7: Tute Task

1. What is creative commons and how could this licensing framework be relevant to your own experience at university?
Creative Commons (CC): provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

This is relevant to university studies as more and more of our assignments are solely posted online and we need a mix of digital materials to create them. CC works towards increasing the amount of creativity in "the commons" which aids producers of creative content by allowing them to use the CC material in their own work, such as using someone else's photo of the Eiffel Tower in one of your works.

This video gives a good explanation of what CC is all about:


2. Find 3 examples of works created by creative commons and embed them in your blog.

1. I love it when you dress in blue! appears on Flickr courtesy of spettacolopuro.
   
   
   Not all of the photos on Flickr are under a CC license so I searched specifically for photos that were and found the above in Creative Commons - Free Pictures.
   
   
2. This "Free Culture" popup audiobook is
   an audio book about Creative Commons written by Lawrence Lessig (founding member of CC). Each of the chapters have been read by people with affiliations to CC licenses. A text version of the book is also available for download.
   
   Obviously this isn't the only CC licensed book available online. Openculture.com lists 45 books available online that are under a CC license.
   
   
3. American band Nine Inch Nails released their 7th album Ghosts I-IV in 2008 under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. The band put their album online for free download, later releasing special edition box-set versions (for a measly $300...).
   
   

3. Find an academic article which discusses creative commons using a database or online journal. Provide a link to and a summary of the article.

Gordon-Murnane, L.. (2010, January)
CREATIVE COMMONS: Copyright Tools for the 21st Century
Online, 34(1), 18-21
Retrieved October 6, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global
Document ID: 1957509621

I found this article by Laura Gordon-Murnane via the Griffith library catalogue. Hopefully the link above works.

Gordon-Murnane's article is basically a 101 on Creative Commons written without the technical jargon you would expect to find in an article about copyright laws.

The article gives a brief outline of traditional copyright laws, mentioning that copyright laws in the U.S have been in place since 1790. But with the fairly recent move towards the internet "fostering a read/write culture", a need for a new category of copyright protection was needed and this is where Creative Commons comes into the mix.

I had never heard of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act before, but Gordon-Murnane gives an outline of it in her article. Apparently the Act "lengthened copyright terms in the United States by 20 years". It is also means that as soon as a piece of content is created it is copyrighted (as shown in the video in question 1 of this blog), meaning that as soon as you take a photo that image is copyrighted to you and will be for the rest of your life PLUS another 70 years after your death.

This means that a lot of content - including text, books, magazines, pictures, films, music, audio, and video - won't enter the public domain until well into the 21st century, meaning that nobody can reproduce or alter the content without permission.

Traditionally content was created in an analog format (such as books and records), but with the move toward digital technologies and its ability to "enable individuals to share, remix, mash up, collaborate, adapt and create something new and different", there was a need for new copyright laws to be created. This is why the Creative Commons Foundation sought to find an alternative to "All Rights Reserved".

• All Rights Reserved
  - Copyrighted
  - Unable to be used in any way without permission from the author
  
• Some Rights Reserved
  - Creative Commons Licensed
  - Content is allowed to be reproduced and altered depending on the license the work is under
  
• No Rights Reserved
  - Content is in the public domain
  - No permission needed to use

There is some contention over the "Non-Commercial License", for example are you still able to use content that was created under a Non-Commercial License if you post it on your blog or website that uses Google Ads? Technically you are profiting from the work by having Google Ads. There are other issues that Creative Commons are yet to address.

I found this article to be very helpful in exploring Creative Commons and will definitely be referring to it if I decide to do the essay topic regarding the Creative Commons.

4. Have a look at Portable Apps (a pc based application) – provide a brief description of what it is and how you think this is useful.
Portable Apps is an amazing site that has open source software available for download - but without the large file size! It basically allows you to carry all your favourite open source software around with you all day long... on your USB.

The main idea behind Portable Apps is that you can be working on any computer and not need to worry about downloading programs you are familiar with if that computer does not have them installed. Some of the free applications available for download include Mozilla Firefox, GIMP and Skype.

I heard about Portable Apps earlier this semester in another one of my classes when we were discussing the different kinds of open source software available. I think that this is a great concept and would be particularly useful in a work situation if you were, say, a journalist and you needed to send something through to the office on a deadline. There is a portable app for Open Office so you would be able to quickly type up something on the word processor or spreadsheet, whatever the task called for.

Another thing I find amazing about this site is that to download the Suite Standard Platform, which includes both Mozilla Firefox and Open Office along with many other applications, it takes up a mere 137MB. On average people have a USB with 4GB space and this would take up 2.5% of the storage space - virtually nothing.