OpenLife

Important press release as a follow up on these earlier news:

DANISH COLLECTING SOCIETY KODA TEAMS UP WITH CC DENMARK

Copenhagen, Denmark — January 30 2008

Creative Commons Denmark is pleased to announce that KODA is now offering noncommercial Creative Commons licensing to its members - making it the second country worldwide to do so. A similar pilot project was initiated in 2007 by Buma/Stemra in the Netherlands. Both show that collective rights management and Creative Commons licenses can be combined to the benefit of creators: “Creators can rely on the strength of collective rights management for commercial uses of their works, while taking noncommercial online distribution into their own hands by using Creative Commons licenses”, says Paul Keller of Creative Commons Netherlands.

“This important development highlights two of Creative Commons’ most significant strengths: worldwide presence through local projects, in this case CC Denmark, and the ability to bridge divides in the copyright debate with pragmatic and voluntary tools,” adds Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons.

More flexibility and freedom for musicians

KODA’s adoption of Creative Commons licensing marks a breakthrough for Danish composers and lyricists wanting to explore new ways of making their work available online while at the same time collecting commercial royalties through KODA.

“KODA is an important part of the music infrastructure, and we feel obliged to let artists decide how they want their rights administered. KODA must be a tolerant organization, and allow for experimentation and new ways of doing things”, says Assistant Managing Director at KODA, Martin Gormsen.

“In the past, allowing your fans to share your music meant waving goodbye to an important revenue stream for the artist. We are happy to be able to offer the best of both worlds now” says Christian Villum of Urlyd, a new Danish label that encourages fans to copy and share their music.

Facts about the KODA / Creative Commons pilot

KODA members must sign an agreement with KODA in which they indicate which works they wish to license. Not all Creative Commons licenses can be implemented for this pilot; since KODA manages all commercial rights for their members, only Creative Commons licenses with the “noncommercial” condition can be used.

Creative Commons Denmark has issued a set of guidelines to clarify what constitutes “noncommercial use”.

The most important provisions are:
• The use is only noncommercial if used by a private individual or certain non-profit associations / institutions.
• The music cannot endorse, sponsor, advertise or in other ways promote third party products or services. • No money or similar value can be exchanged as remuneration for the music.

Read more at http://creativecommons.dk/koda/ (in Danish).

About KODA

KODA (Danish Authors’ Society) is a non-profit rights management society with approximately 32,000 members: composers, songwriters, lyricists and music publishers. A collaboration with similar societies across the world ensures that an agreement on music usage with KODA gives the user access to the entire world repertoire. In 2006, administrative fees constituted just 11.1 percent.
For more information, please visit http://www.koda.dk.

About Creative Commons Denmark

Creative Commons Danmark is a collaboration between the law department at Copenhagen Business School and a network of volunteers. Creative Commons Denmark is part of Creative Commons, a not-for-profit organization founded in 2001 that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works. Through its copyright licenses, Creative Commons offers authors, artists, scientists, and educators the choice of a flexible range of protections and freedoms that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to enable a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach. For more information about Creative Commons Denmark, please visit http://creativecommons.dk, and for Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.org.

Contact

Public project lead: Henrik Moltke, moltke@creativecommons.dk (Press and non-legal inquiries)

Legal project lead: Thomas Riis

Creative Commons Danmark c/o Copenhagen Business School
Juridisk Institut
Howitzvej 13, 3. sal
2000 Frederiksberg
info@creativecommons.dk

Press Kit

http://creativecommons.org/presskit

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koda, creativecommons, collectingsocieties

Jens is now ready for his first Fastelavn (Carnival) the coming weekend. Batman returns!

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fastelavn, batman

A not so positive review of Erik Ringmar’s A Blogger’s Manifesto by Christopher Howse: A Blogger’s Manifesto: By so many, to so few in the Spectator.

First I must say parenthetically, for those who take no cognisance of such things, that blogs are no more than diaries that people post up on their own websites, hoping that some desperate wanderer or other in cyberspace might like to read them.

Hmmn, Christopher Howse semms to have a very simplistic view of blogs.

The world had 70 million bloggers last April, and the number may have doubled since then. Britain now has four million bloggers. Most blogs are read by fewer than 10 people a day. Only 10 per cent have more than 100 hits a day. You’d reach a wider audience if you photocopied a few sheets of paper and left them on the Underground.

Okay, then. 4 million blogs multiplied by 10 people a day gives 40 millions readings a day of just British blogs. That is lot. The Lobdon tube would become very messy, if 40 millions let alone 4 millions photocopies were to be left there for people to pick up and read every day.

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bloggersmanifesto, erikringmar, christopherhowse

I spend two hours the other night watching Zeitgeist - the movie. The first parts covering the link between astrology and all the major religions and the relation between the pursuit of profit and war waging are very convincing. But then - like most conspiracy theories - it raves away to the point where you sit back wondering if the movie was worth the two hours you just spent watching it.

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zeitgeist, conspiracies

Here’s a book that I would love to find the time to read: Biobazaar - The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology by Janet Hope.

The question that Janet Hope explores in Biobazaar is: can the open source approach do for biotechnology what it has done for information technology?

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biobazaar, biotech, janethope

After having listened to Bill Gates’ 30 minutes speech at this years World Economic Forum a couple of points struck me.

First, I was surprised by the lack of substance. I would have thought Bill Gates would have presented some truly new ideas or angles on how to view capitalism as a source of promoting social welfare. But disappointingly, his concept of creative capitalism seems to me to be just the same old song that self-interested companies should incorporate into their business models the benefits from being nice and responsible to society.

