YouTube Future?

Will this be the future for Youtube?

"A 12 year old girl uploads a video of herself lip syncing the latest Shakira pop song onto YouTube and is served with a copyright infringement notice. Has she breached copyright law? Has she infringed moral rights or performers’ rights? Is she entitled to rely upon the defence of fair dealing? Can YouTube be held liable for authorising copyright infringement? And on what terms may her video be reused? The popularity of online video sharing websites has grown enormously over the past year, with the most famous of these YouTube now ranked as the 10th most popular website on the internet with over a 100 million videos viewed every day. However, the copyright and other related issues surrounding these video sharing websites – in particular the content which is uploaded to them – remain less clear. This article will provide an overview of key copyright law issues facing online video sharing websites, such as YouTube from an Australian perspective."
O'Brien, Damien and Fitzgerald, Brian (2006) Digital copyright law in a YouTube world .

The Electronic Literature Collection (Christmas comes early)

College Park, Maryland, October 26, 2006 — The Electronic Literature Organization today released the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One. The Collection, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, is an anthology of 60 eclectic works of electronic literature, published simultaneously on CD-ROM and on the web at collection.eliterature.org. Another compelling aspect of the project is that it is being published by the Electronic Literature Organization under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5), so readers are free to copy and share any of the works included, or for instance to install the collection on every computer in a school’s computer lab, without paying any licensing fees. The Collection will be free for individuals.

The 60 works included in the Electronic Literature Collection present a broad overview of the field of electronic literature, including selected works in new media forms such as hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, and narrative animations. Contributors include authors and artists from the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. Each work is framed with brief editorial and author descriptions, and tagged with descriptive keywords. The CD-ROM of the Collection runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms and is published in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. Free copies of the CD-ROM can be requested from The Electronic Literature Organization.

The Collection will also be included with N. Katherine Hayles’ forthcoming book, Electronic Literature: Teaching, Interpreting, Playing (Notre Dame University Press, 2007).

The Pedagogy of Civic Participation

The NMC campus in SecondLife has just finished hosting a 12 day Impact of Digital Media, a series of seminars and lectures on "the impact of digital media on all aspects of our daily lives". For those of us who missed it there is a small consulation in the form of a podcast download of the presentation given by Howard Rhiengold on the final night; "The Pedagogy of Civic Participation". NCM is my next destination in SL.

Music with Expansion

Next Monday I will be joining Cauldron for some public improvised soundscapes. This is enough to draw anyone out into the chilly October night of Umea BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE! Larkin Grimm will be singing her songs all the way from the USA and Cellsam X are joining us from Stockholm....Come on down!

LIVE:
LARKIN GRIMM (Providence, US)
CAULDRON (Umeå/Skellefteå)
CELLSAM X (Stockholm)

Måndag 30 Oktober
19:00-23:00
Café Escape, Storgatan 62B Umea
60 kr. Drug Free
Preshop: Burmans Music.
Info: http://moonshake.popmanifest.net
moonshake@popmanifest.net, 073-7388819
Arr: KF Moonshake i samarbete med KF Kretsen

Chat Live with Jason Nelson

Jason Nelson, author of Dreamaphage (one of my thesis corpus texts) and many other high points of digital literature will be live online tomorrow night (CET). Jason stated in a email list in August this year:

"my site secrettechnology.com and particularly three of my artworks, have had over 2.2 million hits in the past few months."

Anyone interested in what is going on in digital Lit/art/reality should check this out. Here are the details:


Leonardo Electronic Almanac Discussion (LEAD): Vol 14 No 5_

:: Live chat with digital artist and cyberpoet Jason Nelson, discussing
fictobiography, responsive poetry, and other topics.
:: Chat date: Tuesday, October 24.
:: 10 am West Coast US / 1 pm East Coast USA / 7 pm Paris FR / 3 am
Melbourne AU
:: LEAD is an open forum around the New Media Poetics special issue of
Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

Chat instructions are here:
http://leoalmanac.org/journal/Vol_14/lea_v14_n05-06/forum.asp.
PLEASE NOTE: The instructions are intended to apply to all jabber chat clients, but there may be some variation for individual clients. For example, some clients may require the chat room server "conference.jabber.org" and others clients only "jabber.org." Also, please refer to the link for a complete schedule of upcoming chats and for instructions on joining chats.

