I want to highlight a few things that I think are fairly interesting.

First, Fair Pay:
Jono is experimenting with the same model that many others have done (notably: Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and GirlTalk) where you let the music fan pay for the enjoyment they get from the music (that is about the best way to put that, because they aren’t really paying for the bits, those cost practically nothing). When this choice is put in front of music fans, either paying zero or some other non-zero amount, many pay some non-zero amount. My recollection is that the amount is somewhere around $8 for an album.

What would be curious to look at in the case of Severed Fifth is what that amount is. As we saw with the Humble Bundle from Wolfire, Linux users paid more per game than any other platform. Will the awareness of Jono’s project in the FLOSS world translate into a higher average “Fair Pay” for Severed Fifth? That probably isn’t measurable, unfortunately.

Second, Frets on Fire:
Boy do I love me some Rock Band, er, Frets on Fire! I think this is one of the cooler things about CC-licensed music: easier conversion into kick ass formats like Frets on Fire with no worries about copyright law (more accurately, the copyright holder) telling you that enjoying Jono’s music in a certain way is not permitted.

Third, YouTube:
This one might seem obvious, but I promise there is a bit more to it. Basically, because the Severed Fifth music is licensed under a CC license, people can us it in their YouTube videos without getting take-down notices. Pretty awesome stuff. Now the really interesting part. Jono has licensed the Severed Fifth music under CC:BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) license. That means, simply, you can use, redistribute, and remix the work as long as you give attribution to the author (Severed Fifth, or Jono) and share any derivative work you make under the same license, CC:BY-SA.

Now, using Severed Fifth music in your video means that your video, a derivative work of both your footage and the Severed Fifth music, is now required to be licensed CC:BY-SA. From the legal code of the license: “For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image (“synching”) will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License” (see section 1b). This is great, now all of those awesome videos Jono showcased in his blog post are now available for your reuse under the terms of the CC:BY-SA license! I think that might be my favorite part of the new happenings around Severed Fifth; Jono spreading the Freedom!

Now, backing up flickr.

There are few very important pieces of information to backup from flickr which I can do right now: my photos and my stats (views/referrals of my photos).

Photos
Tool: FlickrTouchr
Why #1: Do you backup your ~/Photos directory? If your answer is “No” or “Infrequently” you might really like this when your harddrive crashes and you don’t have local copies of those awesome photos from your awesome vacation.

Why #2: Do you take photos with your cell phone and upload them directly to flickr? Do you then clear them off your phone because they take up valuable space? This will make sure you have a copy of those on your own machine for easy editing/backup (see #1).

What it does: This one does what it does very well. It authorizes itself with your flickr account and then proceeds to download all of your photos (including your private ones, hence needing to authorize). Also, if you use the Sets feature of flickr, it keeps those associations by creating directories with the sets’ names. So, my directory structure that flickrtouchr creates for my account looks like this:

greg@rose:~/backup/flickr/photos$ ls -1
Bike Lock Fail Blog
Bike Ride – 20090628
Botanical Garden, July 4th, 2009
Bug Jam
Favourites
Gettysburg Trip
Jaunty Release Party
Mackinac Island Trip
No Set
SF – 2008
touchr.frob.cache
Traverse City – December ’09
UDS Karmic

You’ll see the “No Set” directory, which is where all the photos that are NOT part of any set.

How:
If you are going to run this script manually and your local machine with a web browser, you’ll be just fine and just follow the instructions it gives you. If, however, you are like me and want to run this via a cron job on a regular basis, you’ll need to take an extra 2 steps.
1. Start it on your local computer and it will authorize itself via your browser.
2. Kill it (CTRL+C) so you don’t have to sit there and wait for it to finish downloading all of your photos.
3. Copy the touchr.frob.cache file to your server and put it in the folder you’re going to backup your photos to.

Now when it runs it will pick up your credential information from that file and run as expected. Put 5 23 * * * python /home/greg/src/scripts/flickrtouchr.py in your crontab and you always have a backup of your photos! Don’t worry about running it every night; if the photo is already downloaded it just skips it (ie: It does The Right Thing®).

COOL! Now you have your photos backed up!

Statistics
Tool: My flickr-stats-export.sh based on this unnamed Github Gist
Why #1: I like numbers and these are the “raw” CSV files that flickr is producing for your photos. It tells you how many times your photos are viewed and what the referrer was.
Why #2: The stats are going away!

What it does: Pretty simply, it goes to the your stats download page and downloads all the CSV files linked from it. You can see that page by going to this url: http://www.flickr.com/photos/YOURUSERNAME/stats/downloads/ (fill in your username). It then makes a tar.gz of these to save space.

