produce materials such as legal flow charts and public domain “algorithms” which will help with the representation of different national copyright laws and the determination of public domain status. [20nov09]

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A new report from CED on improving Research, Teaching and Learning in colleges & universities. [19nov09]

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Die Open Web Foundation hat diese Woche ihr Agreement vorgestellt. Das soll in Anlehnung an Creative Commons dazu dienen, Software-Spezifikationen unter eine einfache, offene Lizenz zu stellen:

The Open Web Foundation Agreement [OWFa] itself establishes the copyright and patent rights for a specification, ensuring that downstream consumers may freely implement and reuse the licensed specification without seeking further permission.

Ähnlich wie bei Creative Commons gibt es für das OWFa ein “Deed“. Darin sind die Bedingungen der Lizenzierung in verständlichen Worten erklärt. Eine Anleitung erklärt, wie man das OWFa auf eigene Spezifikationen anwenden kann.

Die Foundation hat es sich zum Ziel gesetzt, der “Welt der Formate und Protokolle” den erfolgreichen Graswurzel-Ansatz der Open-Source-Gemeine nahezubringen. Das Agreement soll dazu dienen, Software-Entwicklung “einfach, sicher und nachhaltig” zu machen.

Zu den ersten Unternehmen, die eine Implementation des Agreements für ihre Spezifikationen (oder einen Teil davon) zugesagt haben, gehören Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! und Facebook.

De eerste selectie van beeldmateriaal voor Open Beelden staat inmiddels onder online! De 469 items die nu op Open Beelden te vinden zijn, komen voornamelijk uit de Polygoon Hollands Nieuws collectie en enkele uit de RVD collectie van het Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid. Alle 469 istems zijn voorzien van een Creative Commons Naamsvermelding GelijkDelen licentie. Deze licentie staat hergebruik van de videos vrij toe (zelfs voor commerciele doeleinden) en maakt zo hergebruik van de videos door andere open content projecten zoals bijvoorbeeld wikipedia mogelijk. De huidige selectie is grotendeels gecentreerd rond een aantal thema’s, namelijk: stad, zomer, natuur, water, voeding, sport, onderwijs, religie en arbeid. De onderwerpen van de items zijn heel divers, zoals bijvoorbeeld een item over een caravan die ook als boot dienst doet, maar ook beelden van de Tour de France in Nederland of de eerste bewoners van Almere. Het beeldmateriaal beslaat de periode 1919 t/m 1980 en gaat van stom zwart-wit materiaal tot kleurrijke beelden met het karakteristieke commentaar van Philip Bloemendaal.

Om een indruk te geven van wat er allemaal te vinden is, een kleine greep uit het aanbod. Uit de vroege jaren, toen er nog geen commentaar onder het beeld zat, komen bijvoorbeeld deze beelden van overstromingen in Ridderkerk en Barendrecht in 1928:

Vanaf de jaren dertig komt er steeds vaker geluid bij het beeld. Tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog wordt het Polygoonjournaal voornamelijk aangewend als propagandamiddel voor de Duitsers en de NSB. Zo is er in 1941 een serie items genaamd ‘Nederland voedt zichzelf’ waarin propaganda wordt gemaakt voor het nationaalsocialistische idee dat een land in staat moet zijn in zijn eigen voedsel te voorzien:

Na de Tweede Wereldoorlog worden de beelden voorzien van het commentaar van Philip Bloemendaal. Met zijn karakteristieke stemgeluid is hij onlosmakelijk verbonden met het Polygoonjournaal:

Vanaf de jaren zeventig worden er ook journaals in kleur gemaakt. Een mooi voorbeeld van de meerwaarde die dit geeft is te zien in de kleurenpracht van de vlinderverzameling van de amateurentomoloog Hermans:

Voor 2009 zijn wij met de toevoeging van de hierboven beschreven selectie even klaar met het toevoegen van materiaal aan Open Beelden. Maar volgend maand wordt het mogelijk om ook als gebruiker materiaal aan Open Beelden toe te voegen. Dit kan materiaal zijn dat gemaakt is op basis van Open Beelden, maar ook eigen werk.

Na de jaarwisseling zullen wij het toevoegen van beeldmateriaal uit ons archief aan Open Beelden hervatten. Daarnaast zullen wij actief samenwerking zoeken met ander collectiehouders, om zo het aanbod op Open Beelden verder te vergroten en meer divers en nog interessanter te maken.

Om de voorbeelden van beeldmateriaal in dit bericht te kunnen bekijken raden wij aan om gebruik te maken van Firefox 3.5, of een andere moderne browser die HTML5 <video> technologie ondersteunt. Internet Explorer e.d. zal de voorbeelden niet kunnen weergeven.

[deze post van Evelien Wolda is overgenomen van het open beelden blog]

Der Wissenschaftliche Dienst des deutschen Bundestages erklärt im “Aktuellen Begriff” “Creative Commons Lizenzen” auf zwei Seiten.

I am off to Madrid for FICOD09 — a Spanish conference on the digital environment.  It looks ambitious, and I couldn’t help being amused by the announcement below..

III Forum on Digital Content to be held in Madrid from November 17th to 19th

From The New York Times: Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court on Friday. The changes would pave the way for other companies to license Google’s vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might resolve its conflicts with European governments.

The revisions to the settlement primarily address the handling of so-called orphan works, the millions of books whose rights holders are unknown or cannot be found. The changes call for the appointment of an independent fiduciary, or trustee, who will be solely responsible for decisions regarding orphan works. [17nov09]

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A video-lecture by Michael Geist: "Everything You Need To Know About ACTA, But Didn't Know To Ask". [13nov09]

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Според “Новинар“:

Компаниите “Вирджиния рекърдс” и “Анимато мюзик” с управител Саня Армутлиева дължат към 150 000 лв. отчисления за авторски права, съобщиха от сдружение “Музикаутор”. Общо музикалните ни фирми имат над 300 000 лв. дългове. Другите длъжници са “Ка мюзик”, “Орфей мюзик” и “Виталити мюзик”. От “Музикаутор” изпратили нотариално заверени покани до петте задлъжнели компании. Директорът на организацията Ценко Минкин заяви, че се надява да не се стигне до съд. Дължимите суми били най-вече отчисления за песните, тиражирани на дискове в България.

Саня Армутлиева участва нееднократно през последните години в редица тв- и радио-предавания заедно с представители на “Интернет общество – България”, в които обясняваше как в Интернет има само пиратска музика и филми. Тук можете да видите едно нейно интервю за “Всеки ден”, а тук – мое. Прочетете ги именно в тази последователност, макар да се разминават по време.

Заключенията си ги правете сами.

Full report of the 6th Communia Workshop: "Memory Institutions and Public Domain" (Barcelona, 1-2 October 2009)

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Hendrik Heuermann und Ulrike Reinhard haben als Herausgeber das Buch “Reboot_D: Digitale Demokratie – Alles auf Anfang” gemacht. Ab dem 25.11.2009 kann es auch in gedruckter Form erworben werden. Das Buch steht schon zum download und zum einbinden auf scribd.com und kann zu den Bedingungen der CC-BY-NC-SA-Lizenz kopiert und weiterverteilt werden.

Hier ist das PDF zum Download

Über das Buch:

Sie stehen sich gegenüber. Die Politiker und die Generation Internet.

Zwischen ihnen ein Fluss aus Vorurteilen, Missverständnissen und unbekannten Tools und Techniken. Dabei könnten sie so viel voneinander lernen: Was die jungen Menschen bewegt, warum sie nicht politikverdrossen sind, wie sich Politik im Internet verändert, wie bekannte Politiker denken und wie sie das Web nutzen. Beide Gruppen könnten voneinander lernen, dass das andere Ufer gar nicht so anders ist. Das vorliegende Buch will zwischen der Internetgeneration und der Politik eine Brücke bauen. Viele Beiträge sind im Austausch zwischen den beiden Gruppen entstanden. Neben vielen politikbegeisterten Digital Natives haben namhafte (Netz-)Politiker wie Oswald Metzger, Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel und Markus Beckedahl zum Gelingen des Buches beigetragen. Prof. Kruse nimmt mit gewohnt kritischer Stimme die Politik ins Visier und ein Blick ins Ausland zeigt wie in China (Isaac Mao) und USA (Tim O’Reilly,) mit diesem Thema umgegangen wird.
Dieses Buch lädt die Politik in Deutschland zum gemeinsamen „Reboot“ ein …

ISBN: 978-3-934013-01-8, whois verlags- & vertriebsgesellschaft, zu bestellen bei: info@whoiswho.de

Für das Buch hat mich Frank Roebers über Netzpolitik, Zensursula und neue Öffentlichkeiten im Netz interviewt.

Und hier ist das Buch zum einbinden und im Blog lesen:

Reboot_D Digitale Demokratie – Alles auf Anfang

I last looked closely at a new micropatronage/crowdfunding site 2 years ago, having resolved that nobody was likely to take an interesting or well executed approach to the idea that would end up making a significant impact. Since then I’ve heard in passing of a number of new projects that fit my low expectations, but also two that appear very well executed and successful on a scale large enough that it isn’t ridiculous to imagine this sort of mechanism becoming important at least for cultural production — MyMajorCompany (French; a few English links gathered here) and Kickstarter.

The occasion of this post is Fred Benenson’s announcement that he’s joining Kickstarter after having done outreach and product management for Creative Commons for the last year and a half (and involved as an intern and activist for much longer). It’s sad to see them go, but great to see recent CC alumni start or join projects that at least have the potential to be important enablers of the free and open world — in addition to Fred, also Asheesh Laroia (OpenHatch) and Jon Phillips (StatusNet).

Congratulations all!

It also feels good to hire people at Creative Commons who have demonstrated some commitment and capacity nearby — Fred, Asheesh, and Jon were all examples of that, and more recently Chris Weber, who was a Miro hacker before coming to CC.

Gleich zweimal hat das Deutschlandradio in der vergangenen Woche über Creative Commons berichtet. Hier sind die beiden Beiträge:

Wie Creative Commons die Vermarktung von Musik verändert (MP3)

Der Jurist und Betreiber des netlabels id.eology, Volker Tripp, ist schon mehrfach in Breitband zu Gast gewesen – zuletzt bei der Sendung vom netaudiofestival in Berlin. Am vergangenen Montag war er zu Gast im Radiofeuilleton und netzmusik-Redakteur Martin Risel hat mit ihm darüber gesprochen, wie sich die Vermarktung von Musik durch Creative Commons verändert hat. Hier gibts das audio dazu:

Ohne Geld aus Überzeugung (MP3)

In der Musik hat uns die Frage schon häufig beschäftigt: Wie verdienen die Musiker mit CC-Musik ihr Geld? Und wir nehmen zur Kenntnis: die einen verdienen tatsächlich mit Merchandizing-Artikeln und Konzerten, die anderen glauben an eine Kultur des Gebens und wollen damit gar nichts verdienen. Ob das, was für die Musik gilt sich auch auf den Film übertragen lässt, werden wir in dieser Woche von John Weitzmann, dem juristischen Kopf von Creative Commons in Deutschland, erfahren. Anlässlich des digitalfilmcamps, einer Mikrokonferenz für open source- und creative commons geprägte Projekte der Filmschaffenden, soll diskutiert werden, wie neue Geschäftsmodelle für die CC-Filmbranche im online-Zeitalter aussehen könnten.

I got a lot of feedback on my last post in which I argued that open source is the wrong metaphor fo science, because it ties us too closely to the artifact that is open source software. The core of my argument remains the same - science is not software, and we shouldn't treat it the way we treat software. But I got a few comments, here on the blog and in email, that are worth looking at.

Here's comment #1.

You cite openwetware and the biobricks registry, but if you look closer, openwetware is a wiki, not a website about open source wetware tech. To my knowledge, other than the people over at diybio, there have been no signs of anyone with an understanding of free and open source software infrastructure (not the legalese- the toolchains) applying the concepts to the world of open source science.

