Open Media Review

|\| | |/| - Trent Reznor to fans: “Thank you”

clipped from dl.nin.com 999,999 1,000,000 letting you discipline echoplex head down lights in the sky corona radiata the four of us are dying demon seed length: 43:45 streaming audio available at iLike. the slip is licensed under a creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license. we encourage you to remix it share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc. ©2008 NIN www.nin.com as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com. the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options - all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.

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D(iscover) the R(eal) M(eaning) of ‘free’

clipped from opsound.org opsound Opsound is a gift economy in action, an experiment in applying the model of free software to music. Musicians and sound artists are invited to add their work to the Opsound pool using a copyleft license developed by Creative Commons. Listeners are invited to download, share, remix, and reimagine. Anyone is encouraged to contribute sound files to the Opsound’s open sound pool. All material for the sound pool will be released under a Creative Commons license (the “Attribution-ShareAlike license“), a copyleft license in the spirit of open source software license which allows for all kinds of copying, remixing, use, and reuse while retaining an attribution to the original artist. [more info] Opsound: Free Love, Free Music.

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Links and status

Hello faithful readers!

We here at the Open Media Review want to let you know that we are discussing many things behind the scenes (and some of us are even going to get together IN PERSON soon to talk), and we’re focusing on the purpose behind this site, where we want it to go, and how we’re going to get it there. So hopefully soon we’ll be back on a more regular schedule with more regular postings - because there’s lots of cool stuff going on! Thanks for your patience.

In the meantime:

• An update to Thomas’ Little Brother post - the audiobook is also available at eMusic, which has DRM-free music and audiobooks (you need the subscription option that gives you two book credits per month, not one). You can also get excerpts in a handful of podcasts including I Should Be Writing (and The Command Line soon, too, right?).
• From Natalie Metzger: From the Read, Write, Web Blog. They discuss the recent decision by Del Ray to release Star Wars “Legacy of the Force” Book 1, Betrayal as a free download in conjunction with the May 13 release of the final book in the series. In addition to it being freely  apparently they are encouraging users to share this freebie with others. RWW goes on to discuss how this move is an emulation of the recent free releases from popular music artists. Interestingly enough, there is no mention in the post about how this move might be following suit with recent free book releases from other book publishers. Here’s the link. Thanks, Natalie!
• From Kevin Crosby: came across a podcast in my feeds today that I thought would interest you for the Open Media Review.  It’s not completely on point, but I found some of the comments interesting.  The podcast deals with efforts to collect free and open legal case law on the web instead of leaving it almost completely in the corporate hands of Thomson-West and Lexis-Nexis.  Basically those two companies have had a lock on access to legal research ever since they first started to collect and publish court decisions.  While the actual court decisions are public domain, the companies (particularly West) own the volume and page numbering system that is the backbone of legal research and citation. The podcast is Lawyer 2 Lawyer which is part of Law.com’s LegalTalk Network and the episode is called Free Case Law.

Posted in Audio, Law, Open Fiction | 1 Comment »

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother

Cory Doctorow has launched his latest novel, Little Brother, this past weekend. This is Doctorow’s first young adult offering and one I had the good fortune to read in manuscript form. It is yet another example of how sophisticated the young adult market is today. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

The short synopsis is that several teens are snagged in a Homeland Security net after a tragic catastrophe in San Francisco and the novel details their dedicated efforts to take back the Bill of Rights through technology and hacking techniques that exist today. Cory deals well with these hefty issues of civil liberties and technology hacking in the interest of activism. The print version of the book includes how-tos with each chapter giving more information in a hands-on fashion about the technology and skills demonstrated throughout.

As with his other novels, this book is available as a free download in a variety of electronic book formats, including plain text, HTML and PDF as well as ones for specific readers. The ebook is available under a very liberal CC license: attribution, non-commercial, share alike.

If you are looking for the book in your local book store, where you should be able to find it, keep in mind that it may shelved under young adult or fantasy/science fiction or both. Also up until May 22nd you can order a signed copy from Borderlands. There may be some limitations on shipping, check the site for details.

Cory is also trying something new for him, a commercial audio book offering. At his insistence, the audio will only be available without DRM. Unfortunately, this means for the moment it will not be available through the largest online reseller, Audible. iTunes audio books are all provided by Audible, as well. You can order the audiobook through the book’s site and there is also an embeddable flash widget if you’d like to help sell the book through your own site. There is also a plain text link if you are unable to support flash on your site.

