Parody of WIPO Comic

A comic that talks about copying as culture, and how art, music and other forms of creativity rely on copying. This comic is a rescension/parody/counterdrama of the comic published by the World Intellectual Property Organisation

– Alternative Law Forum

To download visit http://www.altlawforum.org/Parody

WGBH Lab: Video Sandbox

The WGBH Lab is an online destination for independent media makers to produce and showcase innovative content for public media outlets with a focus on short duration and small formats. It is produced by WGBH Boston Media Productions and powered by Open Media Network (OMN).

One can watch, download, cut, and mash free video clips from the WGBH Archive.

 http://streams.wgbh.org/sandbox/

The Freesound Project

The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/

Visit this page for interesting links

http://del.icio.us/cogdog/remix

Remix Commons

Remix Commons is a network of free culture projects in the UK. Their aim is to get artists (working with music, video, images and text) to come together and share their work, be inspired by each others’ work, and ultimately to create “remixes”.

http://www.remixcommons.org/

The more we can create and remix, the more enriching those communities become. When you can set-up a band with your mates, or run a music night in a local club, or make some video clips – be they funny or serious – you’re doing something profoundly social and human. This creative ability is far more important than the ability to simply access cultural items cheaply. If we just want to be a nation of consumers, a culture based around buying goods and becoming couch potatoes, then the ability to consume really matters a lot. But if we want to be vibrant, interesting people, sharing culture in communities, we need to think more about the ability to create, which implies access.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/23/remix_reading_cclice.html 

Also visit http://tom.acrewoods.net/writing/remixculture

“U.S Path to Wealth and Power: Intellectual Piracy and the Making of America” – Doron Ben Attar

With the signing of the 1783 peace accord with England which officially
ended the American revolution, the United States and Great Britain became
political and economic adversaries. The founders believed that American
political independence depended on economic self-sufficiency, which meant
that the young nation needed to reduce its vast consumption of imported
English manufactured goods. The new defiant American mood, heightened by
war time demands for military industrial goods and by the post-war desire
to prove the compatibility of republican government and a high standard of
living, viewed technology piracy as the premier tool for industrial
development. Perhaps I should do what historians do, and tell a story:

In the second week of November, 1787, Finneaus Bond who was the British
Consul in Philadelphia, received a visit from two English nationals. They
knocked on his door frantically. One was Thomas Edimsor, a cotton merchant
from Manchester, and the other was Henry Royal. Henry Royal was a calico
printer from Cheshire County. Both men were greatly agitated. They feared
they were going to be lynched by the American mob, lead by the leading
citizens of the city. They looked to the envoy of his Brittianic Majesty,
for shelter. And their story, went as follows:

In 1783, concomitant with the signing of the Anglo-American peace accord,
an English artisan by the name of Benjamin Phillips, decided he was going
to make money in America. He purchased, and sent to America, four machines
for the production of textile. One cotton machine, and three spinning
machines. There were of course restrictions, he was not officially allowed
to do so. But he sent them to America on a British ship called the
'Liberty', in the guise of them being Wedgewood china.

(Extracted from Doron Ben Attar's public lecture at the Contested Commons/

Trespassing Publics Confernce, organised by Sarai-CSDS and

Alternative Law Forum in Delhi. 6, 7 and 8 January 2005)

For the full text, go to the Sarai Reader-list Archives or click here

Levelling and 9/11

On September 11, 1648, the Levellers submitted the Large Petition with
40,000 signatures to Parliament. The deed was decisive because it set in
motion the terrible events that culminated four months later in the
execution of Charles Stuart, King of England, and because the Levellers,
the first popular democratic political party in European, if not world,
history, announced their opposition to the enclosures of the commons, or
the privatization of the English land.

Read more at
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=02/09/09/1225239

(from a Sarai Internal mailing list)

GNU/Linux

Milestone on the Way to the GPL Society

Stefan Merten

http://www.oekonux.org/texts/meilenstein/english.html

(from a Sarai Internal mailing list)

An interview with John Frow

A link to an interview with John Frow on his take on how the internet and digital technology have changed/impacted social and economic life.

http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1801jf.html

(from a Sarai Internal mailing list)

Software Patenting Timeline

Here is a good link to material on Software Patenting, esp. in the European 
Union context. http://swpat.ffii.org/

For a quick timeline on Patents, see:

http://swpat.ffii.org/swpat/log/history/index.en.html

(from a Sarai Internal mailing list)

Arts Project Moving Image Contest

Arts Project Moving Image Contest was organized  in the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke University School of Law (april, 2004)
The contest asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film.

To watch the shortlisted films, go to

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/contest/finalists/