This comment illustrates my point by missing it, which is that we should not be applying the understanding of software to science. In software, we the humans are in charge. We write the code. We compile it. Everything exists inside a system that we built, that is at least somewhat intelligently designed. Bringing this "understanding" to science means we shove a science peg into a software slot. The idea that "open source science" should be a site about wetware tech betrays a focus on the construction of tech, which is indeed the point of software.

But science isn't like software. Science is about extending the boundaries of our ignorance, not making technology. The difference between making technology (which is the point of software) and making discoveries (the point of science) is the root of the failure of the "open source science" metaphor. Science is about creating knowledge that doesn't exist and exposing ignorance that does exist, not about writing source code that we control.

In honor of his recent passing, here's Claude Lévi-Strauss: "The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions." (from Le Cru et le cuit, 1964)

This is precisely why I want to take us up a layer in the ontology. Open source software is an example of distributed innovation, and as an inspiration to make distributed innovation happen in science, it's lovely. But it's an inspiration, not a map.

We should absolutely have distributed innovation in science. Open WetWare (which I am well aware is a wiki) contains many protocols, crafts and techniques, that are shared openly. This is a locally relevant form of distribution, even if it doesn't fit into an open source software box. Control over protocols and craft is at the core of one of the biggest resistors to distribution in science, which is competitive withholding. So is the registry of standard biological parts. These are resources and toolchains that absolutely support distribution of capability and increase capacity, which are fundamental to early-stage distributed innovation.

They're just not what we expect when we wear open source glasses.

Here's comment #2:

The "Open Gel Box" project is an initiative to bring biotech equipment into the 21st century. We need innovation in "established" tools to make them intuitive and accessible for anyone who wants to work with DNA. To that end, a group of users from the DIYbio list got together and designed a better, faster gel system than what exists today.

Pearl Biotech is now manufacturing a complete gel electrophoresis system according to the Open Gel Box design The Pearl Gel Box is available for $199 at http://www.pearlbiotech.com. We're advocating for better equipment on all fronts, such as an Open Thermal Cycler.

I think this is awesome. It's not "open source" though. It's not even what I'd call "distributed innovation" - the innovation theorists call this kind of thing User-Driven Innovation. This is about as clear a case of UDI as I know, right down to the fact that it's designed by the DIY folks and then made pretty and sold by a company. This again gets to the paucity of the open source software example. It simply isn't big enough to fit science into it.

Distributed science, user-driven science, open innovation science, we need ALL of them, not a narrow idea that comes from software. It's about hardware for science. It's about data for science. It's about laboratories for science. It's about research departments and funders and promotion and tenure. It's about paradigms, and paradigm shifts.

It's not software.

We control software. We don't control science. DIY Biology is one of the absolute leading examples of how, when we have a critical mass of open craft and protocols, users can lead the way. But it's not something that's enabled by an open source license, a code version repository, and other hallmarks of open source software. It's users saying, "screw this, I can do better" - and doing it. It's users who know the problem best and design the best solutions.

The business school folks call this "stickiness." The knowledge of how to make the solution is localized - sticks - to the user. The dumb firms in the sector only make products their marketing departments tell them about, and the smart ones find ways to take user inventions and turn them into their product lines. Like Pearl.

Comment #3:

(from my post: Stem cells, mice, vectors, plasmids, and more will need to available outside the old boy's club that dominates modern life sciences.)

This is simply never gonna happen, because of the huge irreducible expense of maintaining and manipulating these reagents.

See: Personal Genome Project, Coriell Cell Culture Repository, Jackson Laboratories, StrainInfo. I could link a dozen more. The nodes are emerging. What's missing is the network that connects them. What's missing is an impact factor for materials.

We're headed straight towards a future where scientists will need to publish their tools, data, and narratives, instead of compressing everything into a "paper" that is constrained by the cost of printing and mailing. I for one can't wait. It's going to be a key to distributing democratized access to tools, which is fundamental for both distributed innovation *and* user-driven innovation.

Comment #4:

I believe your historical facts are a little skewed. Open Biology perhaps began on the internet back with BIONET, which functioned well through the late 80's and early 90's, until the network apparently failed to grab sufficient interest for funding. [...] There have been efforts to create biology software repositories (similar to sourceforge.net except for Biology software) and these have largely failed to attract a majority of Bio-scientists too.

This comment's talking about software. I'm not. It again illustrates the way that the open source metaphor comes with code-centric blinders.

It would be great to accelerate this process even further, for example by expanding PLoS, encouraging all scientists to publish their working software (for example, MATLAB scripts) into open source repositories

Now this is talking about the foundations for distributed science. When there is software in science, it should be published. Just like stem cells. Into repositories. Couldn't agree more.

encouraging the people-in-the-middle (hobbyists, engineers) to publish in an intermediate form which isn't as strict as a scientific journal yet maintains some level of technological standard and legitimacy -- similar to the Internet RFC's, which started as simple technical memo's.

Now here's where the comment truly shines, IMO. This is thinking broadly about breaking open the central metaphor of knowledge governance in science. This is not about "open source" - the internet RFCs aren't "open source software" - they are protocols, distributed for implementation and comment. Sort of like that stuff on the Open WetWare wiki, huh?

Coming back to my point.

Let's take off the open source glasses. Making science isn't like making software. Engineering foundations for distribution, for user hacking, for bringing more people into the system, these are the things that allowed open source to emerge in software. Good design choices, like separation of concerns, led us to the world of open source software. Let's learn from those lessons and build the foundations first, and let the science surprise us with the way it localizes distributed and user driven innovation.

Science Commons helps the W3C in making "knowledge sharing more efficient". [3nov09]

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SWR2 Wissen berichtete heute über “Gemein-Freiheit – Vorboten einer freien digitalen Kultur”.

Zitieren, kopieren und collagieren – die Sprache des 21. Jahrhunderts ist digital. Texte, Musik, Bewegtbilder lassen sich in Sekundenbruchteilen körperlos rund um den Erdball schicken. Die binäre Information ist so flüchtig geworden wie der Gedanke selbst. Ort und Zeit spielen im virtuellen Gedanken- und Ideenaustausch keine Rolle. Ganz gleich, ob Kunst, Kultur oder Wissenschaft – im virtuellen globalen Netzwerk des Internet wird gemeinsam an einer neuen Kultur gebaut, mit neuen Regeln und Werten. Die Wissenschaft bietet mit “Open Access” einen offenen Zugang zu ihrer Forschung. Und der Lizenzbaukasten “Creative Commons” soll bisherige rechtliche nationale Schranken überbrücken und den Ideenaustausch im Netz rechtlich absichern und fördern. Denn die Vision einer freien digitalen Kultur rüttelt am Wertesystem, das sich auf den Buchdruck gründet und aus geistigen Werken besteht, die oft nur Einzelne besitzen. Sie verweist auf eine überlieferte Metapher: Die jeweils lebende Generation steht auf den “Schultern von Riesen”. Das heißt, alle Menschen schöpfen unentwegt aus dem kulturellen Erbe und arbeiten mit ihren Ideen und Werken daran weiter.

Kann man sich hier als MP3 anhören.

Here below please find the October edition of our monthly newsletter, with a selection of updated news about Communia activities and other issues related to the digital Public Domain. [30oct09]

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I was asked in an interview recently about "open source science" and it got me thinking about the ways that, in the "open" communities of practice, we frequently over-simplify the realities of how software like GNU/Linux actually came to be. Open Source refers to a software worldview. It's about software development, not a universal truth that can be easily exported. And it's well worth unpacking the worldview to understand it, and then to look at the realities of open source software as they map - or more frequently do not map - to science.

The foundations of open source software are relatively easy to track. In the beginning, there was free software and Richard Stallman. RMS didn't just invent the GPL as a legal, he wrote crucial foundational software for writing software, notably the GNU compiler collection, GNU Debugger, and the original Emacs. So from the beginning, there was not only a free legal tool, but tools for coding that were better than other systems at the time.

Simultaneously, we can see that the emergence of microcomputers and ubiquitous access to the internet expanded the number (and interconnectivity) of potential programmers. Suddenly there were tens of thousands of programmers with computers at home and at work. The explosion of the Web saw the creation of infrastructure like code repositories, version control systems, and coding communities. Thanks to object-orientation, software was also very amenable to being broken into defined, modular chunks and tasks. One coder could work on a kernel function, another on a user interface function, a third on an application, and they could be reasonably sure that as long as they all followed the standards, their work would snap together into the growing distribution. The phrase "open source" can sort of be a shorthand for this kind of innovation, which we also see in wikipedia and other community built projects.

Open source, if we view it through a different lens, is really more about a distributed methodology for software development. The burden of creation is widely distributed across a massive community with more-or-less equal access to tools and systems. In this context, the role of the legal tool is more akin to an enzyme. It was an essential piece of a puzzle, but it was not the only piece. In fact, without the rest of the infrastructure (connectivity, tools, and people) the legal tool on its own would not have led us to GNU/Linux.

Yet far too often the focus on "porting" open source to science focuses on the legal aspects rather than performing an analysis of the infrastructure for science. Science is actually not very similar to modern software at this point. In science, especially life science, many of these factors don't exist. There isn't democratic access to tools. You tend to need a lab, which means you tend to need to work at a place big enough to afford a lab, which tends to mean you need an advanced degree, which means there is no crowd - thus the fundamentals for distributed science development aren't there. And when we try to force open source on a knowledge space that is fundamentally poorly structured for distributed development, we'll not only be frustrated by our failures to replicate the GNU/Linux and Wikipedia successes, we'll risk discrediting the idea of distribution itself.

Another problem: the open source approach, which is based on the open licensing of a powerful, moderately internationally harmonious property right, doesn't really apply very well to science, in which the IP situation is far more often patents v trade secret instead of copyright v copyleft. Copyrights are free to acquire, and thus easy to license at no cost as well. No one's losing an investment they made of $50,000 or more to acquire their copyright when they license code under copyleft. Patents are not so amenable to legal aikido. And they can kill a great idea in the cradle by tying up all the rights in a tangle of patent thickets and expensive licenses.

A third problem is that science is a long, long, long, long, long way from being a modular knowledge construction discipline. Whereas writing code forces the programmer to compile the code, and the standard distribution forces a certain amount of interoperability, scientists typically write up their knowledge as narrative text. It's written for human brains, not silicon compilers. Scientists are taught to think in a reductionist fashion, asking smaller and smaller questions to prove or disprove specific hypotheses. This system almost guarantees that the tasks fail to achieve modularity like software, and also binds scientists through tradition into a culture of writing their knowledge in a word processor rather than a compiler. Until we can achieve something akin to object-orientation in scientific discourse, we're unlike to see the distributed innovation erupt as it does in culture and code.

A fourth problem is that science has the additional problem of collective action congestion created by the significant institutional participation impact of research institutions, tech transfer offices, venture capital, startups, and so forth. Software isn't subject to these constraints, at least, not most software. But science is like writing code in the 1950s - if you didn't work at a research institution then, you probably couldn't write code, and if you did, you were stuck with punch cards. Science is in the punch cards stage, and punch cards aren't so easy to turn into GNU/Linux.

None of this is meant to discourage open approaches. We need to try. The problems we face, from neglected diseases to climate change to earthquake analysis to sustainability, are so complex that they'll probably overwhelm any approach that is not inherently distributed. Distributed systems scale much better than non-distributed, closed systems. But we should always understand the foundations, and closely examine our work to see if we need to work on building those foundations.

In the sciences, the first foundation is access to the narrative texts that form the canon of the sciences. Tens of thousands of papers are published a year. They need object-orientation - semantics - so that we can begin to treat that information as a platform, not a consumable product. Licensing is a part of this, but so is technology and scientific culture. Better ontologies, buy-in to technical standards, publisher participation in integration and federation, and more will be foundational to the establishment of content-as-platform. As the data deluge intensifies, this foundation becomes more and more important, as the literature provides the context for the data. Moving to a linked web or semantic web without a powerful knowledge platform at the base is building a castle made of sand - close to the water line.