--------------------------------------

Artist Biography

With work recently appearing in Singapore at the Asian Civilizations
Museum, St. Petersburg Florida, UCLA, Hermeneia from Barcelona, Spain,
Vancouver Washington, around Australia, and other worldly parts, Jason
Nelson is always charmed by how rarely he travels beyond the distance
provided by a tank of gas. Being a Digital Writing Lecturer at Griffith
University in the Gold Coast of Australia, he deeply misses the snows of
the Oklahoma plains, so miss the snows. Come explore his creatures at:
http://secrettechnology.com or http://heliozoa.com

Foundations of American Cyber-Cultures

The podcasts for the Berkeley course Foundations of American Cyber-Cultures currently being taught by Professor Greg Niemeyer are available online for all. I have had them on my drive for a while but today I am having a blogging marathon (notice the plethora of entries), reading tons of backlogged email and listening to podcasts that I have not had time to get to. So the podcasts seem alright, although I am not sure about Niemeyer's reliance on the distinction between Virtual and Real. Those fined for downloading are feeling the intersecting pinch between the two points of view. A central theme in Niemeyer's talk is embodiment and therefore touches on many areas of cyber identity. His discussion on race and identity is a shocking situation ("I am white and to be the only white in a room I couldn't act as I wanted to....and suddenly they noticed") for the non-Americans in the (virtual) audience. More downloads for the course (notes and texts) are available HERE. Niemeyer touches on points made by T.L. Taylor in the seminar Reconsidering Emergence (Mp3 also) in HUMlab recently.

The Artist and the Book in Japan

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806.) Shiohi no tsuto (Gifts from the Ebb Tide). Woodblock print, mica and brass dust, 1789.

Currently on at the New York Public Library:

The Japanese literary tradition, dating from as early as the 8th century, is among the richest and most enduring of any country in the world, and ehon, or "picture books," although little known in the West are one of the glories of world art.

Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan will demonstrate the variety of visual languages used by artists over many historical periods from 764 to 2005. It will include approximately 200 books with printed illustrations, as well as related manuscripts, drawings, woodblock prints, and photographs. Drawn from the Library's collections, a wide range of works will be featured, including two examples of Empress Shôtoku's Million Prayer Towers (764-770), Utamaro's celebrated Shiohi no tsuto (Gifts of the Ebb Tide, also known as The Shell Book, 1789), and Hokusai's Fugaku Hyakkei (One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, 1834). The exhibition will also showcase more recent examples of Japanese book art, with books by some of the leading photographers of the 20th century, modernist books by artists like Koshiro Onchi, avant-garde works associated with early 20th-century movements such as MAVO, precursors of present-day anime, and works by internationally known contemporary artists like Hiroshi.
The website has two online electronic editions of texts:


Kitagawa Utamaro, Gifts of the Ebb Tide (The Shell Book) (Shiohi no tsuto) [Flash plug-in required]

Kamisaka Sekka, Flowers of a Hundred Worlds (Momoyogusa), volume 1 [Flash plug-in required]

The Moral Sociology of Filesharing

Continuing with the file sharing theme, tomorrow in HUMlab Simon Lingren will be giving a seminar on The Moral Sociology of Filesharing. This should be very interesting. For some background Simon's blog can be found HERE. The seminar is at 13:15 CRT and will be live video streamed from a link (opens only at around 13:15) HERE. There seems to be a chat server operating during the seminar for those of us who are telepresent.

Delaut.se Insurance for Pirates

A fund has been started for Pirate Insurance by a Swedish organization Delaut.se. The fund can pay fines incurred from legal cases against P2P file sharers. They give legal advice as well to anyone who is subjected to prosecution for file sharing for non-commercial purposes. Delaut ("Pass Around") has enough capital to pay the maximum insured amount of 250 000 crowns ($US 34 000) three times with funds collected from around 2500 members. According to the website:

"Delautrix HB is a Swedish fund which strives to give Swedish citizens the possibility to spread culture unhindered."

