Free Culture formats
The free Free Culture was released as a pdf under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. Some complained about the format. Others, relying upon the freedom granted, created derivative works in other formats. So far, 36 hours after the book was released, I know of 9 versions available, including: MS-reader, Rocket e-Book, zipped, iSilo, Mobipocket, EasyRead, PostScript, Plain Text, html. Most of these are from Blackmask, but thanks to Firas, Mike and Josh as well.
| Permalink | technorati
Comments (22)
As a physician interested in public health I would be curious to hear your thoughts on how intellectual property rights could impact the healthcare industry. Recently, the SF Chronicle had a small article on Clayton Christensen. He was paraphrased as saying that health care is an industry in dire need of a disruptive technology. I think many people would agree with his observation.
Do you have thoughts on how the creative commons license could be used to further the goals of public health initiatives.
Thank you.
The Blackmask html conversion (in the .zip file) seems nicer than Josh's, though both of them are fairly direct conversions from the pdf file. Doing a really nice version is going to take some manual cleanup, for example, fixing words that are broken by hyphenation in the pdf. Easiest would be if Larry could make his original word processing file available. Any chance?
There is also a version in Plucker format, my favourite reader for PalmOS:.
The plain text file on my site (and many of the other direct conversions of the pdf) are quite unfit for consumption. I'm fixing it manually right now; will probably be done within the weekend. After that making a semantically yummy HTML document will be trivial.
Thus, Larry, any tranlsation to this work is allowed?
The claim in chapter 4 that recording artists don't get any royalties from radio broadcasts surprises me. Does that mean my local classical radio station can broadcast Yo-Yo Ma's CBS Masterworks CD of the Bach cello suites without having to pay anything to CBS? I'm astounded if the record labels permit anything like that to happen.
Replies:
(1) A noncommercial translation is as permitted as an audio version.
(2) I don't have a source file. The original that I sent got edited.
(3) Record labels want to sell records. Free radio does that.
I don't know about Yoyo Ma, but I have heard directly from many cover artists (ie swing-era jazz, early jugband/blues) who tell of zero royalties from airplay; airplay is covetted only to sell tickets or CDs.
And it gets worse: The law only considers "composition" in the white-European church-music tradition -- Jerome Kern's estate received the full royalties for John Coltrane's "My Favourite Things" because free-jazz improvisation (the larger share of the recording timewise) is not recognized as "composition".
This is also why new pop-artists are cajoled into flooding the market with "original" songs instead of the rich tradition of "versions" we see in every other genre on the planet: If you write your own songs, however badly, you get airplay money, if you don't you don't, and thus the kids are left to continually re-invent musical culture in a clean-room environment.
But to get back on topic, add my vote to the request to release your original word-processor files, or perhaps a text dump done from the original source; we can do best justice to your work when the signal:noise is highest :)
A format I'd love to see (not got the resources myself, hence this LazyWebbish post) would be one with publically editable margin notes / hooks in the text that could spawn discussion threads.
Clearly it would end up having a very different flavor to the current work, where a single author presents his carefully prepared argument, but that's what transformative/derivative works are all about, right?
It seems an obvious extension of the kind of blog-enabled communal thinking people around these parts like to celebrate. Also I think it would be very cute to have a relative unique creation enabled by free culture actually be derived from Free Culture.
A simple but possibly sufficient implementation would be to use a Wiki together with a convention that one doesn't edit Lessig's original words directly.
> (2) I dont have a source file. The original that I sent got edited.
um, _somebody_ has "the source file". they made the .pdf with it.
i would very much like to make this an example-book for
a new e-book format/viewer combination i have developed.
(alongside the example i'm making of cory doctorow's stuff.)
an .rtf version would facilitate this derivative use _greatly_...
-bowerbird
Bowerbird:
I'm almost done with a proper plaintext version (with markup delimited with special characters--the only real thing is italicizing and dashes--so formatting can be introduced in any conversion), if that would help. Only have the Notes, Acknowledgements and--here's the tough one--Index left to go.
Anthony: I was wondering if that would be useful. Can do. Eventually (in a week or so). After the HTML version.
(You can tell I'm having fun with this.)
firas said:
> Im almost done with a proper plaintext version
great! i would be very happy to see it!
another option i should have mentioned is to o.c.r. the .pdf.
