Creative Commons - User contributions [en]

Case Studies/Cory Doctorow

2008-12-07T04:04:27Z

Frank Tobia: copyedit

{{Case Study
|Description=Cory Doctorow is a writer, blogger, and futurist that has embraced the ideals of Creative Commons from the beginning.
|Quote=Not only does making my books available for free increase the number of sales that I get, but I also came to understand it artistically as a Science Fiction writer that if I was making work that wasn't intended to be copied, then I was really making contemporary work.
|Quote_Attribution=[http://craphound.com Cory Doctorow]
|Image_Header=http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2018/2196901054_a9f86dbd12.jpg
|Image_attribution=[http://flickr.com/photos/joi/2196901054/ Joi Ito]
|Image_license=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
|Mainurl=http://craphound.com
|Author=Cory Doctorow
|User_Status=Creator
|Tag=Literature
|License short name=CC BY-NC-SA
|License=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
|Format=Text
|Country=United Kingdom
}}
== Overview ==
Cory Doctorow is a Science Fiction author with a vast amount of work under his name. Cory, as a very early adopter of Creative Commons, has been producing Creative Commons licensed works since 2003 with the publication of the first CC licensed novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Along with writing SciFi, Cory is one of the editors of Boing Boing, an award wining blog covering a wide range of topics from technological gadgets, to steampunk tricycles, to current information policy debates.

== License Usage ==
Cory Doctorow's literary works are released under Creative Commons Atrribution NonCommercial ShareAlike or Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives. His latest work, Little Brother, has spent 4 weeks on the NYTimes bestseller list and is released as BY-NC-SA.

== Motivations ==
As a very early adopter and promoter of Creative Commons licenses, Cory Doctorow's reasoning for using them for his works is well known in certain circles. For instance, in an interview with Greg Grossmeier, community development intern at Creative Commons, Cory gave his reasoning as it relates to the type of writing he does:
“Not only does making my books available for free increase the number of sales that I get, but I also came to understand it artistically as a Science Fiction writer that if I was making work that wasn't intended to be copied, then I was really making contemporary work.”

From that same interview Cory describes how he sees the relationship between the increasing role and power of copyright and the people who use those works:
“As the copyright wars deepened, I really started to understand the cost of imposing a 20th century exclusive rights style copyright on individual users of works in the 21st century would lead to a dramatic decrease in freedoms that are really important like free speech, free expression, even free of assembly and freedom of the press. All of these things would come under fire as a result of the copyright wars.”

Cory's support of the CC licenses also stems from his dislike of overly restrictive forms of protection on creative works. As expressed on his personal website's bio page, written in 2006, “I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes.”

== Media ==

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Add media that is relevant.

{{Incomplete|Media|formedit}}

Case Studies/Jonathan Coulton

2008-12-06T20:22:12Z

Frank Tobia: Jonathon Coulton moved to Jonathan Coulton: Mis-spelling, per Wikipedia and his own website http://www.jonathancoulton.com/

{{Case Study
|Description=Jonathan Coulton is an independent/unsigned singer-songwriter who utilises Creative Commons licences to help promote his music via free downloads.
|Quote=All I can say is that Creative Commons is the most powerful idea that I’ve heard since they told me there was going to be a sequel to ''Star Wars''. Everyone in the world should read Lawrence Lessig’s book ''Free Culture''. …The things he says make so much sense
|Quote_Attribution=Jonathan Coulton, http://www.jonathancoulton.com/faq#CC
|Image_Header=http://farm1.static.flickr.com/190/510308241_3d9950e377.jpg
|Mainurl=http://www.jonathancoulton.com/
|Author=Jonathon Coulton
|User_Status=Creator
|Tag=music
|License short name=CC BY-NC
|License=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
|Format=Sound
|Country=United States of America
}}
== Overview ==

Jonathan Coulton is a singer-songwriter and musician based in the United States of America. Coulton refers to his music as an experiment in the new ways in which content will be distributed and disseminated as a result of the Internet. His rationale, in his own words, is that, ‘I give away music because I want to make music, and I can’t make music unless I make money, and I won’t make any money unless I get heard, and I won’t get heard unless I give away music.' (http://www.jonathancoulton.com/faq#Who). In 2005, Coulton began a project entitled 'Thing a Week', where he wrote and released a new song on his website every week for a year (http://www.jonathancoulton.com/primer/thing-a-week). The project was aimed at getting publicity for Coulton's music, and several of the songs including 'Flickr' and 'Code Monkey' were big Internet hits. The Thing a Week project was released via a weekly podcast, with each song being available under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial licence.

