Digital Britain
June 7, 2009 by Cath · Leave a Comment
The UK culture secretary, Andy Burnham, said today that the government intends to acquire powers to apply “technical measures” to crack down on persistent illegal filesharers on the internet. The Digital Britain report is due to be released later this month, according to Burnham any solution is likely to involve a requirement that internet service providers (ISPs) notify users caught stealing digital content.
Speaking at a Music Week conference about monetising digital music, Burnham said any new legislation would be overseen by Ofcom. Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the British Phonographic Industry, has welcomed the promise of legislation, but said it must go further than forcing ISPs to send educational letters and should be backed up by measures to steer persistent illegal filesharers towards legitimate online services.
Unlawful downloading still accounts for 95% of online purchases, the Pirate Bay website is used by 25 million people around the world – including millions of Britons. It argues that it does not break the law because no copyright content is hosted on its servers; instead, it hosts “torrent” links to TV, film and music files held on users’ computers. Record companies, which claim that illegal file-sharing has cost them billions of pounds in lost revenue, argue that new music will suffer if people continue to download without paying.
Some artists release their music under creative commons licences, take a look at Jamendo. You probably won’t have heard of them, but there might be something you like.
Tremulous
Chris introduced me to a pretty cool game called Tremulous. Its a free and open source, team-based first person shooter. The game features two teams, humans and aliens, and the aim is to build and protect a base. I am not sure I quite got the hang of it, I managed to shoot and kill Jack, who happened to be on my team….oops.
Tremulous is licensed under the GPL, although it includes code from other projects that was released under other GPL-compatible licenses. Most of the game media is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
The release of the game as free and open source software has meant that programmers can modify the game and game engine. This has meant that a growing number of players are releasing patches for the game in order to remove bugs, add features to the game or modify the game play itself.
Its well worth a look. I am going to need a bit more practice I think.
Creative Commons Australia Mayer and Bettle Sequel
June 4, 2008 by Chris · Leave a Comment
I’ve been looking at free software for hosting your own site similar to youtube. Im leaning towards Plumi and have also thought about using phpmotion. I spend way to much time looking at the sites using the software and watching lots of videos about all kinds of interesting things. I thought this one was pretty cool.
From the page “Creative Commons Australia Mayer and Bettle Sequel”
Full description
The kooky CC duo Mayer and Bettle are back! This film they are exploring what’s been happening in Creative Commons over the last two years. Like the previous animation, this sequel was commissioned to inform young people (mainly targeted at upper high school) about the Creative Commons licences, placing their use within a context that young people could understand. This film was animated by Pete Foley, with sound and music by Chris Perren. The project was co-ordinated by Elliott Bledsoe, from Creative Commons Australia. The animation was commissioned for the QUT Smart Train, which was launched in Brisbane on last Friday, and is now on its 5 week journey around Queensland.
Also checkout the http://www.engagemedia.org site.
I also randomly ended up watching this video of a talk about open access for governments.