How:
How about we let it tell you:

greg@zen:~/src/scripts$ ./flickr-stats-export.sh –help

Usage: ./flickr-stats-export.sh DIRECTORY USERNAME COOKIES

DIRECTORY:
Directory to save the flickr-stats.tar.gz file of stats .CSVs

USERNAME:
Your flickr.com username

COOKIE:
See the -b flag from the CURL manpage.
It can be the contents of a cookie file or the full filename of the cookie file.
I recommend getting the cookie file from flickr using Firebug, then saving that
in the directory you plan to save the stats files.

If there is already a cookiejar.txt file in the download directory,
we will use that instead and this can be left blank.
See the -c flag from the CURL manpage for more on cookiejars.

As you can see, it needs your flickr cookies to run, so, 1) Install Firebug and Firecookie 2) Login to flickr 3) Go to the cookie tab in Firebug, then the Cookies dropdown and select “Export Cookies For This Site.” 4) Save that file somewhere.

I run this form my server, so I copied that cookies.txt file to the ~/backup/flickr/stats/ directory and then ran
./flickr-stats-export.sh ~/backup/flickr/stats/ grggrssmr /backup/flickr/stats/cookies.txt

I would suggest running this automatically so you don’t miss any stats. But, you only need to do it monthly as the stats csv files are only updated every first of the month. So, I have this in my crontab:
0 12 1 * * /home/greg/src/scripts/flickr-stats-export.sh /home/greg/backup/flickr/stats/ grggrssmr

Notice that I left off the cookies.txt? That is because after the first time it runs it saves the cookies in a “cookiejar.txt” file in the stats directory, and if that file is there, it uses it.

That cron job runs at Noon (Eastern time zone, where my server is) on the 1st day of every month. Why? This data will only be available until June 1st, 2010 at Noon PDT (Pacific time zone). So, I picked a time 3 hours before the data will disappear so that I A) won’t miss it and B) give it time to generate my data for the month of May. After June, you can remove this from your crontab as it won’t do much after the files are gone.

Luckily, if you forget to remove the script’s entry from your cronjob file after that date, it will just exit if it doesn’t have any .csv urls to download. So, it then won’t try to make a tar.gz of empty files and save empty data over your last good flickr-stats.tar.gz

Future Research
So, with those two things you have the photos and the statistics from your flickr account. However, that isn’t everything. I am working on extending flickrtouchr to also download the photo metadata (title, description, tags, comments, license) which it doesn’t save. With that metadata I will either create a metadata xml file associated with the jpg or embed the info INTO the jpg using the XMP standard (see: python-xmp-toolkit). You can see what I’m doing at this launchpad branch. Please feel free to branch it and help out!

But, what I want to share with you right now is a quick script I whipped up to backup my Google Calendars nightly. This is one of the steps in my on-going process of making sure all of my personal data is backed up by me on machines I control with an eye to migrating to self (or friend) hosted services. Yes, I want services I use to follow the Franklin Street Statement.

Until the day that all of the services I use follow the Franklin Street Statement recommendations, I will just have to make sure I make personal backups of my information. So tonight, I finally did that for Google Calendars. It was pretty simple, really:

#!/bin/sh
# Backup my Google Calendars

# Remove files that are older than 1 week
find /home/greg/backup/google/*.ics -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} \;

That’s it. Create the filenames for the various calendars I’m backing up, including today’s date. Then wget them. Then, delete any .ics file that is older than a week. Not sure why I need 7 days of backup, but better safe than sorry, I guess.

Ted Gould just posted to the planet with his presentation that he gave at the Desktop Summit. At the end of his post you’ll notice that he uploaded his presentation to Launchpad (at lp:~ted/presentations/2009_desktop_summit/).

I think that is a great idea! Not only does it provide the ability for the community to see what others are using for their presentations but it allows anyone to branch a presentation, which has awesome potential. Especially with the presentation format that Ted chose, SVGs. The S5 presentation format (XHTML/CSS/JS based) would also be a great candidate for easy branching and editing of presentations.

But what if you need to create presentations with others who use Powerpoint or Impress and you wanted to harness the power of a Version Control System? Old powerpoint (ppt) files are binary blobs which don’t work well in version control systems (they *work* but not *well*). Impress (odp) and new Powerpoint (pptx) files are effectively zipped archives of xml and images. However, since it is zipped, bzr treats it as a binary. I only tested with bzr but don’t foresee any of the other systems behaving any differently.

