Xerxes Atlas Blog

About a week ago most of the Xerxes' Atlas team met for a drinks and nibbles night in Auckland, which was something of a creative summit about the project.  We invited a bunch of smart and talented people were able to pick their brains regarding our project to see what was working, what wasn't and try to find areas that we could expand into.  

While not as many people showed up as we expected, that turned out to be a good thing because we got some really quality feedback and had a great discussion going that might not have been possible with a larger group.  

One important distinction to come out of the meeting was the idea of the difference between product and process, and whether a finished theatrical production was the final product for us, or whether the actual PROCESS of developing a wikimusical is the product.  

Producing and premiering a new musical is a pretty massive undertaking, and it would take a lot of funding to be able to do it properly.  However, what makes this project interesting is not that it's a NEW musical, but that it's an OPEN SOURCE musical, or a WIKIMUSICAL.  I think we came to realise that in order to complete the project we don't have to mount the production ourselves, but develop the tools and resources for other people to produce their own versions of it.

Jade's unique vision is for a musical that can easily be changed and adapted for each production, and where open collaboration is a central part of the creative process.  In focusing just on that aspect, as well as reaching out to groups that might be interested in eventually producing XA, we'll be able to use our resources better and hopefully be a  bit more efficient.

All of this came out of the meeting last week, and while it's changed the parameters of the project a bit, we're very excited about this evolution.  So as far as we're concerned, the meeting was a big success and I'm sure you'll hear more about our new direction in the coming weeks.

This one is for all you academics out there. It gives a history of Copyright law and what it was intended for and how it's now not serving it's original purpose.

Yes we're being facetious.

In the wake of the story in Publisher's Weekly that "publishers may lose as many $3 billion to online book piracy" is a sudden realization of a much greater threat to the viability of the industry book. Apparently, more than 2 billion pounds have been "loaned" last year by a cabal of organisms found in almost every American city and town. Using the same advanced mathematical projections used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has calculated that the publishers could lose sales opportunities totaling over 100 billion dollars a year, losses dating back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf online piracy reported. 

The director of Sita Sings the Blues, Nina Paley, had to pay $50,000 to use old songs in her animation movie. She then put the movie online for free and turned herself into a free-culture activist. Composer Jaron Lanier was a digital pioneer in the '90s, but in his new book he claims that open-source is destroying creativity and fostering vicious behavior. They join us to debate the pros and cons of free love in art-making.

Once again the music industry has come out with disappointing results for physical music sales, which they blame entirely on file-sharing. What they failed to mention though, is that their findings show that music pirates are buying more digital music than the average music consumer. Since digital music is the future, pirates are the industry’s most valuable customers.

http://thenextweb.com/uk/2010/01/18/flickr-independent-dangers-digital-content/

When I spoke to Elliot Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia last month he said that we should consider using the Attribution Share-a-like licence. We'd been thinking of using the Attribution Non-Commercial licence - but he argued that we would get the all the benefits of a groundswell of use by not implementing the Non-Commercial clause but the Share-a-like would be enough to stop the major players. From Elliot's blog:

Here in Australia, a staff member at the ABC, one of the national public broadcasters, informed me that it was unlikely that they would ever use Share Alike-licensed material in an ABC product because there is uncertainty what would need to be licensed on the same terms. As they pondered, “Would that segment have to be licensed? Or the whole show?” The potential scope of what must be licensed on the same terms (which allow remixing) makes the Share Alike licences less appealing to mainstream licensees.

In fact, this blog entry talks about a photographer who's photograph licenced under a Attribution licence was picked up by the movie 'Iron Man'. Although the movie didn't need to ask permission as long as the attributed the work to him,  they choose to maintain their risk-adverse clearances process when dealing with permissions to reuse content and wanted to pay him for his work.

Read the whole article here: http://popcult.cc/?p=191

Paley's credo is that profit can be earned from clever merchandising rather than copyrighted sales of an artist's work. Do away with copyrights, which have "far too little perks for an artist today" , she says. "Artists are gagged by the dictates of labels, publishers and distributors"

Check out the full article:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/music/The-burden-of-lifting-/articleshow/5355549.cms


Part 1/10 on YouTube: