Xerxes Atlas Blog

I have just come back from NetHui, a gathering of people who are interested in the future of the Internet in New Zealand. It's been pretty good - for me the people there are probably a bit more interesting than the topics although I am certainly learning things! Cudos to InternetNZ for making it accessible (read cheap tickets) to everyone.

There's been one person I've been looking forward to meeting ever since I heard he was going to be there: Lawrence Lessig - the father of Creative Commons. Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand held a meetup this evening I got to hear of a number of projects and organisations that could be a good fit with this project. I had no idea that MusicHype was started in New Zealand for example. I just met the Chairman who lives in Wellington. I didn't get to chat to the guy from People in Your Neighbourhood, but he's done similar things in years gone by in terms of collaborative music creation backed by the British Council.

But Lawrence Lessig was the highlight. He's a pleasant and encouraging and unassuming man that takes an interest in projects no matter how small. His little spectacles top him off as a professor. This guy just ooses intelligence. He seemed genuinely interested in the wikimusical project, writing the URL in his iPhone for later. He then went on to tweet about it to his 150,000+ followers. Awesome.

Really looking forward to his keynote tomorrow morning.

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.

I've been visiting lawyers. They've got their own take on our ideas. What's they're referring to is known as "CC+". Sounds like a programming language, but it's not.

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.

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

"Releasing it for free is just good marketing," he says. "Whether it's through piracy or distribution your film is out there on the Internet, so we decided to harness this." And he has managed to make quite a bit of money out of it. Online sales of merchandise — including T-shirts and collector's editions of the DVD — have generated $430,000 on a film that only cost $21,500 to make, Vuorensola says. He and his team have also now secured a proper distribution deal with Revolver Entertainment in the U.S. and Britain.

See the whole story here:

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1950005,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

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: