Puck

A draft of the new Creative Commons license has just been published. According to bOING bOING, in its first 3.5 years, 160,000,000 works were released under the license.

poem by Brian Charles Clark

rip-off failure of a king —
power lies in story—
Lakoff’s frames describe the way
a dark room receives the bright focus
of its single window.
Up the Valley—
away from the house—
the view is different,
like art: alter the window,
violence is changing.
In the bush of ghosts the danger
I see is everyday talk becoming
lemon tree, very pretty, with fruit too
sour to eat.

We’ve known for a good long while now that Senator Santorum is an unlawful enemy combatant, working, as he does, for Lord Sauron. Proof has finally arrived, if you know how to read between the lines. In an interview published in the Bucks County Courier Times, the Myrmidon of Mordor said, “As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.” Now I’m a Tolkein fan from way back, but this is just fuckin weird. This is war, damn it, not an RPG.

Defective by Design has a great page listing a number of online vendors of music, books and video, all of which are DRM-free. Please support these business models!

Kirkpatrick Sales has a short piece on the First North American Secessionist Convention, which will be held this fall in Burlington, Vermont. Libertarians have had their eye on New Hampshire, while the usual suspects have been pushing for a reindependence movement in the South. Hawai’i, of course, was only conquered and annexed; Hawai’ians never agreed to joining the U.S. Many Alaskans feel the same way: when the vote for statehood came up in 1958 it was a simple up or down proposition; many Alaskans wanted an independent nation. I’ve long held that California should A) secede and B) split into two separate nations (NorCal should hook up with the seaboard areas of Oregon and Washington). Since I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve supported the notion of Columbia, a nation (or, some say, 51st state) comprised of bits of Northern Idaho, and the eastern portions of Oregon and Washington. Like Sales, I think it’s premature to say secession fever is sweeping the country, but it’s nice to see the idea getting at least some ventilation.

A follow up to my previous post: Fred Wilhelms reports in CounterPunch that “if SoundExchange had exploited [the] sense of community that music creates, I doubt there would be more than a handful of artists left on the list, and those would be ones who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be found.” Wilhelms has been receiving reports from folks all over the planet: they’ve been googling “lost” musicians, calling friends of friends and, by goddess, the unpaid musicians are signing up with SoundExchange in order to be paid. | In addition to the What is DRM? faq, there’s the Set-Top Cop blog created by Cory Doctorow’s USC students that is chock full of interesting news, opinions and links. | Along these same lines–that is, the open source and creative commons lines–Odiyya, over at the David Suzuki Foundation (O, Canada!), writes, “For the reckless capitalists and right wing pundits of our culture, nothing is more fearsome than confronting the fact that we as people are indeed a part of the natural systems of this planet, and in the long run, our society will ultimately be accountable to the measure of its sustainability. To them I say, get ready for the reckoning. There’s a lot more to come.” The occasion for this comment was the “theft” (as some would view it) of research published by the Foundation. Problem is, as David Suzuki says, the Foundation wants its research used in any way, shape or fashion people see fit. Scientists (and others) jockeying for academic or corporate position, take heed: if you don’t share it, we’ll steal it. And if we don’t steal it, it wasn’t worth shit to begin with.

Foley me once…. Well, never mind. Instead, check out this list of misdeeds by the moral’er than thou crowd.