Some of the things that have taken my eye during recent wanderings.

This CO2 statistics calculator says that it is able to calculate the carbon footprint of your website. So the more users = the higher the carbon footprint. One example of where being an unpopular website makes you a winner. I think.

Following the links on the statistics site takes you to a site where you can buy calculate your carbon footprint and buy those credits straight away.

A couple of weeks ago Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand celebrated the ‘porting’ of Creative Commons licences. This means that we New Zealanders can apply Creative Commons licences to our work and know the licences have been adapted to the peculiarities of our law. Although the ported licences are not yet showing up on the CreativeCommons.Org site they can’t be too far away. (Unported licencing here)

TED videos are all the rage at the moment. What about the TED blog? It’s a great way to keep up with new videos as they are released. This blog post from August has a list of a 100 websites that you should know and use.

Speaking of TED videos, I’ve been following the development of an amazing internet tv and video player. Miro is free, opensource and under constant development. Currently it’s at revision 0.9.9.9.1 (it’s definitely ready for general consumption!) and as solid as a rock on both XP and Vista. I haven’t tried it on the Mac but apparently it works equally as well on both the Mac and on Linux machines.

So why Miro? Because its good looking (and that matters!) but also because it allows you to subscribe to video ‘channels’ and then to download from those channels. You can use Miro to download YouTube, Google and other videos The programme makes it really easy to find and download a host of really interesting video content. But that’s only half of it. Miro is designed to encourage people to share their own work.

There’s an opportunity to build a new, open mass medium of online television. We’re developing the Miro internet TV platform so that watching internet video channels will be as easy as watching TV and broadcasting a channel will be open to everyone. Unlike traditional TV, everyone will have a voice. (from the Miro blog)

The developers believe that Video RSS is central to the future of open publishing on the internet. They are pushing the ideas of open access, open standards and open source.

And finally, seeing as we’re talking open standards … my current favourite gapingvoid cartoon.

Related posts:

1. Licenced

As yet New Zealand does not have specific Creative Commons Licences so for those of us who choose to licence our work in this way we are using licences which are based on US rights and laws. From the Worldwide CC website:

Our generic licenses are jurisdiction-agnostic: they do not mention any particular jurisdiction’s laws or statutes or contain any sort of choice-of-law provision. The licenses are, however, based on the U.S. Copyright Act in many respects. This means that, though we have no reason to believe that the licenses would not function in legal systems across the world, it is at least conceivable that some aspect of our licenses does not jibe with a particular jurisdiction’s laws.

And from the Creative Commons New Zealand FAQ:

You may well feel that you don’t need to take the trouble; both sets of licences are designed to give the same bundle of rights as the generic licences, so that they can be used worldwide. However, CC feels that there are advantages to switching to a New Zealand licence if you live in New Zealand. These licences have been designed to be fully compatible with national contract and copyright law. Some benefits from using a New Zealand licence would be:

• their plain English language; easier to understand than the American legal language of the generic licences;
• because they follow national contract and copyright law, they offer explicit protection of your ‘moral rights’;
• the support offered by the New Zealand project, [and its helpful joint mailing list??];
• in the very unlikely event of any dispute over the terms of the licence, they provide that this should be heard in the courts of your own country;

Related posts:

1. Digital Content Strategy
2. Sunday Procrastination
3. Content Sharing

When it comes to music files, Bill Gates simply had this to say in summary; “People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.”

Except, of course, if you live in New Zealand.
Full story

Related posts:

1. Legal March
2. Licenced
3. Digital Content Strategy

Will we be able to legaly copy that brand new CD so that we can listen on that lovely new teacher laptop so thoughtfully subsidised by the Ministry of Education? Possibly. Sort of.

Clause (e) is the condition that I can see causing the most confusion and potential grief. Its not at all clear that you can play your music on a work computer, and if you do you probably are required to do so in a private office or with headphones. No listening to your co-workers music allowed! This very limited interpretation is supported by clause (f) which suggests that you have to own any computer you play music on, i.e. no using one provided by your employer. Why do I think we’ve just changed one stupid, unenforceable law for another that will see some workplaces continue to ban digital music… Link

What about copy that DVD for the computer or the media player (generous fellow that Santa bloke)? Possibly. Sort of. We we be allowed to videotape Sunday night’s Christmas movie and watch it next Christmas Eve? Possibly. Sort of. Lend it to a friend? Possibly. Sort of.

The other type of format shifting allowed under the bill is time shifting. This is the provision that makes VCRs legal while simultaneously making that collection of carefully recorded video cassettes on your shelf illegal. Yes, you can record “solely for the purpose of viewing or listening to the recording at a more convenient time” but only if you can’t access it from an on-demand service (and yes that might require a payment). However, you only get to keep that copy for as long as is “reasonably necessary for viewing or listening to the recording at a more convenient time.” Link

As presented in Parliament the bill offers little more than half measures. Whilst there has been some discussion on the web, no one in the ‘mainstream’ media has even approached some of the apparent contradictions and sops offered by this piece of legislation. There is a lot more to the whole thing than just being able to watch a DVD on a phone or video iPod. The bill is about rights of ownership of information and ideas. It’s about whether this country follows other nations into implementing draconian protection measures that may end up being used against innocent consumers and lining the purses of those whose pockets are already deep and full.

