Friday, March 13, 2009

Aim and influence

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.[

Creative Commons Japan Seminar, Tokyo 2007
Creative Commons - Get Creative.ogg
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An animated film covers the basics of why Creative Commons was formed, what it does and how

Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic "all rights reserved" copyright, dubbed "some rights reserved." David Berry and Giles Moss have credited Creative Commons with generating interest in the issue of intellectual property and contributing to the re-thinking of the role of the "commons" in the "information age". Beyond that Creative Commons has provided "institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment and communicate with culture more freely".

Creative Commons works to counter what the organisation considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. According to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, it is "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past" Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions more

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Photographers




Freelance photographer Dan Heller claimed that the licenses are created in such a way that if the work was licensed in CC by someone altering the copyright notice of the original work, then the licensee will be held liable to copyright infringement damages, even though the downstream licensees were fooled by original perpetrators, which increases legal risk for CC licensee. Furthermore, copyright holder of the registered copyrighted works can game the CC system by withdrawing CC licenses and erase evidence of the issuing such licenses, then sue people who use the copyrighted works. One could argue however, that this would be a limitation of the media upon which the content is stored, not the license itself.[citation needed] One recent development in response to this problem has been the launch of the ImageStamper website. ImageStamper keeps dated, independently verified copies of license conditions associated with creative commons images on behalf of its users. The site is currently being extended to support other media types.

Technically, this isn’t rocket science. The challenge is the composition. Because things are in motion, it’s hard to frame your picture in real-time conditions that change so quickly, and deciding when to release the shutter. Expect to shoot many pictures of the same thing, hoping that one great shot will appear. One hint about composition is to pay attention to the direction of motion, since that will be the theme of the picture. Straight lines, curved motion, forward, backward. It’s all about leading the viewer’s eye from a starting point to an endpoint. It may be subtly implied, or very direct, but it’s the motion itself that you want to convey.