My Creative Commons-licensed photo appears in a Science article

Bill Clinton reaches for something to sign Here’s a nice demonstration of the power of releasing your photos under a Creative Commons license… a photograph of Bill Clinton that I once took is now featured in this month’s Science magazine!

The fellow who wrote the paper was nice enough to let me know about my picture appearing in Science, writing me to say “Hello – I am writing because you kindly granted permission for your photography to be used in a paper submitted to the journal Science.” Yesss! He understood that permission had already been granted 🙂 Too frequently people e-mail me asking permission to use my photographs and such, when the whole point of the CC license was so they could use it without wasting my time, so long as they follow my license terms. Of course in this case he probably didn’t need to use Creative Commons-licensed photos, I’d say he has a pretty good case for fair use here, publishing part of a picture in an academic journal. But hey, whatever.

Check out this nice summary of the article and see how we can teach a computer to recognize Bill Clinton’s face!

P.S. Thanks to Elsa for mentioning the article to me too… it’s always good to know that even if the author had neglected to inform me, my friends would have kept me up to date 🙂

I’m speaking at Reed College in Portland

Early this morning I am flying to Portland, Oregon, where I will be staying at Reed College for a few days, as a guest of Reed Free Culture. If you are in or around Portland for some reason, we should hang out!

I will be speaking at Reed Monday, April 9, 7:30 p.m., in Psychology 105. (You can also see me mentioned on their Public Policy Series webpage if you scroll down a bit.) I’ll also probably be at a Reed chapter meeting on Sunday, doing a little workshop to help them get their chapter rolling. My friend Kevin from high school (who now works for Microsoft, to my derision) is visiting me on Saturday, and we’ll go sightseeing around Portland… I’m planning on dropping by Free Geek at some point 🙂

On Tuesday I’ll be flying back to LAX to speak at USC for USC Free Culture, on a panel of several people. Hm… I can’t find the details on that, I’ll have to post about it later. Sleepytime!

UPDATE: You can get the audio from the panel that I was on at USC here: Free[ing] Culture in Los Angeles: Beyond the Ivory Tower [download mp3]

Nelson at U Florida this weekend / next week

florida free culture presents Nelson Pavlosky

I’ll be visiting the University of Florida in Gainesville March 1-7, and speaking multiple times while I’m there. The main event is Monday, March 5, 6:30pm – 8:00pm in Turlington Room 1315, where I’ll be addressing the members of Florida Free Culture about the Diebold case and the free culture movement in general.

I’ll also be speaking to two sections of a class called Legal and Social Issues in Computing on Tuesday morning March 6th, so if you’re in that class please do attend that day 🙂

While I’m at U Florida, I’ll be visiting the Open Art show, FFC’s art show featuring Creative Commons-licensed art. This is the 3rd CC art show that FreeCulture.org chapters have done, following in the footsteps of NYU’s CC art show and Harvard’s Sharing is Daring.

I also plan to attend a games and digital media conference, a comic studies conference, and perhaps go to rock concerts, visit alternative libraries, and explore nature. The possibilities are endless! If you’re in the area, I’d love to meet up with you ^_^ Unless, of course, you’re an axe murderer or something.

Come see me speak at UPenn on Monday night

A poster for my talk, featuring my faceI’ll be coming out of hiding briefly to speak at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday night. I’ve updated the graphics for my presentation a bit with Karen’s help (thanks for drawing pretty things for me, Karen!), so it will be even prettier than it has been in the past ^_^ Come see me speak at 8:00 pm on Nov 20, 2006 at the King’s Court English House, in the 1938 Lounge. If you need directions, it’s at 3465 Sansom Street in Philadelphia. Please RSVP through the Facebook event or some other means (leave a comment?) if you are not a UPenn student, so that I can put your name on a list of people who are allowed in. Otherwise you may be ejected by UPenn’s robot guardians, or perhaps devoured by a large three-headed dog.

You should especially come to this talk because UPenn’s free culture club is kind of short on members, which is odd given that most of the freshmen at UPenn supposedly read the book Free Culture as their freshman reading project. Help us get Penn Free Culture off the ground!

Going to California, then Boston

Flyer for my talk at ScrippsThanks to everyone who wished me happy birthday on IM and Facebook: I love you all! I was considering throwing a full-fledged birthday party today, but I was worn out from last week at school, so I just got together with a few friends from my hometown and played Scrabble and Risk. Gosh, I’m 22… my age is a palindrome.

Anyway, I will be in California in the LA – Claremont area this week, doing free culture stuff and visiting friends. I arrive on Sunday afternoon (today!) and depart for NJ on Saturday morning, so if you’re in the area and you want to see me, now’s the time to do it! I’m considering going to check the urban farm that is in danger of being paved over to build a warehouse, and also going to see the Electric 6, so there should be plenty of fun to go around ^_^

I will be speaking on Thursday, March 9 at 8:30pm at Scripps College in Humanities 101. (See the flyer.) I went out and bought a wireless presentation mousy-clicker thing for this talk, so it’ll be a little extra smooth and sexy. Do come!