Another foundation is access to tools and the creation of fundamental open tools. We need the biological equivalent of the C compiler, of Emacs. Stem cells, mice, vectors, plasmids, and more will need to available outside the old boy's club that dominates modern life sciences. We need access to supercomputers that can run massive simulations for earth sciences and climate sciences. These tools need to be democratized to bring the beginning of distributed knowledge creation into labs, with the efficiencies we know from eBay and Amazon (of course, these tools should perhaps be restricted to authenticated research scientists, so that we don't get garage biologists accidentally creating a super-virus).

The legal aspects weave through these foundations. The license has power to create freedoms but the improper application of a license approach carries significant risks. The "open source" meme can often feel a little religious about licenses, but it's good to remember that the GPL was invented not in the desire to write a license, but in a desire to return programming to a free state. With data and tools, we have the chance to avoid the intellectual property trap completely - if we have the nerve for it.

There is some distributed innovation happening in new fields of science, like DIY biology, and in non science communities, like patients sharing treatments and outcomes with each other. A quick examination of the foundations reveals they are ripe for distribution: DIY biology can build on open wetware, the registry of standard biological parts, and the availability of equipment and tools. Patients can connect using Web 2.0 and talk to each other without intermediaries. But this doesn't scale across into traditional science.

I propose that the point of this isn't to replicate "open source" as we know it in software. The point is to create the essential foundations for distributed science so that it can emerge in a form that is locally relevant and globally impactful. We can do this. But we have to be relentless in questioning our assumptions and in discovering the interventions necessary to make this happen. We don't want to wake up in ten years and realize we missed an opportunity by focusing on the software model instead of designing an open system out of which open science might emerge on its own.

The workshop, held on Thursday 1 and Friday 2 October 2009 at the University of Barcelona in Spain, started with a keynote by Dr. Ben White (British Library), emphasizing that we are at a crucial time: norms are currently being set by different uses, governments, and technologies, and libraries have to find a way around such differences in their on-going digitalisation efforts. It is important to get digital preservation right at economic, technical and legal levels, otherwise we will not be able to build and preserve our digital public domain. For instance, an analysys of over 100 contracts revealed that most of them systematically undermine preservation right of libraries. It is imperative to follow the lead of countries such as Ireland and Belgium: contract law cannot undermine exceptions to exclusive rights. Indeed, the British Library is currently in discussion with Wikimedia commons following the lead of the Bundesarchiv: they plan to use "social contracts" rather than a contractual framework such as a Creative Commons license. Above economic copyright, there are other issues to to be beared in mind, such as moral rights, religious sensitivities and other concerns of libraries that want people to know that certain material comes from such libraries. [28oct09]

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So no surprise I’ve been thinking more and more about semantic web technologies and the law, given my recent trips and talks on open data. This represents some of my early-stage thinking about how copyright plays into the coming framework.

For those not familiar with this area, my big picture layman’s summary of the semantic web / linked data: Make more stuff machine readable so that we can do smarter and better things with machines.

One of the strands of developing semantic web technology deals with building out copyright (and other IP) permissions into the framework. You can find out what the rights cover what, and where to go to get copyright permissions, etc, generally through adding metadata (data about data).

Going back to my lay interpretation, this means “making copyright permissions machine readable so that machines can do smarter and better stuff when dealing with copyright permissions”.

Creative Commons for example has started this through giving each of its licenses a set of machine readable code and through developing standards around these machine readable expressions of their licenses such as ccREL. Incidentally they give their licenses out in three versions: human readable (a summary), lawyer readable (the actual license) and machine readable (the extra stuff in the copy and paste code they provide).

Incidentally, at ISWC, there was a really interesting presentation on a paper (PDF) on looking at attribution, Creative Commons, and Flickr within a semantic web framework and ways to make compliant attribution in CC licenses easier.

I’m not qualified to go into deep detail on the technical side of implementing rights into the semantic web, so I’ll leave that to others. I’m thinking more about the big picture on how you build out such a framework for copyright and what approach you take.

Where do you start when trying to describe copyright licenses for the web?

I see (and have seen presented by others) three options:

• Option 1. Start with copyright law and write out permissions based on each of the individual rights bundled up with copyright.
• Option 2. Start with what users may do with a work and then whether you grant them permission.
• Option 3. Start with current copyright licensing practice and how copyright gets bundled and used by licensors currently.

I see options 2 or 3 as the only real way to go. Starting with copyright law (Option 1), and expressing the rights – such as simply “distribution” – paints with entirely too broad a brush. To express a permission in terms of “distribution” misses the fine grained control that copyright gives rightsholders.

For example, industry practice (say in the movie industry) often break down the broad distribution right into very fine grained levels, such as:

• by geographic region – North America market versus European market
• by media type – theatrical vs satellite rights vs DVD rights
• by time – licenses last for set number of years

Option 1 – starting with copyright law – also has a further wrinkle: What copyright law do you use? Copyright consists of national rights harmonised by international treaties. The Berne Convention (or rather, Berne via TRIPs) sets a floor and not a ceiling, and member states have fairly wide variation in how the implement and enforce it. Using Berne as a “copyright law for the global internet” may be tempting but is inaccurate – 171 countries on the internet mean 171 different sets of copyright law. One specific right such as “distribution” means in one place may mean something different somewhere else, and you have to find ways to express both of those differences (though that is not to say that this can’t be done or that semantic web technologies aren’t addressing the problem of different definitions).

Options 2 and 3 admittedly aren’t too far apart from each other. Mainly I see this as a difference in tone rather than a deep divide:

• Option 2 starts with the hypothetical user and asks what could he or she possibly do with the work, versus
• Option 3 starts with industry practice in licensing and asks how do licensors typically license their works.

I think Option 3 is probably the more practical of the two, as while copyright law may allow super fine grained control at times, the key is what level of control most rightsholders usually exercise and how they bundle those rights. Mechanical rights, for example, are the name given by the industry to the right to reproduce and distribute a music CD, but aren’t a single right granted by statute.

Either way, more fine grained expressions of copyright will get built into the next generation of web technologies – indeed this has already started with ccREL and others. Starting with existing copyright practice and building out from there seems to make the most sense to me.

YMMV

Como ya les había contado estaría apoyando las iniciativas de ccLearn en iberoamérica y con ese propósito he estado trabajando con varios amigos en la creación de la comunidad hispanoparlante dentro de OpenEd.

Nos complace presentarles esta comunidad y para ello copio acá la presentación e invitación que estamos circulando, por favor siéntanse libres de circularla, copiarla, acogerla y bueno, nos vemos en OpenEd/Es. El anuncio fue hecho ayer por Creative Commons

Educación y Comunidad: un nuevo portal internacional para la educación abierta, ¡en español!

Para impulsar el movimiento en nuestra región hace falta generar puentes que sirvan para conectar los fabulosos proyectos que están teniendo lugar en la comunidad de habla hispana en América Latina y en la península Ibérica. Tenemos la obligación y a la vez la oportunidad de hacer visible y promover lo que sucede en nuestro propio entorno y además podemos apoyarnos unos a otros para generar una cultura participativa y activa en pro de la educación abierta. Este es el espacio que la Comunidad OpenEd Hispanoparlante –OpenEd en Español, busca ocupar, desarrollar e impactar con la ayuda de todos.

¿Qué es OpenEd?

OpenEd es la comunidad de educación abierta en Internet. OpenEd es el nuevo portal desarrollado y sostenido por el Proyecto ccLearn de Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ los invitamos a conocerlo y a ¡participar del sitio para hispanoparlantes: OpenEd-ES!

OpenEd es un wiki y por tanto, es una invitación para que colabores y aportes tu propia visión de la comunidad, para que ¡crezcamos juntos!

¿Cómo participar?

Para dar un primer paso hemos creado unos espacios que buscan dar inicio y bases a esta comunidad. Te invitamos a conocer el sitio y a colaborar, hay muchas formas de hacerlo escoge la tuya y encontrémonos en OpenEd

¿Tienes un proyecto de educación abierta o de recursos educativos abiertos?

Revisa si los datos están acá o ajusta e ingresa los datos correspondientes

¿Vas a hospedar o conoces un evento en el que el tema de educación abierta sea eje central?

Revisa si los datos están acá o ajusta e ingresa los datos correspondientes

¿Eres un novato en esto?, ¿ya sabes algo y quieres contribuir con recursos para informar y explicar a otros sobre educación abierta, recursos educativos abiertos, Creative Commons, etc.?, ¿quieres ayudarnos a traducir?

Puedes ayudarnos contribuyendo con material, podemos traducir lo que valga la pena y de esa forma comunicar a los demás de qué se trata. Si te interesa éste es el sitio que debes visitar

¿Quieres participar activamente y formar parte del grupo que arranque y dinamice esta comunidad?

¡Inscríbete en la lista de discusión!

Estamos presenciando el nacimiento de una comunidad que necesita nuestra región, ¡gracias por participar, divulgar y apoyar esta iniciativa!

Importancia de OpenEd en Español para la Educación:

Pensar en educación abierta es hablar del creciente y fantástico movimiento que ha surgido en torno a la apertura de los recursos educativos que pretende que cualquiera, en cualquier lugar, pueda acceder, usar y reutilizar materiales educativos ya existentes en formas nuevas y creativas o simplemente permitir que los adapten para satisfacer sus necesidades propias y sus contextos locales o culturales. Internet ha servido de plataforma tecnológica para potenciar y favorecer este tipo de proyectos sin embargo, reconocemos que el material y los recursos más visibles son aquellos del mundo angloparlante, ayudemos a dar visibilidad y fuerza al mundo hispanoparlante.

¡Repite este mensaje a quienes creas que pueda interesar!

In a great blow for consumers everywhere, the prospect of 3-strikes for copyright infringers has returned with a vengeance, as both the EU Council and French Constitutional court pushed forward with their respective legislation. The HADOPI bill is still alive, and the EU has shredded requirements for judicial oversight.

While in some countries this threat had been reduced in recent weeks, with strong protests in the UK and an open rejection in Germany, lobby groups and politicians are still pushing for the ruling in France and in the EP. [26oct09]

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Can you name some of the other high-profile musicians who use CC licenses?
We've worked with all kinds of artists. Beastie Boys, Deerhoof, Dangermouse, Pearl Jam, Girl Talk and T-Pain are just a few that use CC licenses.

How do you think Creative Commons and copyright fits into this new music industry?
We're in a transition period. And I think that an approach like a CC license can be a critical part of the new music industry because it puts the artist in control to permit which rights they want to grant and which rights they want to keep. I think you'll have more luck getting people involved with your music if you're clear about what you want them to be able to do and tell them how you want to be attributed. This clarity will be integral to the relationship between people who consume and listen to music and people who create and publish it.

The Internet is a copy machine - it's a natural state of the thing. Denying that, is akin to feeling oppressed because, as a blacksmith, your business is being trampled by these new fangled auto-mobiles. Get over the fact that horseshoes are yesterday's technology and start figuring out how to leverage the natural 'copy state' of the new machine.

	Web ramblinglibrarian.blogspot.com myrightbrain.wordpress.com roughnotes.wordpress.com

Oficialmente en Colombia estamos hablando de estrategias de postconflicto, pero más allá de lo que opinemos de eso creo que hay una realidad que es especialmente diciente en contravía de esa posición: todos los desplazados del conflicto. En cifras conservadora se habla de tres millones de personas refugiadas, desplazadas al interior de Colombia, obligadas a moverse de su territorio y moverse a núcleos urbanos. Se trata de almas a las que a mi me gustaría decirle que estamos en el “postconflicto”, pero a las que su realidad dolorosa y evidente las sitúa en un inminente conflicto.

