News Blog

The Web enables anyone to communicate with the masses, even serial killers.

Charles Manson, convicted murderer and leader of the infamous Manson Family, has released the digital album One Mind over the Web.

Manson, who ordered the deaths of actress Sharon Tate and seven others including Tate's unborn son, has issued the album under the Creative Commons license, which means anyone can listen or copy it as long as they don't use it for commercial purposes.

It's doubtful that anyone would want to buy Manson's music. Indeed, one of the reasons that Manson sent his minions to Tate's house to kill everybody in it was that he thought it was occupied by a record producer who had rejected his music.

So you're a fan of intellectual property innovation and you want to bring Creative Commons to Hong Kong. What are your pitches? Exalting the free market and smearing Hollywood.

Creative Commons, founded by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, develops licenses that let creators allow or disallow a variety of reuses of the work. It's catchphrase, if it has one, is "Some Rights Reserved."

Will Creative Commons make it to Hong Kong?

(Credit: Creative Commons / Sinobyte)

Teams of lawyers have adapted these licenses to more than 40 national jurisdictions, including mainland China, but the Hong Kong efforts are still under way.

Rebecca MacKinnon--an excellent media blogger, an assistant professor at Hong Kong University, and a member of CC's Hong Kong team--writes in her blog about the progress of the Hong Kong effort. She also recounts two arguments for CC in Hong Kong:

The first is from Pindar Wong, an ICANN board member who founded Hong Kong's first ISP:

...Hong Kong is one of the freest economies in the world. So let the market decide. The Creative Commons license should be there by default. Once it's there, then we can start doing things that are very interesting...This is a starting point not an ending point.

The second from Joi Ito, chair of CC's board and a longtime media blogger:

What's really a pity is that this Hollywood regime is infecting other governments into thinking that by having a strong copyright regime they will encourage the content business. When in fact by encouraging the amateur business, they may sell more video cameras and televisions and network connections and bandwidth, and we would probably make a lot more money supporting the sharing economy in Asia than we would trying to build a Hollywood inside Hong Kong.

I am a supporter (and a user, at my other site) of CC. I'm hoping it gets up and running in Hong Kong's legal structure sooner rather than later.

The Internet has enabled the emergence of a collective consciousness that is unprecedented in human history. We are coming together as a hive, and the intelligence of the swarm is being mined and utilized like never before.

Knowledge is power, information is a cash commodity, and who decides how these resources and benefits are distributed? The latest controversy about Facebook's Beacon advertisements is one of many examples that suggests that the issue of user control over his or her own information is reaching a tipping point. We, the online masses, are developing a new sense that our own information is sacred and worth protecting, and not to be indiscriminately broadcast, or blindly exploited for someone else's commercial gain.

Beyond a "right to privacy" that might have meant "secrecy" in the past, we need to think about the right to control our information when it comes to:

• What I say about myself
• What others say about me, and
• How that information is used

I see these issues coming up time and time again in a thread that runs through everything from Internet safety, to social networking, creative artists' rights, consumer/patient rights, all the way up to government wiretapping and surveillance.

Lately, my daughter has been begging to see the new show iCarly, a spinoff of Drake and Josh.

Now, I'm not a big TV watcher, but I was a huge fan of it when I was a kid, and I do think that iCarly could have all the makings of a 21st century Zoom, given what we have available in the form of consumer technology around the house.

When Creative Commons first surfaced, it was heralded as a means to share media without being ensnared by the complications accompanying traditional copyright.

With six different licenses available, media creators were provided the opportunity to dial in the exact rights they wanted. Or at least that was the plan.

In reality, this bevy of choices has led to significant confusion and as CNN reports, 16 year-old Alison Chang recently learned her picture is being used for a Virgin Mobile ad campaign in Australia. She didn't give her permission, and it appears that the ads exploit confusion around Creative Commons.

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The man who claims to have created the famed Electric Slide has backed down from a legal claim against an engineer who posted a YouTube video of people doing the dance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced.

The EFF had represented the engineer, Kyle Machulia, in a lawsuit against the dance's creator, Richard Silver. But on Tuesday, the EFF said Silver had backed down from his claim and his general "online video takedown campaign" and agreed to allow anyone noncommercial use of the dance.

In February, Silver filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice with YouTube demanding that the service remove a video in which the dance briefly appears.

"Mr. Silver's misuse of the DMCA interfered with our client's free speech rights," EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry said in a press release. "New technologies have opened multiple avenues for artists and their audiences to create, share and comment on new works. We cannot let absurd copyright claims squash this extraordinary growth."

Under the terms of the settlement, Silver agreed to license the dance under a Creative Commons license. That means anyone will be able to perform, reproduce, display or distribute recordings of the Electric Slide for noncommercial use in any medium.

For his part, Machulis said he was excited for what the settlement means for general use of content--like videos of people dancing in public places.

"This is a huge win for open-source licenses as well as line dance enthusiasts and hapless nerds with video cameras," Machulis said. "It's as much a win for Creative Commons as it is for me, as this is a much more understandable platform to talk to people about intellectual property and licensing on than the usual software claims that come up."

The video is now back online as a result of the settlement.