"public domain" entries

Four short links: 26 April 2013

Four short links: 26 April 2013

Engagement Cliff, SSL Best Practices, Public Domain Numbers, and GitHub License Sniffing

  1. The Engagement CliffGallup surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states in 2012 and found that by the time students get to high school only about 4 in 10 qualify as engaged.
  2. SSL/TLS Deployment Best Practicesclear and concise instructions to help overworked administrators and programmers spend the minimum time possible to obtain a secure site or web application. In pursue of clarity, we sacrifice completeness, foregoing certain advanced topics. The focus is on advice that is practical and easy to understand.
  3. Do Bad Things Happen When Works Enter The Public Domain? — research to answer that question. Spoiler: no. (via Surprisingly Free)
  4. Most GitHub Projects Not Open-Source Licensed (The Register) — 1,692,135 code repositories scanned, 219,326 (14.9%) percent had a file in their top-level directories that identified any kind of license at all. Of those, 28 per cent only announced their licenses in a README file, as opposed to recommended filenames such as LICENSE or COPYING. MIT license overwhelmingly popular compared to the different reciprocal (GPL-like) ones.
Four short links: 29 November 2012

Four short links: 29 November 2012

Internet of Zings, Public Domain Alternate Universe, Web Engineers Tools, and Dashboards for All

  1. Is It The Internet of Things? — we’ve moved from “they ignore you” to “they laugh at you”. Next up, “they fight you”, then finally the earless RFID-enabled location-aware ambient-sensing Network of All wins. (via BERG London)
  2. The 2012 We Could Have Had — list of famous and interesting works which would have entered the public domain had we not had the 1976 extension of copyright law.
  3. Web Engineer’s Online Toolbox a list of online, Web-based tools that Web engineers can use for their work in development, testing, debugging and documentation.
  4. Indianapolis Museum of Art Dashboard — everyone should have a HUD showing the things they care about. (via Courtney Johnston)

Fair use: A narrow, subjective, complicated safe haven for free speech

Attorney Miles Feldman on the ins and outs of fair use.

Litigation and intellectual property attorney Miles Feldman addresses issues of fair use, including the deciding factors courts consider, research tools to determine the status of works, and Creative Commons licensing.

Four short links: 10 August 2011

Four short links: 10 August 2011

Gamification is Bullshit, Design for Impact, Public Domain, and Network Analysis

  1. Gamification is Bullshit (Ian Bogost) — [G]amification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway. Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word “gamification” is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.
  2. Design for (Real) Social Impact (Vimeo) — single best talk I’ve seen on making philanthropy effective. (via Rowan Simpson)
  3. The Public Domain Review — an online weekly journal dedicated to treasures that have entered the public domain and articles on them. The home page currently features: Boris Karloff in “Last of the Mohicans”, the Boston Revolution in psychotherapy, “Was Charles Darwin an Atheist?”, the Orson Welles audio show, “100 Years of The Secret Garden”, a feature on a 1300 year old illustrated work on the Book of Revelations, and more.
  4. SNAP — the Stanford Network Analysis Platform, a library for network and graph analysis. (via Joshua Schachter)

Public domain here, under copyright there

The interesting thing about Golan v. Holder is that a decision either way will have big implications.

The Golan v. Holder copyright case the US Supreme Court agreed to hear not only will affect foreign copyrights in the US, but it’s likely to affect US copyrights — one way or the other — abroad as well.

Musopen sets classical music free

To fund copyright-free recordings, Musopen asked for $11k. They got $55k.

The music of Beethoven and Brahms isn't covered by copyright, but performances and sheet music are. With an assist from KickStarter, MusOpen has raised more than enough money to right that wrong by recording and releasing classics into the public domain.

Sony-Google Deal Adds 500k Public Domain Books to E-Reader

Sony is adding 500,000 public domain EPUB-based titles to its Reader catalog through a partnership with Google. Paul Biba at Teleread examines Sony's rationale: Sony's apparent intent, meanwhile, beyond adding value to the Reader, will be to use public domain books in ePub to entice people to install its software and in time buy its reader devices. In the…

Open Source, Community and Audiobooks: Q&A with LibriVox Founder Hugh McGuire

LibriVox is a volunteer effort with a big goal: record audiobook editions for every title in the public domain. In this Q&A, LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire discusses the project's beginnings, the organic development of the LibriVox community, and the distinctions (or lack thereof) between "professional" and "amateur" efforts.