The Anti-pirate Bureau's John Henrik Gustav Pontén has passed the matter on to the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority to see if anyone is breaking the law.

LOS ANGELES AREA BOY SCOUTS COLLABORATE

"There are no collaborators in my troop!"

This has been flying around the blog circuit for the last couple of days but having once been a scout myself (for a whole two weeks!!) I could not let it go. It is true that the MPAA has done a deal with the Los Angeles area Boy Scouts to construct a Copyright merit badge:

Los Angeles - The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) today announced a new education program, in conjunction with the Los Angeles Area Boy Scouts of America, to help raise awareness about the value of copyrights among the over 52,000 young people involved in Boy Scout programs in the greater Los Angeles area. The curriculum is part of an ongoing effort to educate kids about copyright protection and change attitudes towards intellectual property theft.

In order to get on of the Respect Copyright patches one must (a) be a boy (or a convincing representation of one) and (b)take part in:

"creating a public service announcement that demonstrates the importance of copyright protection or visiting a movie studio to learn about the people, time and costs required to make a movie" and other activities

Thinking about the origin of the Scouting movement and the "cunning military deceptions instituted at Baden-Powell's behest as commander of the garrison at Mefeking.", going to a movie studio to learn about the economics of Hollywood seems to be a long way from the dusty trail and the bushcraft I remember as having something to do with the Scouts....Dob Dob Dob Dib Dib Dib.

SoundLab Edition IV "memoryscapes" Launched

Finally, SoundLAB - Edition IV - "memoryscapes" is launched on Tuesday, 17 October 2006.

135 soundartists and more than 200 soundart pieces and a special curatorial contribution of soundart from Chile, curated by Rainer Krause (Chile form "memoryscapes", landscapes of collective memory manifested via sound and music.
The quantity of submitted works (double as much as selected) represented a specifc challenge in concern of creating online content. Another issue represents the non-visual status of sound and music and its representation for an audience via an interactive interface.

SoundLAB - Edition IV has further the priviledge to be included as the corporate extension of the media art project ://selfportrait -a show for Bethlehem - a show for Peace http://self.engad.org on occasion of the exhibition at OFFICYNA art space Szczecin/Poland duration: 20 October - 12 November - and therefore it was necessary to create "memoryscapes" differently than previous SoundLAB editions.

SoundLAB ist still in a re-structuration phase, but is now consisting of a text based low-tech blog and the high-tech streaming Flash based content. "memoryscapes" is a sonic environment consisting of 13 "m'scapes", each "m'scape" has a textual part which gives all information about the artists and the selected soundart works
and a streaming part, containing the soundart pieces.

Edition IV represents also another premiere as SoundLAB published SIP - SoundLAB Interview Project http://soundlab.newmediafest.org/blog/?page_id=41 on occasion of the launch, featuring the first 62 interviews of soundartists participating in SoundLAB Edition I-IV, they are--->
Sara Ayers (USA), Tautvydas Bajarkevicius (Lithuania)
Jim Barrett (Sweden), Becoming animal, Oren Ben Yosef, (Israel)
Chris Bors (USA), Donald Bousted, (UK)
braillebones (France), Mira Burt-Wintonick (Canada)
Martin John Callanan, (UK), Chelsea Cargill, (UK)
Bronwen Casson, (Ireland), Alison Chung-Yan, (Canada)
Catherine Clover, (UK), Luis Coronado, (Guatemala)
Jessica Curry, (UK), elicheinfunzione (Italy)
Ensamble Majamama (Chile), Claudio Fernandez, (Chile)
FLOW (UK), William Fowler Collins, (USA)
Jason Freeman (USA), Anna Friz (Canada)
Satoshi Fukushima, (Japan), Gintas K (Lithuania)
Matthew Giraudeau, (UK), Josh Goldman,(USA)
Scott Hall, (USA), Alex Hetherington, (UK)
Jeremy Hight, (USA), G.H. Hovagimyan,(USA)
David Kasdorf, (USA), Neil Kaczor (UK)
Mikhail Karikis (UK), 80juan80, - Kasari, Juan (Finland) -
Al Larsen (USA), Gregory Lasserre, (France)
Dario Lazzaretto, (Italy), Le Lavatrici Rosse (Italy)
Emily Lutzker, (USA), Wolfgang Peter Menzel, (Sweden)
Ailis Ni Riain (Ireland), Matthew Ostrowski (USA)
Mike McFerron (USA), Stefano Pasquini, (Italy)
Andrea Polli, (USA), PeterPrautzsch, (Germany)
Marco Puccini, (Italy), RijN (walter van rijn) (NL)
Neil Rose (UK), Grit Ruhland,(Germany)
Khaled Sabsabi, (Australia), Luz Maria Sanchez, (Mexico)
Debashis Sinha, (Canada), Pete Stollery, (UK)
Jouni Tauriainen, (Finland), Eldad Tsabari, (USA)
Jeff Thompson, (USA), u n c l e j i mn (UK)
tobias c. van Veen (Canada), Simon Whetham (UK)
Jake Whittaker, (UK)