Why would you want to use a VCS for your presentation files? Especially a DVCS like bzr/git/hg? COLLABORATION!

Some of you may know that I am currently working with Open.Michigan, a project at the University of Michigan that enables the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). OER is effectively a broader term for the concept of Open CourseWare. Basically, everything used in education is a resource, not just presentations, and thus is useful for others to see, use, and remix. If you are curious to see what kinds of things we produce, see our Educommons installation.

Back to the topic at hand though: presentations and DVCS.

One of the major areas that the OER community could greatly improve upon is the area of remixing; taking the openly licensed materials and using them, adding new material, and creating something original. Remixing, in general, is enabled by having access to the source files of the material being worked with. Sure, you can use a PDF or a mp3 in a remix, but it is usually better to have the original .odt or multitrack file to work from. This is why Open.Michigan provides to the public the ppt files along with the pdfs of the presentations created through the OER program.

But lets leverage some of the tried and true methods of the FLOSS community in the OER community. One of the biggest and most fundamental benefits of the FLOSS world is that everyone has access to the source code, and can easily get it, edit it, and (hopefully) compile a new version of the program; effectively a “remix.” How does the FLOSS community lower the barriers and increase efficiency for that workflow? We provide public access to code repositories, instructions on building the software (documentation), and a bug tracker to inform what needs to be worked on next.

I want to mirror much of that to the OER community. One of the first things that needs to happen is to provide an easy way to manage multiple versions of a single resource (eg: presentation, video/audio, book). A VCS seems like the obvious choice. But there must be a better way than just managing binary blobs, right?

That is the part that I need to figure out next: how to utilize the power of a DVCS in this genre. Then I can move on to figuring out what a bug tracker for OER would look like (and if it is even needed). The documentation is actually already there, at least for Open.Michigan.

Do you have any ideas?

I started off with a quick background on Creative Commons and what we do, in general. Then, after answering a ton of questions which were raised in the first 5 minutes, I went on to discuss CC’s role in the Free/Open Source Software community. Specifically, the FLOSS projects we develop and/or work on and how we can help others create awesome things.

If you weren’t there, you missed the opportunity to be a part of a great conversation between some great MUG members and I. But luckily, my slides are available online:

And, since Craig was nice enough to use my photo camera to record the presentation, we even have video! We only have 34 minutes of video, but that gets the majority of the talk. Apparently my camera records at a 1 gig per 10 minutes rate, we only got 34 minutes because it filled up my 4 gig memory card.

Thanks to everyone who came out, you made it fun.

Those in the Southeast Michigan area are more than welcome to attend our release party THIS SATURDAY. We’ll be toasting to the next great Ubuntu release. Bring your friends, bring your laptop (free wifi!), bring your questions. I’ll bring stickers!

Important Details:
What: Jaunty Release Party!
Where: Corner Brewery
When: 7pm – ???
Why: Because Ubuntu is awesome! Because we’re awesome! Right on.
How: Need a ride? Join the mailing list.

Let’s start out this discussion with a quick true story:
I was working on a presentation for one of my graduate classes. My group partner and I were making a dang good presentation and wanted to spice it up with some nice photos of works of art (our topic was art related). So, we went to one of the more prominent art image databases: ARTstor. We found some paintings by Marc Chagall from 1911 and I was all ready to download them and insert them into our presentation. I then did the obvious next step: right-click the image to Save as… Not so fast! The flash interface doesn’t allow that. Why not? That is a complicated question to answer.

My aim is not to fully answer that question. The purpose of this post is to raise awareness, pure and simple. There is a problem out there and it has a name: copyfraud. The perpetrators are either ignorant at best or deceitful at worst. The ones being harmed are you and I, the public. People who want to create but are being unjustly[1] restricted. And being unjustly restricted means they are being unjustly censored.

(Nina Paley, CC:BY-SA)

Back to that Chagall painting. The cool part was this painting was done in the early 1900′s, 1911 to be exact. What that means is that the copyright term on that painting has expired (in US law, which is what governs ARTstor as it is a US non-profit). And, here is the part that is the issue, according to US copyright law any faithful reproduction of a creative work that does not add any new creative element does not produce a new copyright. In simpler terms: if I take a picture of a public domain painting then I do NOT hold a copyright on that photo; that photo is also in the public domain. I did not add any new creative anything to it so there is nothing to copyright. This is all explained in the court case Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp[2]. LARGE CAVEAT: this only applies in the US. The US rightfully, in my opinion, does not give copyright rights for “sweat of the brow” aka: hard work only (see: Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service). Countries like the UK do give copyright restrictions (“protections”) for sweat of the brow work.

