PlanetPlanetPlanet and video.

[reddragdiva]

Why have one when you can have three?

• Planet Wikimedia (you currently get on this by asking brionv; something more distributed to come);
• Wiki Blog Planet (you currently get on this by asking Nick Jenkins);
• Open Wiki Blog Planet (you get on this using the Edit This Planet link ... love it).

Short radio interview on Chris Evans' BBC2 show yesterday, 5:25-5:30pm. No idea what inspired it, it was utterly generic. I know the researchers love Wikipedia as the universal backgrounding resource, as journalists do. Wikipedia gets basically good press because we save journalistic arse on a daily basis.

Nice chat with someone from FourDocs yesterday, about freeing content or at least making it a useful resource for our projects. "We'd love our stuff on Wikipedia. It's all Creative Commons!" They've released a pile of documentaries under CC by-nc-nd, which is about as paralysingly unfree as you can get and still tag it CC. We talked about really-free-content licences — where you can take something and reuse and remix it, and even make money off the result, without prior permission — and how scary they are to those who've spent years learning the ridiculous twists and turns needed to clear a piece of footage for a single with-permission use.

That FourDocs could even manage CC-by-nc-nd with streaming only (not downloadable files) was remarkable given the state of movie copyright. Even the BBC, which is all about the content, has about half the staff keen to release everything freely and widely and the other half horrified at the idea.

Today's question: what the hell can we do to come up with something big content producers will feel able to release under an actually free licence? Something they can feel safe to relax control on? If we can get one, we can get more. What can we do to get that first one?

(Thanks for not much to Creative Commons. I see they even made some versions of CC by-sa 3.0 — not all, just some — not actually free licenses, with onerous codification of moral rights that are default anyway in the countries affected. Well done. And then you have wikis using licenses that are nonsensical in a wiki context — thinking a No Derivatives license doesn't contradict the whole idea of text anyone can edit, because it's Creative Commons. Stallman was right again.)

Comments

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Bah! I was on the phone to a client yesterday evening, and turned the radio back on afterwards just in time to hear the Fox The Fox bit of Evans's show -- which would have been immediately following your interview. That's twice now; you did an interview for Radio 4 a while back that I caught the last thirty seconds of, because I'd been held up at reception on the way to the car...

Yes, this is an utterly useless comment, but I thought I'd make it anyway.

[reddragdiva]

Yesterday's should still be on "listen again".