Jonathan Coulton has all of his music available to stream on his [http://www.jonathancoulton.com website], as well as many of the songs available for free download. Customers can then buy songs in either mp3 or FLAC format for $US1 and albums for between $US5 –$US10. Customers can also make donations via Paypal or Amazon, buy physical CDs through online distributor CD Baby, download songs as ringtones for free, or buy t-shirts, books and games from the merchandise section. There are even karaoke versions available of some of the songs. Evidencing his enthusiasm for engaging fans, Coulton has even performed concerts in the virtual world, [http://www.secondlife.com Second Life] (http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/6056).

== License Usage ==

The licence adopted for all Jonathan Coulton songs is the [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 licence]. The licence is applied to songs available on Coulton's website both for download and as streaming content. Coulton [http://www.jonathancoulton.com/faq#Use highlights] the importance he places on allowing his fans to have the chance to use his work in whatever way they choose, including remixing and adding to his work.

Though unable to release any statistics, Jonathan says that some of his songs have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and 45% of his income in 2007 was from paid digital downloads (Interview by James Milsom with Jonathan Coulton via email, 5 April 2008). This evidences the success Jonathan has had through the use of Creative Commons licences facilitating the ability to give content away for free. Jonathan's content has been used in music videos made by fans and posted on Youtube, subsequently receiving (in some cases) over a million hits. Fans have also created cover versions of his songs, artwork, dances, plays, card games and even guitar instructional videos. Coulton says that this sort of outcome is very satisfying and validating, but more importantly from a business point of view, such enthusiasm from fans has meant that he has received a great amount of free publicity.

== Motivations ==

Jonathan Coulton heard about open content licensing through his previous work writing software. He heard Lawrence Lessig speak at the PopTech conference in 2003, and was [http://www.jonathancoulton.com/faq#CC sold on the Creative Commons rationale] immediately.

When asked about the benefits of licensing his music under CC by Wagner James Au for New World Notes in September 2006, Jonathan [http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/09/the_second_life.html responded]:

:'It’s gone very well for me. At first, even though I was all fired up about the possibilities of CC, I still had that panicky lizard-brain fear about file sharing. I can understand why it’s a hard thing for people in the industry to get over – I totally sympathise. But at least for someone in my position, it’s the best thing I could have done. Every month I get more traffic, more donations/sales, and more fans. I’m quite certain that having a CC license on all the music has really helped that process. If someone who’s never heard my music before gets a free mp3 (or twenty) and likes it, chances are they’re goingt o pass it along to some friends, blog about it, maybe even make a video for it. Each one of those outcomes means more exposure, more fans, and more chances for people to pay me – something that wouldn’t have happened as easily if the music was all locked up with DRM and the full battery of copyright restrictions.'

Creative Commons licensing was chosen for its ability to facilitate sharing of content easily for publicity. Also, while understanding the significance of being able to give music away legally, Jonathan sees the importance of protecting some rights in the music, and the non-commercial aspect of the licence he uses serves this purpose well. He sees it as important for musicians to reserve their right to commercially license their content if an opportunity to do so comes their way.

Jonathan uses the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 licence. Following trials using licences that incorporated the ShareAlike provision, Jonathan found that it was too difficult to monitor whether people were indeed 'sharing alike' and licensing his content in the same manner that he had licensed it. For that reason, he abandoned use of the ShareAlike provision.

Having had considerable success owing to Creative Commons licensing, Jonathan Coulton has also seen the difficulties that arise with commercial licensing of content. He has had many offers from businesses hoping to license content for commercial use for small fees. Such situations, he argues, are hard to justify using a lawyer to negotiate and contract into, as they will most likely not earn a lot of money. He suggests that if there were a boilerplate solution similar to the Creative Commons licences that enabled artists to commercially license their work easily this would be of great benefit. (Interview with Jonathan Coulton via email, 5 April 2008)

== Media ==
‘Jonathan Coulton’ by Dan Coulter, CC BY-SA 2.0, http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancoulter/510308241/

[{{SERVER}}{{localurl:{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}|action=edit}} Please help us edit this.] Add media that is relevant.