Back, again, to that painting by Chagall. I decided to click on the “View Full Record” link to learn more about it and I came across this line: “Rights: © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris” BZZZZZZT! WRONG!

This, my friends, is a classic case of copyfraud

(tvol)

What kind of effect does this have on you and me? First and foremost it “[results] in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use, or altering their creative projects to excise the uncopyrighted material” (Mazzone, “Copyfraud”). People are paying fees to organizations that purport to have our best interests at heart to use images that are in the public domain. Or, almost worse, people are not creating new and cool works because they are told they aren’t allowed to. This is where copyfraud hurts you: our culture will be locked down by those who have no right to do so (cue Free Culture and Free Speech discussions).

Now, let me be clear: I am not saying that people should never be allowed to sell public domain works. That is, of course, one of the things you are allowed to do with public domain works: sell them to people. In fact, paying the people a small fee for the professional work they did to create a high quality scan of a work is important; it means they’ll keep doing it[3].

However, falsely claiming that you hold a copyright on an image is illegal. It is even spelled out explicitly in the US Copyright law: “Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500″ (emphasis mine). So either unlawfully claiming copyright or being someone who distributes that unlawfully copyrighted work results in a fine of up to $2,500. ARTstor, if prosecuted, could be fined a large amount of money ($2.5 million if there are only 1000 works that fall into that category, which according to my test searches is probably a low ball number).

This, of course, assumes that ARTstor is willfully, “with fraudulent intent,” making available these images with false copyright notices. Unfortunately, I think that isn’t too much of a stretch. I don’t think it is a stretch because I don’t believe that the people running ARTstore, or their lawyers, are ignorant. If I were a lawyer asked to sign off on a database of scans/photographs of works of art, this is one of the things I would double, nay, triple check. First, make sure that copyright information is being preserved in the database. Second, make sure that the copyright information in the database is accurate. Third, make sure that you are attributing copyright to the copyright holder on each image, if applicable. Fourth, make sure you aren’t falsely attributing copyright on any image. And in doing any of that I would, as a lawyer worth his salt, research court cases that have an effect on scans of works of art like the Bridgeman v Corel case.

In addition to assuming ARTstor has consulted people with JDs, there are reports out there of people who work for other institutions who, when asked about the fact that they are falsely claiming copyright, say “everyone else does it.” I wish I could say I was joking; that is truly what they say, and think. Put that related example and everything else said together and one could easily assume that ARTstor is doing this “with fraudulent intent.” Again, strong words, but this is an important issue.

What you can do:
Leave a comment with an example of copyfraud that YOU have found. Lets get a big list of organizations who are intentionally or unintentionally falsely claiming copyright on public domain works. The next step is to get them to stop. Emails, phone calls, blog posts, identi.ca/twitter notices, whatever. Stand up for your rights.

Beginning list:

• ARTstor (but JSTOR gets it right)
• American Antiquarian Society. “This site and all contents © 2009 American Antiquarian Society” WRONG!
• Place-holder for your submission!

Footnotes:
[1] “unjustly” instead of “unlawfully” because we are being contractually limited, which is legal. It just isn’t right.
[2] This post doesn’t even get into the discussion of overly zealous publishers making wild claims that over-reach and stifle creativity. Examples are the Major League Baseball and National Football League organizations saying that no part, no matter how small or short, can be reproduced without their permission. That is a blatent lie: those uses fall under Fair Use. The lawyers who wrote those notices, assuming they did any research or know anything about intellectual property law, actively lied when they wrote them. That is a strong statement on my part, but I can only either assume that or assume that the people who wrote those notices were not either A) educated lawyers or B) they didn’t consult an educated lawyer. For a good discussion of this issue see (for example): Mazzone, Jason “Administering Fair Use.”
[3] However, a discussion of the restriction of our heritage via contractual terms should also be had. Contracts are weird things: you can sign away rights that you have, like the right to reproduce public domain images. And remember, EULA and Terms of Service are binding contracts in the US. I think that may be my next post on this topic: “Taking Away Your Rights by Clicking ‘I Accept’”.

Copyfraud links (short list):

• Copyfraud (wikipedia)
• Copyfraud by Jason Mazzone. Great article with a legal perspective.
• More attacks on institutional copyfraud (Library Law Blog)
• Copyfraud in Google Book Search (Open Access News)
• Special collections and the public domain (Steve Lawson)
• ‘Copyfraud’ and public domain works.(THE SIDEBAR) (Access My Library)
• Copyfraud (EFF)
• Copyfraud (Libology Blog)
• Libraries and Copyfraud (RAGESOSS 2.02)
• Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. (wikipedia)
• The Bridgeman Art Library v.Corel Corporation (Copyright Advisory Network)
• Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service (wikipedia)

EDIT: Clarified paragraph beginning with “In addition to the fact..” I was overloading the pronoun “they.”
EDIT2: misspelling, thanks Douglas.