Aterciopelados el año pasado (septiembre de 2008) inauguró la exposición “Destierro y reparación”, en el Museo de Antioquia con una canción sobre esa realidad: “Errante Diamante”. “Destierro y reparación” es un proyecto liderado por el Museo de Antioquia, la Alcaldía de Medellín, la Corporación Región y la revista Semana junto a otros socios, que busca crear conciencia acerca del drama del desplazamiento en Colombia y la canción, la música, el video, lo logran…

Hoy la canción está en Internet Archive con una licencia CCBY2.5 de Colombia. Creo que este tipo de acciones no deberían pasar desapercibidas e incluso me parece que deberían ser más evidentes (como incluir la licencia en el video) puesto que no puede desestimarse el poder de la música para tocar corazones, para convertirse en bandera de causas y sensibilizar a otros de las realidades por dolorosas que sean. La licencia permite a otros reutilizarla para ampliar, desarrollar, reinterpretar e impactar con su mensaje, ojalá y eso ocurra, ojalá y lo que muestra toque más corazones para que todos hagamos propia esa realidad.

Les dejo también el video en el que Héctor Buitrago habla de la canción

Open Access Week (October 19-23, 2009) is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research results.

Open Access Week builds on the momentum started by the student-led national day of action in 2007 and carried by the 120 campuses in 27 countries that celebrated Open Access Day in 2008. 2008 organizers SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), the PLoS (The Public Library of Science), and Students for FreeCulture welcome new key contributors for 2009: OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries), which will again spearhead events in developing and transitional countries. [20oct09]

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Vía Carolina Rossini me entero de esta teleconferencia que tendrá lugar a través de Elluminate con Esther Wojcicki quien ha sido pionera de la interrelación entre educación tecnología y es parte del Consejo de Creative Commons.

Para los interesados la información para acceder a la conferencia es la siguiente:

Esther Wojcicki on Creative Commons and Open Education
Date: Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://www.tinyurl.com/futureofed.
The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if
you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is
configured for Elluminate, please visit
http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be
posted within a day of the event.

My vanity Google Alert turned up something a little strange today. A track contributed to the Internet Archive’s Open Source Audio collection, entitled “Nathan R Yergler”. OK, more than a little strange, that’s weird.

It’s sort of relaxing to listen to, but… yeah, weird.

Einige seltsame Töne waren da neulich schon zu hören, beim VUT-Panel der all2gethernow: Man sprach offen über ein neues Super-Gebilde zur Zusammenführung aller Rechte am deutschen Musikrepertoire, und sogar über eine mögliche Auflösung der GEMA und Neugründung in zeitgemäßerer Form – ganz nach dem Vorbild englischer Clubs, die bestimmte Mitglieder loswerden wollen. Man waren allerdings in diesem Falle weder Netzaktivisten noch frustrierte GEMA-Mitglieder, sondern u.a. GEMA-Syndikus Alexander Wolf, Patrick Strauch von Sony/ATV-Deutschland und Mark Chung von Freibank.

Es ging dort einmal mehr um die leidigen “Online-Rechte”, die Groß und Klein im Musikbusiness das Leben immer schwerer zu machen scheinen. Die ungewöhnlichen Aussagen bei der a2n lassen nun allerdings Spekulationen darüber aufkommen, was da wohl wirklich geplant sein mag zwischen den großen Verlagen, Indy-Labels, Rechtemanagern und GEMA. Ich habe deshalb eine kleine Nachlese zum nämlichen Panel auf der Website von CC Deutschland eingestellt, inklusive Links auf den Audio-Mitschnitt und ein Transkript der betreffenden Passage. Ein Highlight daraus:

Dr. Martin Schaefer: Aber wäre es denn jetzt ‘ne Möglichkeit – jetzt mal ganz provokant gefragt – dass man jetzt mal diese gesamten Versuche, die jetzt mit verschiedenen Agenturen gemacht werden, mal vor die Klammer zieht und genau das, was Sie gerade gesagt haben, das nochmal versucht und sagt ‘Jetzt machen wir das Ganze mal aus den zwei Grundeinstellungen‘ … wir akzeptieren jetzt einfach, dass die Online-Rechte aus der traditionellen GEMA raus sind, und wir machen jetzt einfach eine Neugründung einer anderen Verwertungsgesellschaft, allerdings einer, die eben dann möglicherweise – das müsste man dann europäisch oder nochmal politisch möglich machen, denn mit den gegenwärtigen Gesetzen geht das natürlich nicht – aber wäre es nicht dann eine Variante, dass man sagt ‘Wir machen diese Kombination eben individuell und kollektiv auf einer sauberen Grundlage und machen das, was die englischen Clubs machen, die ihre Mitglieder nicht rauswerfen dürfen, dass sie sich einfach auflösen und neugründen‘ (Gelächter). Ja, ich meine für diesen Bereich … dieser Bereich ist ja isolierbar, weil er ohnehin nur zu einem ganz kleinen Teil in der GEMA ist.

Alexander Wolf: Aus meiner Sicht … das ist genau die Antwort. Es könnte niemand besser zusammengefasst haben als gerade Herr Holzhauer, wie’s aussieht, aber das ist das Problem: Wir können nicht … die GEMA-Administration kann sich nicht bewegen, weil die Rahmenbedingungen … ob das die Satzung ist, die wir jetzt geändert haben auf der letzten Mitgliederversammlung … jetzt können wir Inkasso-Mandatsverträge abschließen, was soviel bedeutet wie: Ein Rechteinhaber muss uns die Rechte nicht übertragen, wir können aber dafür trotzdem das Inkasso durchführen … was passiert? Das Deutsche Patentamt, unsere Aufsichtsbehörde, schaut natürlich sehr genau dadrauf. Die Politik mischt sich ein, alles wieder sehr sehr national fokussiert. Wir müssen es schaffen, wie Du das richtig dargestellt hast, den breiten Rahmen – also den Standort Deutschland – in den Vordergrund zu rücken, und zwar auf Europäischer Ebene. Und den können wir nur erfolgreich … diesen Prozess können wir nur erfolgreich bestehen, wenn wir die Rahmenbedingungen ändern.

Dass der Auflösungsbeschluss auf der Tagesordnung der nächsten GEMA-Hauptversammlung stehen wird, ist unwahrscheinlich. Spannend ist trotzdem, wie es wohl weitergehen wird. Fest steht, dass inzwischen in und um die GEMA Dinge gefragt und ausgesprochen werden dürfen, die noch vor kurzem undenkbar waren. Falls GEMA-Mitglieder also z.B. schon immer mal bei ihrer Gesellschaft nachfragen wollten, wann denn endlich eine Option zur individuellen CC-Lizenzierung eingeführt wird … jetzt wäre der richtige Zeitpunkt für so eine Frage.

Recently Amazon has been adding public domain titles to its Kindle eBook store at a frantic pace: over 18,000 titles are now available as free downloads. The step is in addition to other 'remix' titles for sale, such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, that expands the original Jane Austen novel with "all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, and other biological monstrosities", with some help by Brooklyn, NY-based writer Ben Winters.

This book continues the same ideas laid out in the previous novel of the "Jane Austen and monsters" series, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies created by the editors at Quirk Classics. A new trend including other classics of English literature now in the public domain, that are being re-actualized by adding a pinch of fun and creativity to their original texts. [13oct09]

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How can a layperson figure out the 'finer points' of copyright duration? [10oct09]

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On the Creative Commons blog I highlight the connection between 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics winner Elinor Ostrom’s work on the governance of common-pool resources and relatively recent work on knowledge commons, including a 2003 paper she co-authored addressing the connection.

Great choice. There are countless posts in the econoblogosphere about the prize — I’ll mention two. Paul Romer (a favorite to win the Nobel himself) praises her practice of economics, essentially as being based on an investigation of reality rather than wishful thinking (what Romer calls a “skyhook”):

They, more than anyone else in the profession, spelled out the program that economists should follow. To make the rules that people follow emerge as an equilibrium outcome instead of a skyhook, economists must extend our models of preferences and gather field and experimental evidence on the nature of these preferences.

Economists who have become addicted to skyhooks, who think that they are doing deep theory but are really just assuming their conclusions, find it hard to even understand what it would mean to make the rules that humans follow the object of scientific inquiry. If we fail to explore rules in greater depth, economists will have little to say about the most pressing issues facing humans today – how to improve the quality of bad rules that cause needless waste, harm, and suffering.

Cheers to the Nobel committee for recognizing work on one of the deepest issues in economics. Bravo to the political scientist who showed that she was a better economist than the economic imperialists who can’t tell the difference between assuming and understanding.

Alex Tabarok (who I’ve mentioned before on the related problem of private provision of public goods provides a summary of Ostrom’s work on the well-governed commons. Here’s Tabarrok’s excellent closing paragraph:

For Ostrom it’s not the tragedy of the commons but the opportunity of the commons. Not only can a commons be well-governed but the rules which help to provide efficiency in resource use are also those that foster community and engagement. A formally government protected forest, for example, will fail to protect if the local users do not regard the rules as legitimate. In Hayekian terms legislation is not the same as law. Ostrom’s work is about understanding how the laws of common resource governance evolve and how we may better conserve resources by making legislation that does not conflict with law.

This speaks directly to commons-pool (rivalrous, non-excludable) goods, but applies analogously to public (non-rivalrous, non-excludable) goods.

For the past few years the State Journal-Register, the only daily newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, where I grew up, has published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license as part of GateHouse Media.

Furthermore, at least relative to the newspaper industry’s low standards, the SJ-R site is excellent. (Latest indication I’ve noticed of how low newspaper site standards are — visit the Oakland Tribune’s site, click on “home delivery”, and you’ll get the home page content again — actually you get “page not found” but the site returns the home page content for any page it doesn’t know about — see the archived home page and /services.)

Today’s paper has a curious feature that I’ll take advantage of the limited rights granted by GateHouse’s use of the most restrictive CC license to republish, as I did previously with the Google Chrome Comic.

Bow builder Bob Linksvayer has been constructing his own bows, arrows and other hunting equipment since he was a teen-ager. Chris Young/The State Journal-Register / CC BY-NC-ND

Bob Linksvayer makes all types of traditional hunting equipment including bows, arrows, knives and other gear. What he can’t make, he trades with other craftspeople. Chris Young/The State Journal-Register / CC BY-NC-ND

* interview for The Sofia Echo weekly, published on Friday, Oct. 10. Author: Rene Beekman

On the morning of our interview, Veni Markovski posted a Facebook status message saying he thought that, “as long as there are people in Bulgaria like those with whom I talked the night before, there is hope”.

Asked who he was referring to, Markovski points to the first row of tables in the hotel lobby we are sitting in, and, without naming his conversation partners by name, he says “we were actually sitting right here, at that table over there. These were three well established Bulgarian bloggers, who, besides blogging, also have a profession. If there are still people like them in this country there is still hope that things might become a little bit different.”

Swamp media
“The majority of media has become very – not even populist in the English sense of the word – but they do not report facts, they create stories. They want to produce news instead of reporting the news,” Markovski says.

“If you take a look at the Bulgarian media, there is a specific tense they use; I call it future undefined. In today’s newspaper there is a headline that they are raising the pension of 41 000 pensioners, but if you read the article, you see that nobody is raising anything. It is a proposal that some people are looking at. That’s why I call it future undefined; it may happen in the future, but we are not sure,” he says.

According to Markovski, it is thanks to Bulgarian bloggers that one can still find some reliable information.

“Some bloggers are becoming really better [than newspapers] because they report the news, without speculation, and they do not use this future undefined tense,” he says.
And this is even easier to see from abroad, he adds. “When I’m in the country, like for a holiday, I get sucked in. It’s like a swamp, you can’t get out.”