(i know, it's just _absolutely_stupid_ to have to o.c.r. a .pdf
of a text that somebody obviously has in its original format.
but whacha gonna do?)
if the o.c.r. options are set wisely, i have a program that can
analyze the output to format an e-book rather automatically.
it's not ready for public release yet, but i'd love to have some
good content like this on which to run it through some testing.
so if anyone would want to do this scanning, let me know and
i'll tell you how to set the options correctly. (cross-checking it
against the one done "by hand" by firas is a good confirmation.
i'll also back-convert some of the .html for the same purpose.)
> with markup delimited with special characters--
> the only real thing is italicizing and dashes
ok, but what about the block-quotes?, how ya doing those?
-bowerbird
bowerbird: To be clear, all I did by hand was to paste blackmask's version into a text editor and run through the whole thing fixing the sometimes erroneous paragraph breaks. The marking of italics and superscripts, extra-space-fixing etc. could have been done via a search+replace anyway. (What I'm saying is that I probably didn't catch every inconsistency.)
A blockqoute would be [carriage return][carriage return][open quotes]. Come to think of it, it would take visual confirmation to see that it isn't in fact an inline quote starting a block of lessig's writing.
I'll be making the HTML version pretty carefully. If you need the semantics, formatting, etc., they'll come with it (blockquotes will be in blockquote tags, etc.)
Anthony: how does a metafilter clone (say running metaphilter) with each paragraph as a post sound? I don't see why a wiki (collaborative authoring system) would make more sense than a comments-type thing (discussion system). You get Dave Winer's paragraph-level permalinks, you get comments, trackback... only thing missing is per-paragraph threaded discussion, but that's kinda overkill--unless you were hinting at that?
I agree. I only suggested Wiki because I didn't know the specifics of other solutions/technologies. People do run threads within Wikis, but the format is not ideal for them. A quick look suggests a MeFi could indeed be better for discussions.
Although, I do think both approaches have something different to offer. To get the full benefit of deletion/editing in a Wiki I guess one could be less precious about the original text, and encourage that to be evolved along with everything else. (An ability to reference an unaltered original as well would be useful.) Editability would also mean one could be more flexible in the mapping between the per-paragraph structure of the original text and the issues both evident in the book and arising from discussions it engenders. With respect to which...
Could be. I do think that there might be a desire to start multiple threads re the issues raised across e.g. a whole chapter. But the best way to find out is to start the experiment. I'll be interested in what you come up with!
Things move fast in the blogosphere.
A Chinese edition of "Free Culture" is half done with Wiki collaboration. http://www.socialbrain.org/freeculture
LEGITIMATE OPPORTUNITY! IT's worth reading
I write this article because I have something really exciting to tell
you! I'm going to share with you the most important information that
you will ever received and I hope that the message here can make a
difference in your life later.
You probably have your paycheck, some stocks or other investments, and
may be a little side-job that brings you a little extra money each
month. While all that is a start, what you're really looking for is
"businesses". I am talking about businesses that once up and running,
run themselves. You don't have to do anything, but collect the money.
Right now, I would like to talk about THE BEST LEGAL AND PROFESSIONAL
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY towards FINANCIAL FREEDOM for all of us. Our
slogan is TEAM (Together Everyone Achieves More) and our mission is
RHYTHM (Raise Yourself To Help Mankind). THIS IS THE SIMPLEST BUSINESS
CONCEPT I HAVE EVER SEEN, IT IS DEFINITELY NEITHER MULTILEVEL
MARKETING NOR PYRAMIDING SYSTEM. Does it sound intriguing?
Let me tell you how this works, and most importantly why it works.
Please read this carefully to find out how to get started. I'm not
really really exaggerating too much here, you've heard all the "get
rich now" claims and you're sick of seeing them! This is NOT a GET
RICH QUICK business, but YES it is a GET RICH SURE business for all
money seekers. The passive income offered by the company is
$400-$48000/month. It sounds too good to be true when I first look at
the numbers, but I can't choose not to believe because I have
witnessed that this is already happening to many people if you follow
the simple instructions below faithfully. DO NOT FORGET THAT YOU WILL
NEVER BE BY YOURSELF BECAUSE I HAVE A VERY STRONG INTEREST TO MAKE
SURE THAT THE PROGRAM WORKS FOR YOU.
For those of you who are wish to know more and interested to try, this is how you can get started:
1. Go to www.goldquest.com
Welcome to Gold Quest International! GQI is a five-year-old company
whose core business is retailing of fine art gold products. They have
their corporate headquarters in Hong Kong, and have operational
offices in eight countries worldwide.