Yeah, right. But that is not so simple is it. The idea of the corporate citizenship or corporate social responsibility has been tried for many years now (hundreds of years or two or three decades, if we are talking about the modern version). And as the recent survey in the Economist clearly spells out, CSR is a concept locked in internal conflict:

If the business of business stops being business, we all lose.

But of course, it is laudable indeed that rich people such as Microsoft’s founder spends his vast fortune on helping other people in need. And those initiatives initiated among other places in Davos by individuals and their companies have obviously done wonders in areas where other efforts have conspicuosly failed.

There is money to be made in doing good. But firms are not there to solve the world’s political problems. It is the job of governments to govern; don’t let them wiggle out of it.

Bill Gates’ proposal that company should allocate the smartest people to think more about projects that can benefit the poor, prevent climate change and so on, is not new. It is a slight variation on Google’s and maybe other’s provision for that employee can spend time on charitable word.

These are all nice intentions. But how are they going to happen? Klaus Schwab nailed it with his question to Bill Gates: But aren’t all the good initiatives totally dependending on that the company has a CEO who has a personal passion herein? Bill Gates answer was: Well, yes.

Second, the name of the concept creative capitalism seems to me to be a typical flavor-of-the day catchword that does not really describe what Bill Gates was trying to explain to us. In the similar vein it could have been replaced with innovative capitalism. It does not mean anything. Maybe, something like caring captalism or social capitalism would be better for the purpose.

It is kind of ironic that Bill Gates constantly stresses the need for captalism and free markets as the main driver for social welfare (I agree on that) when his company has twice within the last decade violated the most important regulation to protect free markets. Whether you agree or not in the correctness of these court decisions, it is a fact that Microsoft has been found in the US to have committed severe violations of their antitrust regulation and in Europa our competition law.

Third, it is nice to see that Bill Gates finally has got the open source message. He repeatedly in his speech stressed that the motivating factor for human beings also in their commercial affairs was not just monetary compensation but also recognition (and not just recognition measured by peoples willingness to pay money for your products). I think that Richard Stallman and Bill Gates are fully in agreement here.

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davos, worldeconomicforum, creativecapitalism, billgates

Why debate dogma?

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I think that at the heart at the present debate (or clash, if you will) about faith against atheism is the fundamental premise of the Pat Condell’s (and a lot other atheists’) argument that it is entirely unacceptable that religion claims that to be able to hold a special position: That it cannot be discussed as it is a matter of faith. If you bring this argument to any discussion you are disqualified from the very start. You cannot debate what cannot be questioned!So religious people has to live with that they unless they can bring evidence, logic ans so on to the fore it is as difficult to respect their views (not them as individuals, of course) as it is to respect those of someone who believe in the celestial teacup:.

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970).

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patcondell, celestialteapot, atheism

Yesterday marked the 10 years anniversary of one of my favourite open source succes stories: The open sourcing of Netscape.

January 22, 1998 — the Beginning of Mozilla

NETSCAPE ANNOUNCES PLANS TO MAKE NEXT-GENERATION COMMUNICATOR SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE FREE ON THE NET
BOLD MOVE TO HARNESS CREATIVE POWER OF THOUSANDS OF INTERNET DEVELOPERS; COMPANY MAKES NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR AND COMMUNICATOR 4.0 IMMEDIATELY FREE FOR ALL USERS, SEEDING MARKET FOR ENTERPRISE AND NETCENTER BUSINESSES

Microsoft won the browser war of the late nineties with its Internet Explorer, but it turned out that this was a Pyrrhic victory. Out the ashes of Netscape ver. 5 came the open source browser Firefox (and Netscape 9 which I use) and the illegal tactics used by Microsoft during the war was the reason for the famous antitrust case later lost by Microsoft.

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microsoft, firefox, mozilla, netscape

A letter to the Microsoft CEO with fait and reasonable request from the OpenDoc Society:

Microsoft Corp
attn. Mr. Steve Ballmer
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-7329
USA

Date: 22/01/2008
Telephone: +31 20 888 4251
E-mail: michiel@opendocsociety.org

Amsterdam, January 22nd 2008

Dear mr. Ballmer,

on behalf of OpenDoc Society I want to request the following:

we would like to have the possibility to enable the users of the
Windows platforms to work with the Open Document Format (ISO
26300:2006, or ODF for short). We think there is a significant amount
of Windows users that would be helped with this technology.

What is the price your company would charge us for pushing a mechanism
to your users through the AutoUpdate-facility of Windows and/or
Microsoft Office that should activate at the first encounter of a user
with an ODF file? Your operating system Windows should then prompt the
user with some information about the available software that works with
ODF, and how to install that software that would enable him or her to
make use of ODF. Preferably we would like the user to have as little
work as possible during the whole process.

Can you tell us what the different options are in this respect, and
what these different options would cost? Potentially, we would be
interested in some other file formats currently not available under a
vanilla Windows installation too - such as SVG, RDF and SMIL. Are there
other options available to us to have third party applications
installed in Windows when a user encounters them?

As you will understand, we are eager to start using this post-factory
file extension facility as soon as possible. Would it be possible for
you to respond by February 14th 2008?

Kind regards,

Michiel Leenaars
Board of OpenDoc Society

For correspondence please use:

OpenDoc Society Intnl. secretariat
Wibautstraat 150
1091 GR Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Phone: +31 20 888 4251
Fax: +31 84 712 2055

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odf, opendocsociety

Giving life to Death: Wladyslaw “Adzio” Moes
(left, center) with friend and sisters
photo: Carroll & Graf

This is kind of fun. One of the main characters of one of my favourite novels, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the young Polish boy Tadzio was in fact modelled after a young Polish boy called Wladyslaw “Adzio” Moes. Read more here: http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0349,barra,49149,10.html.

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thomasmann, deathinvenice