From the outside
Markovski, who currently lives in the US where he works as an independent business consultant, started as a system administrator for the first Sofia-based FidoNet bulletin-board system in 1990.

In 1993, Markovski and Dimitar Ganchev started Bulgaria’s second Internet Service Provider (ISP) Bol.bg, a company Markovski headed for several years. In 1995, Markovski co-founded the Bulgarian Internet Society.

“It was the sixth internet society that was founded in the world, now there are more than 80. In the beginning it was mostly explaining what the internet was. Nobody knew. At the time there were probably 2000 users in the whole country,” he says.

The Bulgarian Internet Society became known both locally and internationally, when it successfully fought a government plan to introduce a licensing scheme for ISPs. Currently, the non-profit organisation participates in European projects for free and open source software. It was the Bulgarian Internet Society to introduce the Bulgarian version of the Creative Commons licenses, with adaptations to local law.

“So many websites now offer their content using creative commons licenses that Google and Yahoo offer specific search options to only search within that content. Even in Bulgaria, the President’s site and the Foreign Affairs Ministry are published under Creative Commons licenses,” Markovski says.

“This is what we put a lot of effort into; explaining to people that there is nothing wrong in publishing your content for free. It is really ridiculous to see a copyright sign on government.bg. They can’t get copyright by the Council of Ministers, because they don’t produce anything that can be copyrighted,” Markovski says.

As an example, he points to a website Prime Minister Boiko Borissov recently opened, which contains all the stenographs of the Parliament’s sessions. The content of the site is copyrighted, which, Markovksi says, would mean that newspapers would have to ask permission any time they want to quote from the content.

“We don’t have a working system in this country. If you compare it to Western Europe or the US, where it doesn’t really matter who is your king or who is your president, the society works. Here, if you have an idiot for a prime minister, then the whole system stops working. People always wait for some command from above; they never take initiative.
If I were a system administrator at one of the ministries, I would have changed the copyright notice a long time ago. No one would have noticed that it was not copyrighted,” Markovski says.

Wrong data

Referring to a recent interview with Ina Kileva, executive director of Bulgarian anti-piracy outfit Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP), published by The Sofia Echo, Markovski says the the discussion has been “going on for a very long time and I think it is completely wrong”.

“A few days ago [Bulgarian daily] 24 Chassa published another letter from the music or movie industry, again blaming the internet for the fact that they can’t sell their music or movies,” he says.

“This discussion is based on the assumption that the users are the bad guys who are downloading music for free off the internet, or watching movies.

They say that if we somehow manage to punish these people, instead of downloading movies and music off the internet, they will start buying. But that is a very wrong assumption, because if users are not allowed to download, they will just not download and they will not buy. They are not going to pay for the music or for the movies. If they wanted to pay, they would not be watching the latest movie on a 12-inch screen in not so good quality, they would just go to one of the big movie theatres and watch it for 10 leva,” Markovski says.

According to Markovski, the data quoted by anti-piracy organisations is incorrect. As an example, he quotes the data on software piracy in Bulgaria.

“There is no software piracy in Bulgaria, and that is very easy to prove even with the data that the Business Software Alliance (BSA) provides,” Markovski says.

Quoting BSA data, Markovski says that in 2000, between 80 and 90 per cent of software in Bulgaria was alleged to be pirated, with an estimated value of 10 million dollars.

“If that is the whole amount of software in Bulgaria, that is a very low number, but that is their data, so let’s assume their data is correct,” Markovski comments.

“In 2002, the Bulgarian government signed a deal worth 13.6 million dollars to buy software from Microsoft. Now, if you have 10 million worth of illegal software and you buy 13 million, the next year you should have a plus. What the BSA did though, was that they increased the amount of illegal software to 20 million dollars. Why? Who knows. But probably they couldn’t say ‘we screwed up last year, so we have to fix the numbers this year.’ In 2008, then minister Nikolai Vassilev signed a deal for 54 million euro, again for software only from Microsoft. I bet you the BSA will still claim there is illegal software in Bulgaria,” Markovski says.

“Obviously, something is wrong with their numbers. And if it is something that is so simple to be caught, then how can you trust their numbers at all?” he says.

The BSA is an international organisation, whose members include some of the world’s largest computer software and hardware producers. The organisation’s activities include fighting software piracy and lobbying for tougher laws on anti-piracy. According to Markovski, these companies, and therefore the BSA itself, have an interest to give governments reasons to increase spending on software, and one of the tools used in this is the Special 301 Report, published annually by the office of the US Trade Representative. The report lists countries that are thought to lack sufficient intellectual property rights protection and enforcement.

“Obviously, if Bulgaria is on the 301 list, the minister will say ‘we are in this report and we have to get out, so we have to buy software.’ This is a vicious circle, there is no exit,” Markovski says, “unless you have a government that is committed to change the perception that everyone in this country is a criminal and a pirate. What you need to have is someone at a governmental level who will say ‘your data is not correct and until you fix it, we are not going to take it as reliable’. They can send a letter to the US Trade Representative and explain that if they continue to include Bulgaria in the 301 list based on data that comes from producers’ organisations and the BSA, Bulgaria will make this a public case. There is nothing worse for a US official than to find out that they have been misled by a lobbyist organisation and publicly embarrassed,” he says.

Solutions
As chief executive of one of Bulgaria’s then largest ISPs, Bol.bg, Markovski says he has made proposals to intellectual property rights holders and their representatives to solve the piracy dispute. One of these proposals was a flat-rate fee, to be paid to rights holders, for every subscriber of the ISP.

“We proposed that we would pay two leva, or one euro, per user a month, no matter whether they download movies and music or not. I think we had around 10 000 users at that time, so that would have been roughly 120 000 euro a year from only one ISP,” Markovski says.

“This would have been a very good working model, so all the other ISPs would have joined. And today, with close to 45 per cent of Bulgarians online, or about three million people, they could have had 36 million euro a year, money they can never make by selling CDs,” he says.

According to Markovski, the offer was declined. “Obviously they prefer to get a small amount of money from their foreign sponsors, like other similar associations from all over the world, mainly the US of course.”

With a friend who at the time worked as a top-level officer for the Bulgarian police, Markovski says he once discussed the software piracy issue. According to his police-friend, Markovski said, it was very simple; as long as there is the perception that there is piracy in Bulgaria, the associations get funding from their international bodies to fight the piracy. “If there is no piracy, they get no funding,” Markovski sums up the friend’s conclusion.

“When there was ‘piracy’ in Bulgaria, and I always put quotation marks around the word piracy because I believe there is no piracy in Bulgaria, the workshops that the BSA and others organised in Bulgaria were held in good resorts around the country. For several days they would put together teams of investigators, judges and prosecutors, and they would explain to them how to fight cybercrime and copyright-related crimes. When Bulgaria was dropped off the Special 301 Report, suddenly the same workshop would not take place outside Sofia and there was only water to drink. Otherwise, I’ve been at such workshops where there were big dinner tables with lots of alcohol, you name it,” Markovski says.

“In other words,” he says, “the fight against piracy is in the interest of those who fight it. They have no interest to solve it. If they wanted to solve it, they could have accepted our offer eight years ago. By now, they could have had 200 million for those years, roughly.”

Data wronged

Where Markovski’s comments on piracy and the anti-piracy lobby are light-hearted and sprinkled with an amusement that expresses how absurd he finds the situations he describes, his views on the Bulgarian implementation of the European Data Retention Directive are a lot gloomier.

The police and Interior Ministry background of many of the members of the new Government, combined with the fact that the current opposition cannot oppose the introduction of data retention laws because it was lobbying to get such laws passed while still in power in the previous government, seem to seal the fate of any discussion on this topic in Parliament.

“We may face a data retention law which will be accepted by acclamation. Nobody will be against it,” Markovski says.

“Interior Minster Tsvetan Tsvetanov said they are looking to use court approval before using retained data, but the problem is the police will have constant access, without the knowledge of the service provider, to the data that goes through their system. In other words, if they want to use this in court they will get permission from the court. But if they want to use it for something else, be it control, blackmailing, economic interests, they don’t need the court’s permission. So I think people should know that this could and probably would be used against them. Not could, but would. It will be used,” Markovski says.

“The thing is, we do have freedom of speech. But if someone finds out that you have published something which someone at some level of the government does not like, no one is going to punish you for publishing it, but they will find a different way to punish you by following your communication,” he says.

“The previous Interior Minister [Mihail Mikov] argued that the police needs to act really fast and they don’t have time to go through the court. But even in the current law the minister has the right to give wiretap approval for 24 hours and only then you need to get court approval. Only very few judges have refused approvals for wiretapping. So they are basically saying ‘Look, we are going to be wiretapping you anyway, so why are you wasting our time with this stupid court approval?’ That’s how I read it anyway,” Markovski says.

“In Bulgaria it is well known there has been wiretapping, under communism and today. So if we have a history with that, why would you think the government would suddenly say ‘well, we used to do that, but we are not going to do it anymore.’ If we talk about the individuals, the people who actually have been access to it and have been making a lot of money with it, why would they suddenly stop? These are the same people. The companies that used to buy data are the same,” he says.

“The government says they do it for the security of the people, which is not always the case.

Or let’s put it this way; while it is the case, in our [Bulgarian] conditions it can also be used for someone’s personal benefit. That is what I am afraid of, because we don’t have a society in this country. At all. We don’t have any mechanism of control over abuse of that database,” Markovski says.

“We all know that the US was spying on their own citizens after September 11, even though this was illegal. The difference between there and the EU-proper, as I call it, and here, is that if somebody breaks the law there, whether that is a law enforcement officer or a minister or senator, they could be caught and punished. In Bulgaria there has been no case of anyone going to prison. That is the difference,” he says.

In 1997, Markovski wrote an essay entitled “Why nothing is going to change in Bulgaria in the next 25 years”. The subtitle of the essay was “If you’re in a bad mood, don’t read this because it is not going to improve”.

“I read it again recently and I think it is still true, only that instead of 25 I could probably say 45. Bulgaria is very consistent in not creating the basic principles of modern civilization,” he says.

“I used to joke that it is not bad that there will be wiretapping, as long as there is a provision in the law that when you lose your notebook, you can go to the police and get a copy of your communication, then it is fine. Free backup.”

Dies ist ein schönes Beispiel für Remix-Kultur. Andreas Lloyd, ein Fan hat Kevin Kellys großartiges Buch “Out of Control” remixt. Dabei hat er anscheinend versucht das hoch interessante aber auch hoch komplexe Buch zu kürzen und so einen anderen Fokus zu setzen. Lloyd schreibt dazu auf seinem Blog:

Kevin Kelly’s book “Out of Control” is a fascinating book full of fascinating ideas reaching across the board from artificial intelligence, evolution, biology, ecology, robotics and more to explore complexity, cybernetics and self-organising systems in an accessible and engaging way…

.. I would have preferred a much shorter book, more narrowly focused on the idea of self-organising systems. The whole text of the original book is easily available online at Kelly’s own website, so I thought: Why not remix the online text to make such a book? So I did.

So ist ein Werk entstanden von dem Kevin Kelly selbst anerkennend sagt:

I think Lloyd is a fantastic editor, and his fan-based work is exactly the kind of liquidity of text that I believe will propel books in the next century. His remix is the kind of literary fluidity I was talking about in my Scan This Book article for the New York Times.

Die Remix Version von Andreas Lloyd heißt “Bootstrapping Complexity” und steht auch als PDF zum Download bereit. Großartig! Solche kreativen Prozesse wären ohne zeitgemäße Lizenzierungsmodelle wie Creative Commons vor ein paar Jahren noch gar nicht denkbar gewesen. Die Originalversion des Buches “Out of Control” gibt es natürlich auch als web text und als freies PDF.