Also, if you’re in the Boston area, I’ll be speaking at Northeastern University on Thursday, March 23rd, with Danny O’Brien and Lawrence Lessig, 11:30-2:30pm in 450 Dodge Hall. See the pretty yet bizarre poster: Free Culture event at Northeastern

UPDATE: The event is indeed free and open to the public. Also, Danny has been replaced by Derek Slater, and while I will miss Danny’s British accent I’ll be glad to see Derek again ^_^ Here’s an updated poster: Poster for my Northeastern gig

Very rough draft of a syllabus for a student run class on free culture

Alright folks, this is wayyy ambitious, but I’m going to try to put together a student-run class for next semester. I’m working on a syllabus to shop around to professors who may be interested in helping me out, and I want to get your opinions on this early (and informal) draft. Please comment! Would you be interested in taking this class? How can it be improved? Remember, there are 13 weeks in the semester, should I try to have 13 lesson plans? UPDATE: There are actually 14 weeks, but it’s good to leave flex time, so 13 plans is fine for now.

=The Free Culture Movement: A Historical, Legal, Political, and Technical Perspective=
(Ok, the title needs work… suggestions?)

Each class will begin with a short lecture by myself (perhaps supplemented or replaced by a guest speaker at times?), and will end with a more participatory group presentation.

Check out the 13 lesson plans…

Mathematicians get free culture

I’m not sure why I downloaded this PDF, but I am looking at Antongiulio Fornasiero’s thesis about “Integration on Surreal Numbers” (the first Google hit for “surreal numbers thesis intellectual property”). I have little to no interest in the topic, but when I skimmed through it in an attempt to find out what it was doing on my desktop, the “Notice” caught my eye:

==Notice==
The notions of intellectual property and originality are self-contradictory. Ideas
cannot be the private property of anybody; nihil sub sole novi was already in the
Bible.(1) Nobody cares about who first uttered a theorem, only whether it is true or
false.(2)
You can freely distribute, copy, quote, edit or modify the present work, either
as a whole, or in part, without any further obligation on you.

(1)The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
Ecclesiastes I, 9–11.

(2) Unfortunately, this work, being a (almost) verbatim copy of a Ph.D. thesis, does not follow the principles stated here. . .

You tell ’em, Antongiulio!

UPDATE: Mystery solved, I found the link in my del.icio.us inbox… I have friends who are math geeks 😉

Pop And Politics interview

Some of the answers are shorter / less detailed than I would have liked them to be, but I took this opportunity to throttle my inner perfectionist and sent it off… the article is simply entitled “Free Culture” and is posted on Pop and Politics as well as on Pravin Sathe’s blog Solid Hang.

If you have any constructive criticism, please leave it here! scibilia already gave me her input, so she’s off the hook 😉

I attend a live NPR radio show taping in Philadelphia

Chilling with Kembrew McLeod at NPR's live taping of "Justice Talking"
Chilling with Kembrew McLeod, originally uploaded by skyfaller.

I went to a live taping of the show Justice Talking today, where the topic of debate was filesharing, the Grokster case, sampling, and many other free culture issues. Kembrew McLeod, a free culture-y communications professor from UIowa, was debating Dean Garfield, a lawyer who currently works for the MPAA and formerly represented the RIAA in suits against Audiogalaxy and Kazaa. I managed to get in a question early on in the program, so you should be able to hear me if you listen to the show (called “Peer-to-Peer File Sharing“) in late April when it airs.

my breakdown of the event

Creative Commons

There’s been a lot of great stuff happening with Creative Commons licensing recently! First of all, my copy of Jim’s Big Ego‘s latest CD arrived in the mail today, and I’ve been playing its “Some rights reserved” vibes for my Dad 🙂

Second of all, I recently installed the awesomest plugin for Mozilla, called Mozcc. It scans the webpage for Creative Commons RDF Metadata, and if it finds any it displays the licensing info icons in the corner of your screen. You can then click the icons to read any information that the author included with the document. This is an answer to one of Creative Commons’s Tech Challenges, which is basically a wish list of software that the folks Creative Commons want to exist. One SCDC project that I’d like to get moving soon is Code for Social Change, and one of our first projects would be to respond to some of these tech challenges in order to get our name out there. Unfortunately, the free software community works too fast, they’re answering all of the challenges before we can do it 🙂 Slow down, guys! Wait for us!

Finally, while surfing the Creative Commons website, I happened upon this great “Open Source Movie”, called Nothing So Strange. Basically, the final cut of the movie is under a normal copyright, but all of the raw footage is released under an extremely liberal, BSD-Style Creative Commons license (specifically, the Attribution license)! I think it’s a good idea, and I fully intend to buy it. It’s not available on DVD yet, it’s only available in Quicktime MPEG4 format, but that’s fine because I can still play that on Linux in Mplayer, no problem 🙂