The audiobook comes with a liberal license, a little bit different in that the remix/redistribution is limited to a thirty minute excerpt. That’s roughly a full chapter of the book.

Cory has included a novel feature on the book’s site. Many readers have approached him after consuming one of his free electronic editions who are not inclined to purchase a dead tree version but are willing to send him money to support a particular book. His response in the past has been that he prefers the book sale to the cash as he has a very positive working relationship with his publisher. Plus only a book sale registers in terms of how well a particular book is doing.

For Little Brother, there is a donate link on the site. What this allows you to do is support the book in Cory’s preferred fashion and he will connect your donation with a school or library who has registered a desire for a copy or copies of the book.

Visit the site and check out all of the distribution options and activities around this wonderful book.

Posted in Audio, Favorites, Open Fiction | 5 Comments »

No Starch Experiments with BitTorrent, DRM-free Release

No Starch is a fun, smaller, technology oriented publisher. As such, it is hardly surprising they would be willing to experiment with direct distribution through BitTorrent. They are releasing two titles, both by Leander Kahney noted Wired.com columnist; Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod. The books are being made available in DRM-free PDF format.

The candid thoughts of the publisher are encouraging that they understand the larger issues at stake.

But there’s a political issue here as well. I think that publishers (music and book) are spending too much time circling the wagons and not enough time thinking of ways that they can use technology to advantage. Certainly, our move here is a bit unusual, but someone has to take the plunge. May as well be us. After all, we were the first publishers in the United States to come out publicly against the DMCA. Time to put our money where our mouth is, as they say.

Using technology to advantage resonates well with the the NRKbeta doctrine, a coinage deriving from an interview with folks at the Norwegian broadcaster, NRK, after their own experimentation with BitTorrent and DRM-free downloads.

The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it.

Like other publishers they are taking a wait and see approach to the experiment. While they are optimistic that the torrents will have a positive effect on sales, they will condition future such releases on the success of this effort.

Posted in Open News, Tech | No Comments »

Open media authors hit bookshelves

It’s been gratifying to me to see my fellow podcasting authors hit it big, their free works hitting the shelves in the world of publishing. They’ve done a lot of work in podcasting - not to mention they took a real chance in putting their work out for free - and it’s finally paying off.

Matt Wallace is the author behind a good many of the stories at the Variant Frequencies podcast, and his visceral tales have won him the Parsec Award for best podcasted short science fiction story two years in a row. Matt’s releasing a short story collection via Apex Publishing, collecting many of his stories that have been previously released via podcast. In the classic try-before-you-buy manner, I recommend checking out the podcast and then ordering the book. The more we support these authors, the more likely they are to keep giving us free awesomeness. And everyone likes free awesomeness.

Variant Frequencies | Listen to The Next Fix stories | Pre-order the book from Apex

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Scott Sigler was the first of us to get a big book deal and we looked on his success with pride, hope and jealousy (hey, at least I’m honest). If Scott’s big time release of Infected does well this April 1, then it will likely show publishers that there are some good things coming out of the podosphere - not to mention how open media can serve to enhance sales, not stifle them. Infected is available via free podcast as well as PDF, but I urge you to support Scott and the concept of Open Media by purchasing your own copy of Infected next week.

Listen to Infected for free | Download the free PDF | Pre-order the book on Amazon

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Seth Harwood was one of the first non-science fiction podcast novelists, bringing his crime noir novel Jack Wakes Up to audio. He recently got a deal with Breakneck Books, putting his novel into print earlier this month. Again, supporting him is supporting open media authors overall, so be sure to check it out!

Listen to Jack Wakes Up for free | Order from Amazon

Posted in Open Fiction | 1 Comment »

Creative Commons becomes more common

One of the biggest problems with Creative Commons is simply that enough people don’t know about it. And heck, that’s not CC’s fault, not entirely. I try to do my part to let people know about it, and even though it’s beautifully written and easy to understand, some people still have problems wrapping their brain around it.

Thus I was thrilled this morning to discover the Creative Commons Documentation Project, a new project designed to explain the facets of CC licensing.

Alex Roberts, Senior Designer at Creative Commons, explained the benefits of the documentation initiative. “We’re always trying to make Creative Commons licenses easier to understand and use. From the beginning, CC has championed human-readable copyright licenses. Our documentation project works to extend this practice by offering short guides and explanations to a variety of CC topics.” All of the documentation is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license for redistribution, reuse and remix.

