Picture taken by Guido van Nispen before the p2p workshop at felix meritis last friday. from looking at the timestamps of the photo and the previous entry (all the way to the bottom in the white box) it seems that he has actually captured me writing the previous blog entry…

See the rest of the Guidos workshop pictures here.

Unlike everything else on this pages this image is licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons attribution non commercial license. I have always found the non-comercial licenses slightly stupid as the whole concept is incredibly difficult to define (but we are working on it). Now i wonder what the maker of this mini-dv camcorder had in mind when they slapped this sticker on it. and how in hell are they going to enforce this? (message to panasonic the camera in question is used by a non-profit operation). And since when is it possible to restrict the use of tangible things of technology after it has been sold? i always thought this was a more or less exclusive privilege that Hollywood imagines in it’s wet dreams.

Just read trough the Final Conference Paper (warning: pdf) of the Creative Economy Conference that was held last week in London as part of the British EU presidency. It is a pretty troubling paper that seems to be build on two general assumptions: 1) DRM is good for humanity and 2) the more/longer/stronger Intellectual Property Rights the better. Both of these assumptions are obviously stupid but they seem to be what you get when you let corporations sponsor (and dominate) government conferences.

The paper does contain two especially stunning statements that do illustrate what kind of role citizens should play in the creative economy (if you ask the creative economy types). They must be consumers of products that are supplied by the creative industries and for the rest they better shut up. My favorite statement is this:

there are concerns from consumers’ and civil society representatives that DRMs will restrict uses they believe they are entitled to (emphasis mine)

There goes fair-use, there go exceptions to copyright that protect non-consuming uses of creative works. And the DRM loving authors of this document seem to want to make a point of it by creating a PDF that i cant copy and past the text out of. kinda stupid of me to believe that i have the right to quote from this paper. This silly belief must be related to the fact that i am belonging to a minority group of people who actually want to use the powers of digital networks:

A range of alternative licensing arrangements were discussed, all of which cater for some consumers/citizens demand to interact creatively with content in the online environment.

If you ask me this is a pretty outrageous demand indeed. and at the very minimum these people need to be punished by making them type their quotes from PDF documents.

The MPA (Music Publishers Association) and the IFPI (International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers) have released a software called digital file check that can be used by usres to remove file sharing apps from computers.

It also contains a function to check ‘what files are in your “shared folders” – these files are likly to be illegal’. The app only runs on windows so i cannot test it right now, but i was wondering what happens when the app encounters a shared folder full of properly tagged Creative Commons licensed video and audio files. Has anybody tried this out yet?

It should be dirt cheap to implement a metadata check that results in a message that these files can be legally shared, but somehow i am suspecting that the programme will label them as probably illegal anyway. and i do not even want to get into the discussion of how stupid it is to call files ‘illegal’ certain uses of files may infringe on somebody else’s rights but the files themselves cannot be illegal.