Jonathon Coulton

2008-12-06T20:22:12Z

Frank Tobia: Jonathon Coulton moved to Jonathan Coulton: Mis-spelling, per Wikipedia and his own website http://www.jonathancoulton.com/

#REDIRECT [[Jonathan Coulton]]

Git phrasebook

2008-08-19T18:50:07Z

Frank Tobia: git push --tags

Everything in ALLCAPS should be considered something you think about before typing.

== Checking out a project ==

git clone PROJECT_URL
git branch -a # Take a look at all the remote branches you can pick from.

== Creating a new local branch that tracks a remote branch ==

Assuming you want to pull from the remote called "origin":

git branch --track LOCALFUN origin/REMOTE_BRANCH_NAME
git checkout LOCALFUN
git pull # You should see, "Already up-to-date."
git push # You should see, "Everything up-to-date"

However, FIXME!

The push does nothing. :-(

== Switching which branch you are on ==
git checkout <BRANCH_NAME>

NOTE: Do not use this to '''create''' branches!

== Making a local branch available as a remote branch ==
To make the branch BRANCH_NAME appear as a remote branch called BRANCH_NAME:

git push origin BRANCH_NAME

If you want to change the branch name:

git push origin LOCAL_BRANCH_NAME:refs/heads/REMOTE_BRANCH_NAME

== Configuring git to push a particular local branch to a particular remote branch every time you call "git push" ==
Edit .git/config. Look for [remote "origin"].

Inside there, add:
push = refs/heads/LOCAL_BRANCH_NAME:refs/heads/REMOTE_BRANCH_NAME

Two important notes:
# You may have as many push lines as you like. Every "git push" with no arguments will push all of them.
# LOCAL_BRANCH_NAME and REMOTE_BRANCH_NAME are often the same, but naturally do not have to be.

== Deleting a remote branch ==
git push origin :BRANCH_NAME_TO_DELETE
== Adding a new version of a submodule to the git index ==
cd path/to/submodule
git checkout origin/WHICHEVER_BRANCH_YOU_WANT
cd .. # top level of project
git add path/to/submodule # NOTE: No trailing slash!

== Undoing a git-add ==
git reset
will clear out your index, in case you git-add'd something that you didn't want to.

== Pushing tags ==
git-push does not automatically push any tags you may have created. For this, use
git push --tags

Git phrasebook

2008-07-09T22:20:27Z

Frank Tobia: undoing a git-add

Everything in ALLCAPS should be considered something you think about before typing.

== Checking out a project ==

git clone PROJECT_URL
git branch -a # Take a look at all the remote branches you can pick from.

== Creating a new local branch that tracks a remote branch ==

Assuming you want to pull from the remote called "origin":

git branch --track LOCALFUN origin/REMOTE_BRANCH_NAME
git checkout LOCALFUN
git pull # You should see, "Already up-to-date."
git push # You should see, "Everything up-to-date"

However, FIXME!

The push does nothing. :-(

== Switching which branch you are on ==
git checkout <BRANCH_NAME>

NOTE: Do not use this to '''create''' branches!

== Making a local branch available as a remote branch ==
git push origin LOCAL_BRANCH_NAME:refs/heads/REMOTE_BRANCH_NAME

== Configuring git to push a particular local branch to a particular remote branch every time you call "git push" ==
Edit .git/config. Look for [remote "origin"].

Inside there, add:
push = refs/heads/LOCAL_BRANCH_NAME:refs/heads/REMOTE_BRANCH_NAME

Two important notes:
# You may have as many push lines as you like. Every "git push" with no arguments will push all of them.
# LOCAL_BRANCH_NAME and REMOTE_BRANCH_NAME are often the same, but naturally do not have to be.

== Deleting a remote branch ==
git push origin :BRANCH_NAME_TO_DELETE
== Adding a new version of a submodule to the git index ==
cd path/to/submodule
git checkout origin/WHICHEVER_BRANCH_YOU_WANT
cd .. # top level of project
git add path/to/submodule # NOTE: No trailing slash!

== Undoing a git-add ==
git reset
will clear out your index, in case you git-add'd something that you didn't want to.

Api

2008-07-03T16:47:14Z

Frank Tobia: sensible redirect

#REDIRECT [[Web Services]]

User:Frank Tobia

2008-06-27T23:31:02Z

Frank Tobia: intro

Frank is a tech intern at CC, an avid editor of Wikipedia (User:FrankTobia), and probably some other things too.