There is a great event coming up at the University of Michigan, sponsored and coordinated by a great team of librarians: Open Access Week 2009.

Molly Kleinman, one of those great librarians, puts it into context for us:

I’m struck by how timely these events are, and how much we could conceivably do under the umbrella of discussing open access and the future of scholarship. … The confluence of circumstances nationally has made this the perfect moment to discuss what’s wrong with existing modes of academic publishing, and to start getting aggressive about making change.

You really should read the rest of Molly’s post for a wonderful explanation of why the current scholarly publishing system is failing for everyone except the Elseviers of the world.

Along with presentations focused on faculty and scholarly publishing models, there is also going to be a talk by my current boss, Nathan Yergler, CTO of Creative Commons. Nathan will be talking about the impact of Creative Commons (CC) licenses on Open Access, what challenges still exist for Open Access, and what the Creative Commons is doing to build and support an ecosystem of openness. Everyone is welcome to join this event, and all the events during Open Access Week. For the details about Nathan’s talk, check out the announcement on the OPEN:Michigan blog.

If you are in the South East Michigan area and are interested in what Michigan is doing to promote Open Access and make it really work, come by for any of the events; there should be a wide enough range to accommodate most interests.

My school, the School of Information, has this neat program called Alternative Spring Break where students can go work with some really cool organizations in Washington DC, New York, or Chicago. It is an opportunity to go discover if you actually enjoy doing what you are in Graduate School full-time to learn (my words, not theirs). Also, it is a wonderful networking opportunity; I met some really great people last week and whether or not they can help me find a job is secondary.

I specifically worked for the American Library Association‘s Office for Information Technology Policy. This is basically the “think tank” for the ALA Washington office. The Washington office also has the people in the Office of Government Relations; the people that go out there and make sure that the libraries’ perspective is heard on Capitol Hill. It is a really important perspective: who else are as big of proponents of open access to knowledge for all people? who else guards your privacy to such a great degree? Librarians are wonderful people to have on your side, but watch out if you do something wrong.

My time at the OITP involved writing a report about the HathiTrust, an endeavor originating at the University of Michigan and the University of Indiana. It is, in the most simple of terms, a long-term digital works preservation project. It is preserving and providing access to all of the digital scans that are being given to the various member Universities from the Google Book Search scannning program and also the libraries’ internal scanning operations. But there are some important implications of the HathiTrust, and that is what I set out to find. I want to give special thanks to John Wilkin, Executive Director of the HathiTrust, for answering my many questions.

GPeerReview is a very simple Open Source tool that lets you write a review of a work, embed a hash of the work in your review, and sign that review with your digital signature (using your GPG key). The last two things are pretty neat. The hash allows you to be sure that people know which version of a paper you reviewed. Or at least, they will know if the version they have matches the version you had. This would be useful in the case where major changes are made to the paper that contradict your review.

Then, signing your review so that the author (and their publisher/advisor/dean/what have you) knows it is actually from you is pretty neat, and an obvious use of gpg. In fact, GPeerReview is essentially just a wrapper around the GnuPG command-line tool (see the FAQ).

I think this is a pretty interesting tool that could have some great uses, especially if we integrate it with the work-flow of academics (somehow). Step one of that implementation would be to move it from the CLI to some sort of Word/OpenOffice.org plugin. Or, even better, would be to provide a web-based service for this.

Crazy Idea
Launchpad for Scholarly Articles and GPeerReview

Going back to my crazy idea of a Launchpad for Scholarly Articles: basically a service that provides users the ability to link published articles, whether open access or not, with pre-prints or author deposited versions in Institutional Repositories. The killer feature of this service would be to provide a way for people who DON’T have access to the expensive scholarly journals a way to read and be informed via the pre-prints written by the authors that are not restricted by the overzealous journal publishers.

Then, add on the ability for readers of those articles to make comments on and provide useful reviews of the material. Even adding this ability to places like arxiv.org would be great; it provides a mechanism to build community. And as we all know, the community is what makes any service an important resource for people. Without community the service is just a collection of tools.

But, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know all of the various web-based services out there for scholarly communication; maybe someone has already implemented something like this. Leave a comment if you know of anything out there like this.