It’s time to read and think for ourselves. Some local and overseas blogs have picked up what’s happening and attempted to get the discussion going.
Today’s Hard News (guest Green MP Nandor Tanczos), earlier Russell Brown post and some well thought out background from Stephen Marshall.

Also

Synthetic Thoughts

Gadgetophile

Kim Weatherall

Related posts:

1. Ripper
2. Format Shifting
3. Linkeracy – 13th March 2008

This morning’s Sunday Star Times had a spend-up-before -Christmas glossy about some of the exciting new technologies available to consumers at the moment. Apart from giving some computer buying advice that was well out of date (60-80GB hard drive anyone?), the mag had some information about digital audio and video players – MP3 players to most of us.

To most people, you buy your iPod / MP3 player and copy your CDs onto the large empty space. Then you copy all of your friends’ CDs. At some point, people over 40 contemplate copying their entire vinyl collection to their computers and iPods. Most give up when they remember they haven’t got a turntable or find out what a new needle costs.

The problem is that under existing New Zealand law it’s illegal to copy your CDs onto the music player that you just (legally) bought. I’m often asked in professional development sessions about how to do this and teachers are incredulous when I explain what the law says and talk about the implications. Then they’ll ask about downloading music. When I point them to Coketunes or Ampifier they look at me even more incredulously – music is supposed to be free right?

One evening last week I took a cruise around the web and found myself at Sarah McLachlan’s website. I discovered that she had a new album out and decided to listen to a few tracks. I liked what I heard so headed to a couple of NZ sites to see if I could get the CD. $50 to bring it in. I headed back to Sarah’s own site and disovered that I could downlaod the entire album for $9.99 – Canadian dollars of course. Furthermore,

“All audio downloads are available in the popular MP3 format, encoded at 192kbps. The files are not encrypted with digital rights management or copy protection software. Offering this format puts no obstacles in the way of you enjoying your music on your computer, transferring it to your media player, or burning it to CD. This format puts an amount of trust in you to obey copyright laws and not share your files. ” link

Of course I paid my money and downloaded the MP3s. I have the songs on my computer and will pop them onto my MP3 palyer for when I’m away from my computer.

I like this trusted copyright model. The artist (label?) has entrusted me with the right to play her music as and when I choose. I’m perfectly happy to comply with the request to keep the files to myself. Ten bucks Canadian – less than $14 in our currency. What could be better?

Could musicians and their labels in New Zealand do a similar thing? Of course they could. Would New Zealand consumers respect the model? With realistic pricing models like this one and with more information I think that they world. Someone just has to make a start.

Related posts:

1. Ripper
2. Legal March
3. A New Voice

“The draft New Zealand Digital Content Strategy is a sub-strategy of the Digital Strategy, and is the government’s five-year vision for unlocking New Zealand’s stock of content and providing all New Zealanders with seamless, easy access to the information that is important to their lives, businesses and cultural identity.”

This is an important document for digital citizens to read. It seeks to address the debate about the ownership and management of digital information. A bit like the draft curriculum, this is a document that is out there for public consumption and comment.
The draft categories three types of content – formal, informal and commercial. Russell Brown (who has been part of the development of the strategy) has already developed this threefold categorisation further. Russell says,

“…you can spend years strategising and still be stuck with a basically top-down model that institutionalises all decisions and fails to capture the dynamism that drives the Internet community. The emphasis here remains on the institutional capture of both content and decisions about content.”

And further (as may interest Artichoke)

“I’d like to know how a New Zealand Creative Commons licence will interact with the generally obstructive practice of Crown Copyright, for one thing.” (italics added by me)

New Zealand has not yet adopted a localised Creative Commons license. Those of us that do slap a Creative Commons license on our blogs, photos or other works are doing so in hope that at some point the license will have some formal standing in New Zealand. There is a group that is working towards the New Zealand “jurisdiction-specific” license. It’s possible to follow some of the work being done by subscribing to the Creative Commons – New Zealand Mailing List.
I hope that the Draft Digital Content document gets people thinking and talking about digital content and ownership and all of the surrounding issues.

Related posts:

1. The Digital Strategy
2. Content Sharing
3. Licenced

Copyright makes web a turn off

It seems that the Australian copyright people want to collect a fee from schools to cover printing from web pages.

As Cory Doctorow puts it (he is more eloquesnt than I am):

Now they say that they deserve to collect for the use of the Web. Despite the fact that there’s an implied license to read Web pages that goes along with publishing them (who puts up a web-page without expecting it to be read?) and despite the fact that the vast majority of pages online weren’t created by Australians, and despite the fact that the vast majority of pages created by Australians weren’t created by professional authors, the agency proposes that it should be able to collect a tax on behalf of all those authors in the world in order to line the pockets of its few lucky members.

Australian educators are saying that if they are going to be charged they are going to have to turn off their internet connections because the cost will be too high:

“If it turned out we’d have to pay them, we’d turn the internet off in schools,” the council’s national copyright director Delia Browne said.

“We couldn’t afford it; it would not be sustainable. How on earth are we going to deliver education in the 21st century? How are taxpayers going to afford this.”

I need to do some research.

Related posts:

1. Copyright Depth Perception
2. Copyfight