SoundLAB - sonic art project environments
http://soundlab.newmediafest.org

Find Stone Circles

A website has begun that catalogues stone circles and other megalith sites in Sweden. There are a lot of them and so far there are 1.5 million objects at 560 000 sites on the archive. Contributions to the data base can be made by anyone until the end of the year. When you find the record for an object or a site it includes map location in eniro.se (listing for people, businesses and products) and in hitta.se (more general search) as well as Google earth, providing latitude and longitude co coordinates. The search motor on the site is not easy to negotiate (you have to know the RAA - National Heritage Board for Sweden - number for the site). Searching for a name does not seem to be enough.

Introducing Didge Burroughs

This is Didge Burroughs, my avatar self in Second Life. I am happy to be back in a virtual world after a long absence (20 Months). Perhaps it was the trauma of the Death of Atmosphere that precipitated a long hiatus. I begin my Second Life with research on ritual and narrative in the game world. This is for the paper i mentioned in an earlier post, Narratives of Participation and Space: Pilgrimage, Aboriginal, Digital Media (shortened slightly).

Laugh until I Cried

It is not often that I laugh until tears roll down my face. This man does that to me.

World Didgeridoo Vibes Vol.1

The compilation World Didgeridoo Vibes Volume 1 can now be download free of charge from the Internet Archive at this address http://www.archive.org/details/World_Didgeridoo_Vibes_Vol1
I have one track on the compilation under the name Nada Baba.

Networks Outlaws Articles Didgeridoos

Just for the record; what's going on?
Quite a lot. I am REALLY enjoying The Wealth of Networks:How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler. This book is a very detailed examination of how voluntary networks function in the production of value. Pre-digital examples are given but it is under the regimes of the digital (Internet, Wireless, P2P, Commons, Free Software, EFF, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Google....I am only up to page 160 of 473).If you want a better idea of what is happening today with the so called information society economy read Benkler!
A podcast featuring Yochai Benkler (Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University) can be downloaded HERE. Buy or borrow the book (libraries are cool)....you will be glad you did.
Other things; I am 1/3 the way through a long essay entitled Narratives of Participation and Space: Pilgrimage, Aboriginal Narrative Worlds, Digital Media for a Polish new media arts magazine. I have been listening to The Proposition soundtrack. A great (almost) new Australian/British film with the script written by Nick Cave. A great film as well, but not one for the faint of heart.
I as well planning a return to the world longest Review of Literature. Up until a week ago I was wading though the last 16 years of academic writing on digital textuality....my god there is a lot of it! I am up to 2001 and will resume when this magazine article is done (deadline 20th October).
I recently watched a lecture by danah boyd that is available online as a video download. This talk really put social networks and youth in perspective for me. A very lucid and detailed account of the field of knowledge. If anyone still doubts the intellectual depth of the subject area they should check this free bit of education out.
Finally, I was sent a digital copy of the didgeridoo compilation (via gmail) that I have got a spot on, World Didgeridoo Vibes Volume 1. It is a network project itself and I am waiting to hear if I can put it on the Internet Archive for general download. I should know what's what soon and will post it somewhere. I have not yet had a chance to listen to it but it is a very handsome cover:

If anyone wants a copy just mail me and I can send you a zipped file of the whole CD.