Yesterday evening I published my second set of Ubiquity commands which provide a Ubiquity interface between Firefox and Emacs—specifically org-mode—using org-protocol. Ubiquity is an experimental extension from Mozilla Labs that lets you interact with the browser by giving it short, plain text commands. For example, “share” to post a bookmark to Delicious, or “map” to open a map of the selected address.

Org-Mode is an Emacs mode that can be used to keep track of notes, agendas and task lists. I use it to maintain my task list for various projects and take notes when I’m in a meeting. I really like that while it’s an outline editor at heart, it lets me write lots of text and go back later and figure out what’s actually actionable, as opposed to maintaining separate notes and task lists. org-protocol is included in recent releases and lets you launch an instance of emacsclient with some additional information (i.e., the URL and title of a web page, etc) and take some action on it. One of the built in “protocols” is sending that information to remember mode, which org-mode augments.

The main command is simply remember. Invoking it will send the current URL and document title to org-mode’s Remember buffer. You can optionally type a note or select text in the page to be captured along with the link.

Once you’re in the buffer you can make any changes needed and then simply C-c C-c to save the note, or C-1 C-c C-c to interactively file the note someplace else. I’m using this command to quickly store links with some notes to project files. I hope this will be particularly useful when I run across something for a project I’m not actually able to spend time on at the moment.

Note that before using the commands you need to configure Firefox to understand org-protocol:// links, and need to configure a remember template. The template I use looks like:

(?w "* %?\n\n Source: %u, %c\n\n %i" nil "Notes")

This store the information in the Notes section of my org-default-notes-file and positions the cursor ready to type a heading.

To install, visit the command page and click “Subscribe”in the upper right hand corner when prompted (this assumes you have Ubiquity already installed). You can find the Javascript source on gitorious; I’ll be adding my RDFa commands to that repository as well.

This afternoon I left work early to visit my landlord and try to iron out an issue that I’ve been dealing with for over two weeks. The issue, ironically, is that I want to give them money. Some would even call it rent.

The issue boils down to this: I was having my rent debited from my checking account and wanted to stop. I called and left a message asking how to do that, and never heard back. I called a few more times, asking if it was indeed going to keep going, or if I should write a check (you know, cause I want to pay my rent on time). I never heard back. I left two notes at the office for the building accountant (“Jeff”), sent an email to the accounting email address they post online and called their general accounting phone number. Nothing. The one accountant I did manage to speak to (“Mike Z”) told me that, yes, the rent would be debited for October, but not November. I left my phone number in case that changed for some reason, but never received a call.

When I checked today and saw that the rent still hadn’t cleared, I decided I should follow up. They’re usually not this tardy taking my money, so I stopped by the office today. When “Jeff” finally came downstairs (after not answering his phone when the woman at the front desk called up), he launched right in. “Oh, I guess I stopped things too soon, but if you can just write a check, we’ll call it OK.” Frankly, stopping the debit now is fine with me; but how was I to know? My response, “That’s fine, I just didn’t know I was supposed to write a check, since I hadn’t heard anything back from you,” was met with a simple, “Oh, right.”

It’s obvious CitiApartments is in trouble; our elevator was recently broken for a couple weeks and just after Labor Day a piece of the gutter fell off the second story into the courtyard. Luckily no one was hurt. Google’s cache reveals that my building was (is?) for sale, although maybe that complaint to the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection had something to do with the page going away.

This incident, though, is the first time that my direct experience has been uniformly negative. Up until now I could say, “Yeah, I’ve heard they don’t treat residents that well, but I don’t have any direct experience with that. Maybe it’s isolated cases.” Unfortunately their lack of communication while dealing with this means that I no longer trust them to deal with me in an up front manner. A simple phone call back to say, “yes, we’ll stop debiting your account, when would you like to do that?” would have retained my belief that they value me as a tenant. All they had to do was communicate that they’d received my request and were acting on it, and trust would still exist between us.

Sorry, Citi; I won’t be too sad when you finally implode.

AcaWiki^† officiously launches tomorrow. The goal is to make academic knowledge more accessible through wiki community curated article “summaries” — something like long abstracts aimed at a general audience rather than specialists.

This could be seen as an end-run around access and copyright restrictions (the Open Access movement has made tremendous progress though there is still much to be done), but AcaWiki is a very partial solution to that problem — sometimes an article summary (assuming AcaWiki has one) would be enough, though often a researcher would still need access to the full paper (and the full dataset, but that’s another battle).

More interesting to me is the potential for AcaWiki summaries to increase the impact of research by making it more accessible in another way — comprehensible to non-specialists and approachable by non-speedreaders. I read a fair number of academic papers and many more get left on my reading queue unread. A “human readable” distillation of the key points of articles (abstracts typically convey next to nothing or are filled with jargon) would really let me ingest more.

Probably the closest things to AcaWiki summaries are Research Blogging and the idea that journal authors should contribute to Wikipedia. While both of these are great, blog posts don’t obtain the benefits (and costs) of distributed authoring and maintenance and direct contribution of research to Wikipedia has very limited applicability. So I think AcaWiki can make a big contribution. It could turn out that some granularity other than individual article summary is the sweet spot for community curation of academic knowledge — one could imagine field and sub-field and sub-sub-field surveys organized in WikiProject^†† fashion as that — but article summaries are a very concrete place to begin, and more should naturally grow out of the AcaWiki community’s efforts to figure out the best ways to create and organize article summaries.

I’ve written a summary of Steven Levitt’s Why are Gambling Markets Organised So Differently from Financial Markets? I’d be really appreciative of article summaries in the following categories:

• Any paper on prediction markets, in particular from the Journal of Prediction Markets.
• Any paper from Rejuvenation Research.
• Any paper by my brother.
• Any paper about Creative Commons.

^†I’ve been somewhat involved in AcaWiki over the past year — I’m on its board and Creative Commons has done some technology consulting on the project, credit to Nathan and bits from Steren, Nathan K, Alex and Parker — and note that Neeru Paharia, AcaWiki’s founder, was one of CC’s earliest employees. AcaWiki summaries are of course contributed under a CC Attribution license, so you can do anything you want with them so long as you link back to the summary.

^††I urge anyone not already impressed by the contribution of WikiProjects on Wikipedia or generally interested in community curation and quality to check out Martin Walker’s WikiProjects: Improving Wikipedia by organising and assessing articles presented at Wikimania 2009.

Sunday the weather in San Francisco shifted from San Francisco Autumn back to, well, San Francisco Summer: cool, windy, and clear; sunshine that imparts far less warmth than you might imagine. Richard and I ventured to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival at Golden Gate Park Sunday afternoon. Aimee Mann was playing the Arrow Stage and I’d managed to miss every other opportunity I’ve had to see her play live.

Speedway Meadow was far more crowded than I imagined and I think Richard was amused by my remaining provincialism. Somehow we managed to make our way through the crowd and find a spot stage left. We put our blanket down, enjoyed a sandwich, and tried to avoid being trampled while we waited for Aimee to come on.

I’ve heard several live recordings of Aimee and she was just as warm and engaging Sunday as she is on those recordings. She opened saying, “Holy shit! There’re way more people here than I expected! This is awesome!” and interspersed generous helpings of “oh, thanks” and “you guys are so great” between songs. It may be an act but it works for me. On some level I’m able to forget the crowds, the pushing, the pot, the sorority girls behind me (“Oh my god guys! She drank my fifth of vodka! MY FIFTH!” “Damn! No!” “Yeah!”) and imagine that Aimee and I are hanging out and she’s just picking and playing a few songs, just for me.

The set was “Magnolia” heavy. I’m not sure if that’s because her more recent work on ”@#%&*! Smilers” is even less “bluegrass” or if she’s playing what she thinks people know and want to hear. The set list went something like this:

The Moth
Nightmare Girl
Momentum
Build That Wall
Par for the Course
Amateur
This is How It Goes
Wise Up
Save Me
You Could Make a Killing
Little Bombs
Thirty One Today
Freeway

I thought it was interesting that she introduced the last two song as “from my most recent album, Smilers,” as opposed to calling it “Fucking Smilers”. Everyone got a good laugh, too, when she introduced “Save Me” by saying, “this is the song that lost an Oscar; to Phil Collins.”

I had hoped to stick around and see Neko Case and Emmylou Harris, but after walking over to the Star Stage, I decided it wasn’t worth dealing with the crowd. Another time. I’m not sure that I love the free festival musical experience, but I’m glad I finally got to see Aimee live.

Under the title Memory Institutions and the Public Domain, the 6th Communia Workshop took place on Thursday 1 and Friday 2 October 2009 at the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Presentations slides, abstracts, policy recommendations as well as for some speakers transcripts or papers are available from the the download section of this website and also by clicking directly on the presentations titles in the programme below. Policy recommendations and abstracts are also available in a single downloadable document.

[01oct09]

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Here below please find some selected news related to latest and upcoming activities and events of COMMUNIA - The European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain. [27sept09]

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I spent Labor Day weekend in New York City working on a side project with Alex. The project is coming together (albeit slowly, sometimes), and there have been a few interesting technical challenges. Labor Day weekend I was building an interface for editing data on the site. The particular feature I’m working on uses a multi-level data model; an example of this kind of model would be modeling City Blocks, where each Block has one or more Buildings, and each Building has one or more Tenants. Using this as an example, I was building the City Block editor.

Django Formsets manage the complexity of multiple copies of a form in a view. They help you keep track of how many copies you started with, which ones have been changed, and which ones should be deleted. But what if you’re working with this hypothetical data model and want to allow people to edit the Buildings and Tenants for a Block, all on one page? In this case you want each form in the Building formset to have a complete Tenant formset, all its own. The Django Formset documentation is silent on this issue, possibly (probably?) because it’s an edge case and one that almost certainly requires some application-specific thought. I spent the better part of two days working on it—the first pretty much a throw away, the second wildly productive thanks to TDD—and this is what I came up with.

Formsets act as wrappers around Django forms, providing the accounting machinery and convenience methods needed for managing multiple copies of the form. My experience has been that, unlike forms where you have to write your form class (no matter how simple), you write a Formset class infrequently. Instead you use the factory functions which generate a default that’s suitable for most situations. As with regular Forms and Model Forms, Django offers Model Formsets, which simplify the task of creating a formset for a form that handles instances of a model. In addition to model formsets, Django also provides inline formsets, which make it easier to deal with a set of objects that share a common foreign key. So in the example data model, an instance of the inline formset might model all the Buildings on a Block, or all the Tenants in the Building. Even if you’re not interested in nested formsets, the inline formsets can be incredibly useful.

Let’s go ahead and define the models for our example:

class Block(models.Model):
    description = models.CharField(max_length=255)
 
class Building(models.Model):
    block = models.ForeignKey(Block)
    address = models.CharField(max_length=255)
 
class Tenant(models.Model):
    building = models.ForeignKey(Building)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    unit = models.CharField(max_length=255)

After we have our models in place we need to define the forms. The nested form is straight-forward—it’s just a normal inline formset.

form django.forms.models import inlineformset_factory
 
TenantFormset = inlineformset_factory(models.Building, models.Tenant, extra=1)

Note that inlineformset_factory not only creates the Formset class, but it also create the ModelForm for the model (models.Tenant in this example).

The “host” formset which contains the nested one—BuildingFormset in our example—requires some additional work. There are a few cases that need to be handled:

1. Validation—When validating an item in the formset, we also need to validate its sub-items (those on its nested formset.
2. Saving existing data—When saving an item, changes to the items in the nested formset also need to be saved.
3. Saving new parent objects—If the user adds “parent” data as well as sub-items (so adding a Building, along with Tenants), the nested form won’t have a reference back to the parent unless we add it ourselves.
4. Finally, the very basic issue of creating the nested formset instance for each parent form.

Before delving into those issues, let’s look at the basic formset declaration.

from django.forms.models import BaseInlineFormSet
 
class BaseBuildingFormset(BaseInlineFormSet): 
    pass
 
BuildingFormset = inlineformset_factory(models.Block, models.Building,
                                    formset=BaseBuildingFormset, extra=1)

Here we declare a sub-class of the BaseInlineFormSet and then pass it to the inlineformset_factory as the class we want to base our new formset on.

