Last month I was threatened with police intervention after taking pictures of my two-year-old. Why? We were in what you might think of as analogous to an outdoor mall. It’s a former industrial complex that’s listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Today the area has been revitalized with restaurants and office space, a large greenspace in the middle, and an attractive manmade river and waterfall. Despite there being no signs to indicate such, security informed me that the owners of the space have prohibited photography in order to “protect the intellectual property of the architecture.”
This week a friend posted on her blog that she was marking all of her Flickr images “all rights reserved” (instead of with a Creative Commons license) and “friends and family only” (instead of publicly viewable) because of this story. A person uploaded photos of his daughter to Flickr. One was used without permission by Nerve Media’s Babble.com on an article about children and lead poisoning. The photo had been marked “all rights reserved,” and Nerve/Babble blamed the error on an ill-informed intern. The community responded that the company had been guilty of the same offense repeatedly in the past. Babble responded on their site that there wasn’t an alleged “long history” at all. He said/she said.
The Society for Sustainable Mobility, formerly known as the Open Source Green Vehicle project, is one of the official teams registered for the Automotive X-Prize competition.
The X-Prize Foundation got a lot of press in 2004 when it awarded $10 million to the first private team that built and launched a vehicle carrying three people 100 km above the earth. This year, the foundation has been working to get the funding for the Automotive X-Prize: another $10 million to the team that can build a marketable 100 MPG vehicle. Will open source win the prize?
In 1999, a scientist wanted to look at some data from soil samples collected on Mars in 1975 by the Viking lander. He wanted to test a theory about detecting the existence of Martian bacteria and microbes–in other words, finding life on Mars. The scientist thought he would find what he needed on a NASA website somewhere, but it wasn’t that easy. The original data had been misplaced, and when the huge magnetic tapes that stored the data were found, they were “in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.” Someone finally found a ream of paper printouts propping a door open and humanity’s understanding of the universe expanded a bit more. » Read more
by Mark Webbink
As a history buff, reading the Novell and Microsoft open letters this morning conjured up the image of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain standing in front of 10 Downing Street in 1938 and declaring: “My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time.“
We all know how well that turned out.
by Mark Webbink
As a history buff, reading the Novell and Microsoft open letters this morning conjured up the image of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain standing in front of 10 Downing Street in 1938 and declaring: “My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time.“
We all know how well that turned out.
Confused about the difference between a non-commercial and an attribution license? Want to publish your content on the web, but unsure how to set it free while protecting it? Wish you could share your creations with the world, but just not sure where to start?
This helpful comic strip from the folks at Creative Commons will put you in the known. And, in the spirit of sharing, they’ve released it under an attribution license. No idea what that means? This comic was created especially for you.
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We’re interested in so many things–open source, collaboration, intellectual property rights, technology. We can’t possibly cover every topic from every angle every month. And that’s where Truth happens comes in.
