Tag Archives | free

Kopimi

By Tom Saunter on July 21, 2009 // Web

An admission to you all – I’ve used Pirate Bay to download stuff for free.
A statement of facts – I also believe in protecting the rights of content creators.

How do I reconcile my piracy usage of great content with my belief in copyright? The jury is still out on that one, but with the Pirate Bay being forced into a subscription model, the decision to go straight is made slightly easier for me.

On the subject of licensing, I’ve registered Digital Cortex under one of these:

88x31 | Kopimi | Digital Cortex It’s an ‘Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike’ license, issued to me by the Creative Commons for the content here on this site.

It grants users of Digital Cortex the rights to:

  • Copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
  • Make derivative works

But only under the following conditions:

  • Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
  • Non-Commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
  • Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.

All of which sounds really boring, I’m sure. But Creative Commons licencing is on the up, because more of us are turning to our keyboards and becoming content creators. The CC give out little blog badges and buttons for your site, the iconography of which we are now beginning to accustom to. The CC logo is most prevalent on Flickr, where choosing a license type is part of the sign-up process.

Kopimi rainbow1 | Kopimi | Digital Cortex

Kopimi, the opposite of copyright

For those more liberal in their stance on free content sharing, there is one license I’d like to tell you about. It’s called Kopimi, and it is the exact opposite of copyright.

 

Using a Kopimi badge on your site means you specifically request that people copy and use your work for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, with or without attribution, to be hacked to pieces and repackaged however they damn-well please.

It was created by Piratbyrån, the team behind Pirate Bay as a way to challenge attitudes to intellectual property rights, whilst in the face of all those hundreds of class-action lawsuits that ended up forcing them into submission.

From my research I appear to have found an originator of the design, whose post over at LogoBlink gives a nice side-by-side of the look and feel of each opposing license:

cc vs kopimi1 | Kopimi | Digital Cortex

A side-by-side comparison. Which do you prefer?

I hope that once Pirate Bay is all over with, Kopimi manages to live on.
I identify with the general concept of free (or cheap!) content for all, but without a licensing approach that allows for the free distribution of content, piracy will remain an issue, and copyright will be broken time and time again.

Thank god for Spotify is all I can say.

Comments { 0 }

Web Discoveries for July 17th

By Tom Saunter on July 17, 2009 // del.icio.us

These are my del.icio.us links for July 17th

Comments { 0 }

Web Discoveries for June 24th

By Tom Saunter on June 24, 2009 // del.icio.us

These are my del.icio.us links for June 24th

Comments { 0 }

Web Discoveries for June 16th

By Tom Saunter on June 16, 2009 // del.icio.us

These are my del.icio.us links for June 16th

  • Layar -
    Criminy. This is the future I predicted two years ago in my dissertation finally coming to life. The phrase ‘Game Changer’ comes to mind.
  • SPRXMobile Mobile Service Architects » Home -
    Makers of the awesome sounding Android App – Layar; home of @Rhymo, a fave #AR Twitter Follower.
  • Social Media Biz Buzz -
    A worthy resource for social media marketers. This site offers streamed or downloadable assets without the fluffy blurb.
  • Web Design WordPress function list -
    This is a great resource for WordPress developers. Nice and slidy too.
  • Spymaster -
    I don’t know what this is yet, I’m only just starting out, but by golly this looks cool. **EDIT** It is definitely NOT COOL.
Comments { 0 }

Where is freedimensional?

By Tom Saunter on June 3, 2009 // advertising, mobile

You’ve probably read about Google Latitude, and maybe even used it yourself. I’ve been using it mostly without meaning to, because I activated the service on my N95′s Google Maps and the bloody thing never turns off. Here’s where I am right now:

 

Locative technologies are a growing area of interest for me. I believe that GPS, cell-tower triangulation and even good old Bluetooth will play a large part in making cloud-computing extra-relevant to consumers.

I know that people get a bit funny with the blend of real locations and virtual space (see Google Street View debacle) but once we’re all using our next-gen pieces of UI, your networked device could begin to act as a portal to new layers of information useful to you about the city, street, or shop you are in.

I am talking about location-based advertising. An implementational nightmare, but it is foreseeable that Semantic technologies could serve geographically relevant messages, charging advertisers on a cost per impact basis. Google kind of do this with their local search results. It’s a bit shit at the moment though.

The nearest we have to the kind of next-gen solution I’m thinking of is lastminute.com’s free service NRU, available on the Android OS. It lets you scan around your environment with your phone acting as a viewfinder, where cinemas, restaurants and theatres are overlaid in a sonar-like interface. These services pay a small amount to lastminute.com on an affiliate basis, or are paid inclusions:

NRU for Android, from lastminute on the G1

There’s one locative service I’m disappointed never took off in the UK, despite being around for a while. BrightKite is a kind of location-based Twitter, and it had real promise until Google came stomping all over them with the release of Latitude.

If I were to ‘check in’ at The Queens Larder on Russell Square, BrightKite users would see my marker and message on a map of the area, as well as other people checked in nearby. The potential for social interaction is high, because through using the service one feels proximity with other users.

With all this in mind, I’d like my readers to ‘feel closer’ to me, so as well as in this post I’ll be placing my Latitude Location Badge on my Contact Page. If you’re in the vicinity, go ahead and either serve me an advert or say hello. I won’t mind which.

Comments { 4 }