Let’s start with the most basic piece of functionality: associating the nested formsets with each form. The super class defines an add_fields method which is responsible for adding the fields (and their initial values since this is a model-based Form) to a specific form in the formset. This seemed as good a place as any to add our formset creation code.

class BaseBuildingFormset(BaseInlineFormSet): 
 
    def add_fields(self, form, index):
        # allow the super class to create the fields as usual
        super(BaseBuildingFormset, self).add_fields(form, index)
 
        # created the nested formset
        try:
            instance = self.get_queryset()[index]
            pk_value = instance.pk
        except IndexError:
            instance=None
            pk_value = hash(form.prefix)
 
        # store the formset in the .nested property
        form.nested = [
            TenantFormset(data=self.data,
                            instance = instance,
                            prefix = 'TENANTS_%s' % pk_value)]

The heart of what we’re doing here is in the last statement: creating a form.nested property that contains a list of nested formsets—only one in our example and in the code I implemented; more than one would probably be a UI nightmare. In order to initialize the formset we need two pieces of information: the parent instance and a form prefix. If we’re creating fields for an existing instance we can use the get_queryset method to return the list of objects. If this is a form for a new instance (i.e., the form created by specifying extra=1), we need to specify None as the instance. We include the objects primary key in the form prefix to make sure the formsets are named uniquely; if this is an extra form we hash the parent form’s prefix (which will also be unique). The Django documentation has instructions on using multiple formsets in a single view that are relevant here.

Now that we have the nested formset created we can display it in the template.

def edit_block_buildings(request, block_id):
    """Edit buildings and their tenants on a given block."""
 
    block = get_object_or_404(models.Block, id=block_id)
 
    if request.method == 'POST':
        formset = forms.BuildingFormset(request.POST, instance=block)
 
        if formset.is_valid():
            rooms = formset.save_all()
 
            return redirect('block_view', block_id=block.id)
 
    else:
        formset = forms.BuildingFormset(instance=block)
 
    return render_to_response('rentals/edit_buildings.html',
                              {'block':block,
                               'buildings':formset,
                               },
                              context_instance=RequestContext(request))

<form action="." method="POST">
  {{ buildings.management_form }}
  {% for building in buildings.forms %}
  <div class="formgroup">
    {{ building }}
 
    {% if building.nested %}
    {% for formset in building.nested %}
    {{ formset.as_table }}
    {% endfor %}
    {% endif %}
  </div>
  {% endfor %}
      <input type="submit" value="Save" />
</form>

When the page is submitted, the idiom is to call formset.is_valid() to validate the forms. We override is_valid on our formset to add validation for the nested formsets as well.

class BaseBuildingFormset(BaseInlineFormSet): 
    ...
 
    def is_valid(self):
        result = super(BaseBuildingFormset, self).is_valid()
 
        for form in self.forms:
            if hasattr(form, 'nested'):
                for n in form.nested:
                    # make sure each nested formset is valid as well
                    result = result and n.is_valid()
 
        return result

Finally, assuming the form validates, we need to handle saving. As I mentioned earlier, there are two different situations here—saving existing data (and possibly adding new nested data) and saving completely new data.

For new data we need to override save_new and update the parent reference for any nested data after we save (well, instantiate) the parent.

class BaseBuildingFormset(BaseInlineFormSet): 
    ...
 
    def save_new(self, form, commit=True):
        """Saves and returns a new model instance for the given form."""
 
        instance = super(BaseBuildingFormset, self).save_new(form, commit=commit)
 
        # update the form's instance reference
        form.instance = instance
 
        # update the instance reference on nested forms
        for nested in form.nested:
            nested.instance = instance
 
            # iterate over the cleaned_data of the nested formset and update the foreignkey reference
            for cd in nested.cleaned_data:
                cd[nested.fk.name] = instance
 
        return instance

Finally, we add a save_all method for saving the parent formset and all nested formsets.

from django.forms.formsets import DELETION_FIELD_NAME
 
class BaseBuildingFormset(BaseInlineFormSet): 
    ...
 
    def should_delete(self, form):
        """Convenience method for determining if the form's object will
        be deleted; cribbed from BaseModelFormSet.save_existing_objects."""
 
        if self.can_delete:
            raw_delete_value = form._raw_value(DELETION_FIELD_NAME)
            should_delete = form.fields[DELETION_FIELD_NAME].clean(raw_delete_value)
            return should_delete
 
        return False
 
    def save_all(self, commit=True):
        """Save all formsets and along with their nested formsets."""
 
        # Save without committing (so self.saved_forms is populated)
        # -- We need self.saved_forms so we can go back and access
        #    the nested formsets
        objects = self.save(commit=False)
 
        # Save each instance if commit=True
        if commit:
            for o in objects:
                o.save()
 
        # save many to many fields if needed
        if not commit:
            self.save_m2m()
 
        # save the nested formsets
        for form in set(self.initial_forms + self.saved_forms):
            if self.should_delete(form): continue
 
            for nested in form.nested:
                nested.save(commit=commit)

There are two methods defined here; the first, should_delete, is lifted almost directly from code in django.forms.models.BaseModelFormSet.save_existing_objects. It takes a form object in the formset and returns True if the object for that form is going to be deleted. We use this to short-circuit saving the nested formsets: no point in saving them if we’re going to delete their required ForeignKey.

The save_all method is responsible for saving (updating, creating, deleting) the forms in the formset, as well as all the nested formsets for each form. One thing to note is that regardless of whether we’re committing our save (commit=True), we initially save the forms with commit=False. When you save a model formset with commit=False, Django populates a saved_forms attribute with the list of all the forms saved—new and old. We need this list of saved forms to make sure we are able to save any nested formsets that are attached to newly created forms (ones that did not exist when the initial request was made). After we know saved_forms has been populated we can do another pass to commit if necessary.

There are certainly places this code could be improved, tightened up or generalized (for example, the nested formset prefix calculation and possibly save_all). It’s also entirely plausible that you could wrap much of this into a factory function. But this gets nested editing working and once you wrap your head around what needs to be done, it’s actually fairly straight forward.

This week Lily Allen’s views on file-sharing have been the hot topic. While some agree with her calls to ’save’ the industry from a fate worse than death, others did not subscribe to the doomsday scenario. One of those is UK musician Dan Bull who has written a brilliant song-come-open letter to Miss Allen...

... Say what you like about Lily Allen. Agree with her. Disagree with her if you like. Whatever the position, it’s difficult to take it away from her – she has done more in the last week to raise the online debate over illicit file-sharing than any other artist in recent months.

... “After Lily’s hectic week I’ve made a pro-filesharing song and video calling her up on a few of the claims she’s made,” UK musician Dan Bull explains to TorrentFreak.

“I’ve also tried to outline some of the main moral arguments for filesharing in the lyrics. Hope you enjoy, and hope the readers do too.”

• The band is explicitly allowing users to copy, transmit, re-post, share and remix the work under the specified conditions as detailed in the CC license.
• The band retains the rights to their own music; they do not give up any of their rights.
• They also have the rights to sell their own music; releasing their work under CC does not affect their rights to sell/ release their work in other ways.

	Web ramblinglibrarian.blogspot.com myrightbrain.wordpress.com roughnotes.wordpress.com

Estaba explorando jamendo.com para un poco de música antes de un viajecito… me encontré otra vez con Silvia O y su fabuloso album “Es tarde”. Mientras escuchaba la música recordé su entrevista en Altair durante el Campus Party 2008 en la que explica su apuesta por cultura libre, su lógica e incluso se anima a hacer algunas predicciones, es una FABULOSA ENTREVISTA!!

Pero, en mi exploración buscando por “Colombia” encontré también a Héctor Tobo y su “Episodios” que también me gustó… Anímense a explorar música CC y si eres músico colombiano piensa ¿valdría la pena apuntarte también? (lástima yo no canto ni en el baño!)

In letzter Zeit wurde wieder mehrfach versucht, Creative Commons als NGO vor irgendwelche politischen oder kommerziellen Karren zu spannen. Um diese Fälle nicht einfach undokumentiert zu lassen, und weil es sich dabei um ziemlich problematische Komplimente handelt, hier die Kurzfassung für alle:

• Den Anfang machte die Piratenpartei, die als Hauptveranstalter für den 8. August 2009 in Hamburg einen “Creative-Commons-Day” ausrief und dazu Flyer/Plakate fabrizierte, auf denen unten links groß das Logo von CC und daneben noch etwas größer das der Piraten zu sehen war. So sehr sich Anliegen der Piraten auch im Lizenzmodell von CC widerspigeln mögen: Dass man als ausgewachsene Partei, die zu Bundestagswahlen antritt, nicht mehr ganz die Narrenfreiheit hat wie als reine Aktivistengruppe, scheint zumindest den Hamburger Piraten entgangen zu sein. Aber auch ohne Parteistatus wäre vorheriges Fragen nicht nur freundlich gewesen, sondern das Mindeste.

• Weiter ging es dann mit der “Blogger Conference Germany 2009″, die in der Liste der Angemeldeten auch “creativecommons.org” aufführte. Wie sich hinterher rausstellte, hatte einer der zahlreichen europäischen CC-Affiliates seine Teilnahme zugesagt – und schwups, stand die zentrale Blog-URL von Creative Commons Inc. USA als Referenz der Bloggerkonferenz im Netz. Sieht ja auch besser aus als bloß die Homepageadresse eines weniger bekannten CC-Aktivisten.

• Der dritte Fall ist eher kommerzieller Natur: Der noch bis heute laufende “Reeperbahn Campus”, eine Art Musikmesse mit Festival, nennt den Sonstiges-Teil seines Veranstaltungsangebots mal eben “Creative Common Ground”. Selbstverständlich soll vor allem der Begriff “common ground” (laut dict.leo.org etwa “Gemeinsamkeit” oder “Bezugserde”) im Vordergrund stehen. Eine Nähe zu CC sei da völlig zufällig und keinesfalls beabsichtigt, versicherte man uns auf Nachfrage.

Warum stellt sich CC so an bei derlei Vereinnahmungsversuchen? Weil die Organisation Creative Commons nach ihren Gründungsstatuten zur absoluten politischen Neutralität verpflichtet ist und bei Vertoß dagegen riskiert, die Gemeinnützigkeit abgesprochen zu bekommen. Genau deshalb ist der Name der NGO als eingetragene Marke inklusive Logo das Einzige, was bei CC einem sehr strikten “alle Rechte vorbehalten” unterliegt und nur nach einer eng gefassten Policy lizenziert wird. Das ist nebenbei auch am Ende jeder CC-Lizenz ganz deutlich in der “Creative Commons Notice” zu lesen (bezieht sich dort allerdings nur auf die Lizenzparteien). Wer lesen kann, ist also auch hier klar im Vorteil. Und man kann Support für die CCPL auch problemlos in einer Weise kundtun, bei der nicht der Eindruck entsteht, dass man auch gleich im Auftrag von CC als Organisation unterwegs ist.

Wednesday evening I continued my ten year concert reunion with the Pet Shop Boys. Currently performing on their Pandemonium Tour (supporting Yes), James and I (along with several other friends) caught their second night at The Warfield in downtown San Francisco.

Wednesday’s show exceeded my expectations. They opened with “Heart” and and barely paused for just over 90 minutes, touching on nearly every part of their catalog. Their performance of “Heart”, in particular, was really exciting and energetic. The set included several medleys; I tried to keep a set list as the night went on and ended up with the following (titles in square brackets indicate they just played snippets or a few lines of the song as a transition between numbers).