Get involved - read the press release

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Flotsam and Jetsam

Several years ago a US television network tried to promote rerun season as, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!” Back then I scoffed, but now I abashedly claim the same thing.

I’ve been absent, and I apologize (and am very grateful to my other bloggers for keeping this thing afloat.) But I was looking through Google Reader today and discovered several things from late ‘07 that I starred and wanted to blog about on the now-dead Open Media Watch site, only things went downhill at the job and I never got a chance to do them. So I’m going to blog about two of them here, and if you haven’t seen them, well, it’ll be new to you.
Cory Doctorow writes on Pixel-Stained Technopeasants vs Webscabs: As a proud Technopeasant, I found this argument (that seemed to stretch through half of ‘07) a fascinating one.

I confess that I don’t understand Howard’s argument — it seems to be that a world in which free text-files circulate is one in which readers stop paying for printed books. This isn’t supported by the facts — indeed, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the biggest problem writers have is that readers don’t go to bookstores, and that books compete with MMORPGs and other networked activities for time. Giving away ebooks puts them on an equal footing with all the other online activities, and puts books in serendipity’s way, where non-bookstore-going readers might find them. (Howard also seems to labor under the misapprehension that writers are being pressured to do free online releases, when the reality is that writers have to fight and spit and pitch tantrums to get permission to put their work online)

#

Eric Rice discusses What does social DIY bring to the future of game design?: Something I’m very interested in, as I started in the pro gaming industry where you’re nothing if you don’t have a publisher and promising developers get gobbled up immediately. I was also told that I couldn’t design games because I was in marketing.

Everything I learned spending countless hours on the microphone or promoting music can be compared to the radio station network visible in Grand Theft Auto series of games. The things I learned from being a videoblogger (old world term pre-Youtube era), can be applied to machinima, the genre of digital filmmaking powered by video game engines. Existing in various hypersocial, always-connected networks of blogs and friend-me lands, allows me to compare and contrast the behavior of groups (how IS Twitter or Myspace socially different from hordes of players in MMOs?). And virtual worlds (the very open sandbox ones), enable me to rapidly create a 3D place and instantly attract people.

As I work my way through this hellish cyberpunk project known as Saijo City (where everything around me is so cheerfully dystopian and oppressive), I can’t ignore each of these elements when writing the story. Because in my own head, I can hear what the state-sponsored radio sounds like and I can make it (or at the very least, mock it up). I can visualize the faces of the people of the city. I can imagine what music swells as we pan across the city. And finally, I can already imagine what people will love and hate, especially as a group.

Posted in Gaming, Open Fiction | No Comments »

ElfQuest Archive Being Made Available, Free, Online

I first read ElfQuest in college and immediately fell in love with the series, voraciously devouring back issues and following the current issues for a number of years. The art was distinctive and the writing mature and sophisticated. I even had the distinct pleasure of meeting one of the two creators of this wonderful independent work, Richard Pini, last year at a con where we chatted for a little bit about how he might allow fans access to the thirty years worth of material he had helped create.

I was mostly pleased to see this story on Boing Boing. The full archive is not online, yet, but will be made progressively available throughout the rest of the year.

The issues are in an online only format, which is a bit of a disappointment. The layouts are better than some I’ve seen and not that I would encourage it but the URL scheme looks predictable enough that a little bit of scripting might allow scraping. I do not see any explicit permissions, such as a Creative Commons license (which is why I would not recommend spidering the archive).

Still, getting access to such a wonderful work the bulk of which has been out of print for years is a big plus, in my mind. And if I managed to bump into Richard at another con, I look forward to continuing our discussion about more free schemes, like Creative Commons, and encouraging him to think about downloadable, open formats.

Posted in Favorites, Open Fiction, Open News | 2 Comments »

Creative Commons releases LiveContent 2.0

Natalie Metzger wrote in to tell us about the new Creative Commons DVD.

Creative Commons recently released a live DVD called LiveContent 2.0. It looks like it is a Fedora live DVD (Linux) with oodles of CC licensed content goodness contained within (including audio, text, video, and educational resources). It’s interesting to see how an open source platform has been paired with creative commons content in such a possibility useful way. I haven’t tried it out yet for myself, but it looks like it has a lot of creative potential.

You can find one of the articles about it here: http://www.fanaticattack.com/2008/creative-commons-releases-free-contentsoftware-with-livecontent-dvd.html

Posted in Audio, Open News, Video | No Comments »