Files are not for sharing! June 24, 2006
Matthew Baldwin and Goopymart have an informative yet humorous on-line book for kids called Files are not for sharing.
This book is a must read for young people trying to understand file sharing.
“What is sharing?
Sharing is when you give something to someone else, like a cookie or a toy.
What happens when you share?
Your friend has a cookie and a toy and you have nothing.”
Bound By Law, interview with the authors June 20, 2006
Wired has an interview with the law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, authors of Bound By Law? Tales From the Public Domain. Thanks reddit! We covered this wonderful Creative Commons comic book when it came out here.
Bound By Law, Fair use comic March 15, 2006
The comic book “Bound by Law? (Tales from the Public Domain)” is a fantastically good read on copyright, fair use, and how they impact the making of documentary films. Created by three law professors at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain this is the most entertaining and informative book ever on the complicated subject of copyright. The story is based on Akiko, a filmmaker wanting to capture a day in the life of New York and dealing with all of the obstacles that copyright puts in the way.
“A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true?”
This book is a great educational resource as well as being a lot of fun to read. It’s published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license so you can read on line, download it, or buy it and help support this non-profit effort. I bought two, one to keep and one to pass around.
Free downloads 3, Legal Torrents for all February 24, 2006
Here is a site with loads of content under the Creative Commons license with the full permission of the rights holders to download for free. As LegalTorrents.com puts it,
“LegalTorrents is a collection of Creative Commons-licensed, legally downloadable, freely distributable creator-approved files, from electronic/indie music to movies and books, which we have made available via BitTorrent”
If music is what you are after, some of these archives are the better part of a gigabyte in size and some contain hundreds of mp3’s from a great number of artists. There is more than just music though, go explore this pocket of fair use friendly media. Happy downloading!