2. Place an order for any one of the products offered online.
You buy the products once and you will get the lifetime licence free
of charge which you can even pass it down to any of your family
members. The licence enables the company to recognize you as a valued
customer and endorse you the right to start the business. You will not
lose your licence even though you have sold the products at EBAY or
other places. As long as you have the licence, you will be able to
receive bonuses/checks from the company. ONE TIME CASH OUT, LIFETIME
CASH IN.
3. After you become a customer of this company, you will be able to
introduce the business to at least 2 friends or more if you like (one
on your left, one on your right). Think about it! In your whole life,
are there 2 persons whom you can trust? For sure, there is. We are not
required to introduce to as many people as possible unless we really
want to. It's not demanding right?
4. Tell the referrals below you to do the same. You can copy this
article, and send it to your friends or newsgroups.
5. Keep in touch with the referrals below you through email so as to
work together as a powerful team. You can check out the names of the
referals below you by accessing the geneology section of the website
using your TCO# and password.
If you have any questions or problems, please feel free to send an
email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The PowerPoint presentation of the
business plan can be downloaded at http://www.v-world.biz (click on
Presentation on the home page. Once you have completed all these
steps, you are officially part of a global business that enables you
and your heirs a lifetime of residual income. You can carry out the
business anywhere, even when you go outside US, as long as there are
internets and banks.
WHEN WILL YOU GET YOUR CHECKS?
The commission is $40/transaction. You will always get yourself $40
for every transaction that takes place below you whether you refer
directly to A and B or indirectly by A and B to C, D, E, and F. You
will get your first checks of $400 whenever there are 5 on the left
and 5 on the right. You can get this done whenever you wish, so you
decide how far and how fast you want to go.
Unlike multilevel marketing:
We are not distributors, we are customers instead.
We are not selling, we are just making reference. What does
reference means? For example, after watching the latest movie at the
cinema and you feel satisfied, will you reference it to your friends?
It is for sure that you will tell your friends to watch the same movie
too. You're happy to share a good experience that you've seen, heard,
or read even though you're not paid. Likewise, I am telling you here
now that if you really want to earn a big amount of money flowing into
your account, this is the right company.
There is no membership or annual fee, we just need to become a
customer once and that's it.
The commission does not get lesser as the level gets further away.
It's the same for all levels, $40/transaction.
Unlike pyramiding system:
We are not constricted to forced matrix because pattern does not
matter. You can choose where you want to place your friends under you.
We are not obligated to recruit as many people as possible; we just
need to introduce the business to 2 people (left and right).
People who are below can get richer than people above
People who don't do their work don't get to enjoy the rewards
because the checks are only paid whenever 5 on the left are balanced
by 5 on the right.
You can do this on a part-time basis. All you need to do is just get 2
people to become your business partners. If you believe you have 2
people whom you can trust in this world, I would suggest that you
don't put this off. If you believe you may not have 2 people whom you
can trust, I would suggest that you don't ever take up this
opportunity. We are looking for PIONEERS, THE FIRT BELIEVERS,
GOLDQUESTERS!
THIS IS ALMOST RISK-FREE, BECAUSE YOU CAN GET BACK YOUR INVESTMENT IN
THE UNLIKELY EVENT OF YOU DECIDING TO QUIT WITHIN 6 MONTHS.
You need to respond to this if you are interested, please get back to
me as soon as possible so that I clear all your possible questions and
doubts. GET TOGETHER, KEEP TOGETHER, AND ACT TOGETEHER.
Please, take a few seconds of your time to forward this to your
friends. Thank you
May we become partners in Success!
Sincerely yours in GOLDQUEST,
Referral TCO ID HC064602
e-mail address: [EMAIL ATTACHED]
Email me if you have further clarification. It's set me free to become Dr. eventh uhg i'm used to study long , IT" s Freedom . RYHTM.
can you sen me mails?
the government of Iran has filtered all the internet sites related to he GQI company
what should we do now?
Nothing is filtered. Write in Google "Iran GQI company" and you'll see.
LL's final Free Culture presentation presented a set of life changing ideas parallel to my unarticulated concerns. It has introduced me to Creative Commons and have now listened to the audio-book derivative version.
It is a inspiring, thankyou to Professor Lessig and everyone else involved.