I was surprised to find that I have never seen nor heard of this movie before it just suddenly appeared in Google video today. Called Alternative Freedom the Movie I just couldn’t resist.

Cast:

Doseone (rapper: pop culture commentator) DJ Danger mouse (mix maker extraordinaire) Richard Stallman (The Grand philosopher of Free Software) Lawrence Lessig (Super lawyer, creator of Creative commons) Andrew “Bunnie” huang (reverse engineering pro)

A new conventional wisdom began to spring up around free software, led in part by theorists like Eric Raymond, who were interested in the economics of free software production. Much of this thought centered around service-based and other ancillary sales for supporting free software. Based on this kind of thinking, it’s fairly easy to imagine extending free licensing ideas to utilitarian works. But what about aesthetic works? The Creative Commons was established in 2002, largely to solve the kinds of licensing problems that aesthetic works might encounter, and it has been remarkably successful, pushing the envelope of even this newer wave of thought. Today, Creative Commons licensed works number in at least the tens of millions. And more than a quarter of those are using the free “Attribution” or “Attribution-ShareAlike” licenses.

It used to be that you could safely assume a work was public domain unless there was a highly visible warning printed on it, containing both the copyright owner and the date of copyright (at least in the USA). This system also ensured that, when the work’s copyright expired, you could tell from any copy that this was so—by simply adding the duration of copyright to the date printed in the work’s copyright notice. The Berne Convention, however, changed all that by replacing the assumption of freedom with the assumption of monopoly, and it now takes extensive research to be sure a work is public domain.

The Creative Commons’ new CC-Zero initiative, instigated largely as an adjunct to the Science Commons’ “Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data” is designed to make things easier.

A DVD that comes with lots of great examples of Free Culture which plays in your DVD player, with even more examples when you put it in your computer – including a GNU/Linux Live CD. The idea is simple: help to get the word out about Free Culture, including Free Software, by showing off what’s already been achieved; the thing is, we need your help!

The number of the current, freshly-released version of the Creative Commons licenses: 3.0. The total number of CC licensed works on the web at last estimate: 145 million. The percent of those that we would call “free”: 29%. The time it takes to double the number of free, Creative Commons licensed works: approximately 115 days.

Recently, I’ve become involved in the ongoing discussion between the Creative Commons and Debian over the “freeness” of the Creative Commons Public License (CCPL), version 3. Specifically, the hope is that Debian will declare the CC-By and CC-By-SA licenses “free”, as most people intuitively feel they are. There are a number of minor issues that I think both sides have now agreed to, leaving only the question of “Technological Protection Measures” (TPM, also known as “Digital Rights Management” or “Digital Restrictions Management” or “DRM”).