Open-source Obama: Change.gov shines a light on Creative Commons
,----[ Quote ]
| With all Barack Obama’s administration will have to focus on — economy, war,
| healthcare — it’s remarkable that it honed in on such a tiny detail: it
| switched the copyright notice on its website to the freest Creative Commons
| license. As a nod to government transparency, the move seems to be largely
| symbolic, as commenters at Creative Commons co-founder Lawrence Lessig’s blog
| shows. Most government documents are public domain anyway, and that’s less
| restrictive than Creative Commons-licensed works. But because Obama has not
| yet been sworn in, it’s questionable whether the writings at Change.gov are
| automatically public domain.
`----
http://minnesotaindependent.com/18935/changegov-switches-to-open-source
Principles for an Open Transition
,----[ Quote ]
| Similarly, if the transition chooses to make video accessible on YouTube,
| releasing the same video simultaneously in a standard, universal format will
| allow other video sites to syndicate that content as well.
|
| Ideally, that format should be nonproprietary. But so long as the content is
| freely licensed (Principle #1), and free access is secured (Principle #2),
| transcoding would not be inhibited. The transition would thus not be
| supporting one platform to the exclusion of others.
`----
http://open-government.us/
Thomas signs on for YouTube symphony project
,----[ Quote ]
| YouTube is useful for an astonishing number of things, from evidence of
| political malfeasance to tearful defenses of Britney Spears by hopeless fans.
| It's about time the classical music world got into the mix.
`----
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/02/DDSP14F5N7.DTL
Recent:
Copyright Conundrums Converge on Gordon Brown
,----[ Quote ]
| If reports are correct, the company liked Anthony's theme "NetWorker" so
| much, they used it to create the PM's site — allegedly, removing any credit
| for Anthony, but leaving behind a spate of clues — and then pocketed a
| reported £100,000 for it.
`----
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/copyright-conundrums-converge-gordon-brown
Timber! (More on Number 10’s website)
,----[ Quote ]
| So, out of 24 files in the original theme package, only three files have been
| removed. If you look here in the comments from my post of yesterday, you can
| read what Dave Smith of NMM said:
|
| 1. The only file that was drawn upon from Ant’s theme was the css file.
|
| Now clearly some of the files above will be pre-requisites for any Wordpress
| theme (like index.php for example) but 21 out of 24?.
|
| I’m sure I can smell something quite smelly around here.
`----
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/08/22/timber-more-on-number-10/
British Government Violates Copyright
,----[ Quote ]
| As much as I utterly despise the entire premise of Intellectual Monopoly,
| this is about violating the principles of a Free License, and if it's good
| enough for the British government to violate our civil rights in the name of
| Intellectual Monopoly, then it's good enough for the Free World to protect
| its "property" (in fact Freedom) too…
`----
http://slated.org/british_government_violates_copyright
K government stole website theme
,----[ Quote ]
| NUMBER 10, the UK Prime Minister's website, is apparently built using a
| design it nicked.
`----
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/08/18/uk-government-stole-website
Number 10 and the Creative Commons
,----[ Quote ]
| I can only assume that Number 10 have requested, and received, permission of
| the author to remove all traces of this license and attribution from their
| Wordpress site. I have left a “contact us message” at the author’s website to
| see if this is the case…
|
| [Update] Anthony Baggett, the theme’s author, has just confirmed that No 10
| have not requested that the attribution be removed. That’s not playing fair
| by my book.
`----
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/08/18/number-10-and-the-creative-commons/
More on Number 10’s website fiasco
,----[ Quote ]
| The original stylesheet4 is 612 lines in length and is 9234 bytes in size
| (9KB).
|
| The modified stylesheet5 is 3826 lines long and weighs in at a frankly
| astonishing 63724 bytes (63KB)!
|
| [...]
|
| “If” the developers have modified the Wordpress engine, as is being suggested
| as a possibility here, and then sold it to the Government, in my humble
| understanding that means they have distributed their modifications. That
| means those modifications must also be licensed under the GPL. I had a quick
| look on New Media Maze’s web site and couldn’t find an area for software
| downloads or mention of the GPL. That doesn’t say anything to be honest and
| there might be nothing to this, but it would be interesting to find out a bit
| more… Is there a real Wordpress guru who can look at the “footprint” of the
| XHTML the site generates and tell if it is different? Or are there any other
| ways to tell if it has been modified?
|
| Anyway, what a wheez this all is for us bloggers: It just isn’t Gordon’s year
| is it…
`----
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/08/18/more-on-number-10/
US presidential candidate is a pirate
,----[ Quote ]
| THE PRESUMED Republican US presidential candidate John McCain favours
| draconian copyright enforcement, except when his own election campaign uses
| other people's music.
`----
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/08/16/gop-presidential-candidate
|
|