Heart
Did You See Me Coming
Pandemonium/Can You Forgive Her
Love, etc
[Integral, Building a Wall]
Go West
Two Divided by Zero
Why Don’t We Live Together? / Always On My Mind
New York City Boy
[Closer to Heaven]
Left to my Own Devices
Do I Have To?
King’s Cross
The way It Used To Be
Jealousy
Suburbia
All Around the World
Se A Vida É / Discoteca
Viva la Vida (Coldplay cover)
It’s a Sin

Encore:

Being Boring
West End Girls

I really enjoyed hearing songs that I didn’t at all expect to be played, but which feel like iconic PSB songs to me: “Two Divided by Zero”, “Suburbia”, “King’s Cross”. And of course, “It’s a Sin” and “Being Boring”, which we completely expected and yet still felt relevant and poignant; PSB is without question the band that marks time in my coming out story.

I last saw PSB on their Nightlife tour in 1999. That day, John and I drove three and a half hours from Fort Wayne to the Fox Theater in Detroit, watched the show from the balcony, and drove back the same night, arriving home at nearly four in the morning. My car was hit by a deer on the drive back that morning when we were less than fifteen minutes from home¹. In contrast, Wednesday night I carpooled ten minutes with friends from our pre-show pizza and could have walked home in under half an hour.

I somehow see the change in distance as metaphorical for how I’ve moved in my own life, as well. I remember thinking that night that there was no way I could live in Detroit; it seemed overwhelming and foreign. I suppose in the same way if I had been able to look forward ten years, my life today would have been similarly unrecognizable. As I think about it now, I guess I’m lucky; I was happy² with where I was then, and I’m happy to be where I am today. There are still things I’d like to do and improve but the present is pretty damn good.

¹ Yes, the deer hit me. I was at a dead stop. No, the insurance agent didn’t really believe me, either.

² Sure, I wanted some things to be different, but I was out, I had my own place, and I had my friends.

The CFP for PyCon 2010 closes in five days. I’m on the program committee this year and it’s exciting to see good proposals come in. From the CFP:

Want to showcase your skills as a Python Hacker? Want to have
hundreds of people see your talk on the subject of your choice? Have some
hot button issue you think the community needs to address, or have some
package, code or project you simply love talking about? Want to launch
your master plan to take over the world with python?

PyCon is your platform for getting the word out and teaching something
new to hundreds of people, face to face.

Previous PyCon conferences have had a broad range of presentations,
from reports on academic and commercial projects, tutorials on a broad
range of subjects and case studies. All conference speakers are volunteers
and come from a myriad of backgrounds. Some are new speakers, some
are old speakers. Everyone is welcome so bring your passion and your
code! We’re looking to you to help us top the previous years of success
PyCon has had.

PyCon 2010 is looking for proposals to fill the formal presentation tracks.
The PyCon conference days will be February 19-22, 2010 in Atlanta,
Georgia, preceded by the tutorial days (February 17-18), and followed
by four days of development sprints (February 22-25).

Online proposal submission is open now! Proposals will be accepted
through October 1st, with acceptance notifications coming out on
November 15th. For the detailed call for proposals, please see:

http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/proposals/

For videos of talks from previous years – check out:

http://pycon.blip.tv

We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!

Beim Kongress der Medienwoche der diesjährigen IFA in Berlin hat CC-Mitbegründer und -Vorstandsmitglied Michael Carroll eine Keynote mit dem Titel “Creative Commons as Conversational Copyright” gehalten. Sie sollte die Einleitung zu einer Paneldiskussion sein, die mit Prof. Dieter Gorny (BVMI), Annette Kroeber-Riel (Google Deutschland), Dr. Matthias Leonardy (GVU), Martin Moszkowicz (Constantin Film), Alexander Skipis (Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels), Oliver J. Süme (eco ISP-Verband) und Jens Seipenbusch (Piratenpartei) eigentlich sehr vielversprechend besetzt war. Leider erweckte die Runde dann weitgehend den Eindruck, man habe sich per Zeitmaschine in die 90er des letzten Jahrhunderts zurück begeben. Vielleicht lag das daran, dass Michael nicht als Panelteilnehmer vorgesehen war.

Beim anschließenden Interview erzählte mir Michael u. a. etwas mehr darüber, was er mit “Conversational Copyright” meint, was unter “Copyright Neutrality” zu verstehen ist, was es mit der Metadatensprache REL auf sich hat, wieso das Fair-Use-Prinzip des US-amerikanischen Urheberrechts mit Vorsicht zu genießen ist und was eine Kultur-Flatrate für Creative Commons als Lizenzmodell bedeuten würde. Die Fragen habe ich auf Deutsch reingeschnitten und das Interview dauert ca. 15 Minuten. Die MP3-Datei ist etwas über 13 MB groß.

Tomado del blog de ccLearn:

“…El año pasado tuvo lugar la primera reunión de líderes de CC en América Latina: Latam Commons 2008: Dominio Público, Creative Commons, y Educación Abierta. Esta fue también la primera reunión que se enfocó específicamente en educación abierta y REA (Recursos Educativos Abiertos, OER por sus siglas en inglés). Aunque ya se había blogueado brevemente sobre su éxito en diciembre, los resultados de la reunión se han ido mostrando con el tiempo, América Latina ha venido trabajando hacía una mayor apertura tanto en educación como en otros temas, al punto que Carolina Botero se unió oficialmente como enlace para la región hispanoparlante.

Ahora, los resultados particulares de esta primera reunión aparecen por primera vez, tanto en español como en inglés en un mismo informe titulado Educación Abierta: Primera reunión de líderes CC en América Latina. El informe fue una producción de CC América Latina (ccLatam) y ccLearn, se encuentra licenciado CC BY por lo que puede ser traducido a cualquier otro idioma sin intermediarios. Los invitamos a revisar el resumen de esta primera reunión. De otro lado, una vez tengamos una mejor idea sobre los temas de educación abierta que le interesan a los hispanoparlantes podremos concentrarnos en comunicaciones más efectivas, por ejemplo, en lograr que producciones como ésta y traducciones de entradas del blog de CC relevantes para esta audiencia puedan llegar a sus miembros…”

Como ya les había contado estaría apoyando las iniciativas de ccLearn en iberoamérica. En esta función he estado mirando las entradas en el blog de ccLearn y para el arranque de la escuela en Estados Unidos hicieron una serie de entradas llamada “Back to School week” de las que me llamaron la atención 4 entradas que podrían ser leídas en forma especial para nuestras propias realidades y por tanto hice las versiones en español que fueron publicadas justo después de la original en inglés:

De Regreso al Colegio: DiscoverEd
De regreso al colegio: Retos legales para los docentes (entendiendo las excepciones legales)
De regreso al colegio: Open Courseware como una transición a la educación superior
De regreso al colegio, conclusiones: El camino abierto para el aprendizaje

Si le interesa el tema pueden ser lecturas recomendables e interesantes. En adelante me gustaría escribir en ese blog sobre temas de Recursos Educativos Abiertos y Educación Abierta en América Latina, sobre lo que sucede acá… ideas?

The US DoJ steps in and now the deal is being revised. [19sept09]

read more

Jono contacted me to review his book about community management, The Art of Community, awhile ago. You should buy it and read it no less than 3 times. The chapters are well split, and provide great examples that make this a classic of the scale of my other favorite book about Open Source, Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source (How to Run a Successful Free Software Project). Jono’s book is now freed to be translated, transmitted, reformatted as long as one doesn’t make money off the work and does share back any changes since the book is now CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licensed. Check it out!

Greg over at Creative Commons blog points out that: “The Art of Community isn’t just written for current or would-be community managers. It outlines and discusses all of the issues that are pertinent to simply working with a dispersed community of contributors.”

Honor the Jono by buying a copy! Honor the Jono and CC by translating the book and spreading the community love!

This project promises to make full-text articles available to the public, for free. Since there is no way for researchers to access millions of publications in their full version online, ResearchGATE will enable users to upload their published research directly to their profile pages (a system called the "green route" to Open Access). Our publication index, containing metadata for 35 million publications, will be automatically matched with the SHERPA RoMEO data set of journal and publisher's self-archiving agreements. As a result, authors will know which versions of their articles they can legally upload. Since nine out of ten journals allow self-archiving, this project could give thousands of researchers immediate access to articles that are not yet freely available. [19sept09]

read more

Gestern war John Weitzmann von Creative Commons Deutschland zu Gast im Deutschlandradio Kultur und hat über “Kopieren und kopieren lassen – Neue Wege im Urheberrecht” geredet.

Die Organisation “Creative Commons” bietet für Künstler alternative Lizenzmodelle an. So können Musiker ihre Stücke für die private Nutzung komplett freigeben und nur die kommerzielle Verwertung verbieten, erklärt John Hendrik Weizmann von Creativ Commons.

Hier ist die MP3.

Die erste all2gethernow #camp und #conference findet vom 16-18.09.09 in Berlin statt. Hier meine ersten Eindrücke vom all2gethernow Camp. Die Veranstaltung ist gut besucht und dennoch finden die einzelnen Sessions in einer netten Atmosphäre und mit direktem Dialog zwischen Podium und Publikum statt, die gemeinsam im Kreis sitzen. Es gibt einen live Stream und Internet, alles sehr erfreulich!

Die erste Session an der ich Teilnehme ist von Andrew Dubber zu “Music as Culture”

Seine Kernthese “Musik ist hauptsächlich ein Kulturgut” – klingt erstmal banal. Daraus folgt für ihn, dass der Großteil der Musik (wie anderer Kulturgüter) eigentlich als Gemeingut unter der Public Domain stehen sollte. Weiterhin plädiert er für ein flexibleres und kreativeres Urheberrecht wie es teilweise mit Creative Commons heute schon möglich ist. Darüber hinaus wirbt er für einen Paradigmenwechsel in unserem Denken. So könnten Kreative etwa in vielen Fällen ihre Werke schon nach wenigen Jahren in die Public Domain stellen, statt wie bisher üblich generell mit 80 Jahrigen Urheberrecht zu belegen.

Mein Lieblingszitat aus der Session: “The Internet was not made to make money. It was made for people to communicate” – da braucht man nichts mehr hinzufügen.

Andrew Dubber ist Senior Lecturer in the Music Industries an der Universität in Birmingham und gleichzeitig ein angesehener Berater der Musik Industrie in Großbritanien. In seinem viel gelesenen Blog “New Music Strategies” beschäftigt er sich mit Urheberrecht, dem Medienwandel, der Zukunft der Musikindustrie und der Frage was diese Entwicklungen eigentlich für unsere Gesellschaft bedeutet.

Mit der Webseite “Deleting Music und seinem Buch “The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online”  hat Andrew einige interessante Thesen zur Urheberrechtsdebatte beigetragen. Das Buch liegt als eBook in deutscher Übersetzung zum Download vor.

Hintergrund zur all2gethernow

Als Dieter Gorny im Sommer diesen Jahres bekannt gab, dass Deutschlands größte Musikmesse – die Popkomm – in diesem Jahr aufgrund von Internetpiraterie und die dadurch entstehenden Einnahmeeinbußen der Branche nicht stattfinden wird, hat dies ein großes Medien-Echo hervorgerufen.

Das Aussetzen der Popkomm war gleichzeitig die Initialzündung  zur Gründung des all2gethernow e.V. als neue Plattform für alle, die an der Musik, Kreativität und Kultur und den dafür notwendigen Rahmenbedingungen interessiert sind. Die Gründungsmitglieder wollten die Absage an die Musik- und Kreativbranche, an Musiker und Künstler nicht so einfach hinnehmen. Stattdessen setzten sie sich das  Ziel, eine Veranstatung zu organisieren, die Produzenten, Musiker und Nutzer, Plattenlabels und Veranstalter gemeinsam an einen Tisch bringt, um über zeitgemäße Geschäftsmodelle, zukunftsorientierte Konzepte und neue Ideen für die Musikbranche zu sprechen – mit großem Erfolg!”