Wk1 Reading: Copyright Issues Part 3: The Creative Commons Solution

"Useless laws weaken the necessary laws."   -Montesquieu

First off, I want to disclaim that Lawrence Lessig is one of my heroes.  This man stood before the Supreme Court in a famous case ‘Eldred v. Ashcroft’ also known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Sonny Bono Act, or pejoratively as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act and argued against extending the length of copyright any further which is effectively becoming perpetual copyright.

As of 1976, the length of copyright was the authors life + 50 years.  After that the copyright expired and the work entered the public domain for all to use for FREE. Walt Disney died in 1966 and as you know 1966+50=2006 so the Walt Disney Corporation was in danger of having all the old Disney characters fall into the public domain. This sent shockwaves through Disney and lobbyists to congress.

Walt Disney has been making good money off the public domain by repacking stories for years.  Snow White and the Seven dwarves is a repacking of a public domain story by the Grimm Brothers. Disney has been turning a profit on public domain stories (Hercules, Moses, Robin Hood, Aladdin, Pochahontas, Tarzan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) for years, but when it came time to contribute back their solution was to lobby congress to extend copyright effectively destroying the public domain.  In another 20 years when it comes time for Mickey Mouse to face entering the public domain they will lobby congress again to extend the copyright act.

As you can guess, Lessing lost the Supreme Court Case, but he didn’t take it sitting down.  He decided to found the Creative Commons.  This is a new area where authors can select various types of copyrights and grant rights for different uses.  These type of licenses have been working out really well in the software world, but the entertainment industry is not on board. 

Just to give you an idea of how twisted the thinking of the entertainment industry is in their thinking, imagine a device that cleans up movies on DVD so you can watch them with your kids and not have to cringe a F-bombs, graphic violence, and sex.  A device exists called ClearPlay. You stick a regular DVD into the ClearPlay DVD player and it will skip over the trash and mute foul language.  Even though the consumer bought the DVD, the copyright owners (movie studios) claim that the consumers are violating copyright law when they use Clearplay to skip and mute trash in the movie because this is an altered copy.

Big media has made it very clear that the customer is the enemy and they reserve all rights to do whatever they want and control how you consume their content.  Just put in a DVD or Blue-Ray disc and see how long it takes to get to the movie.  They lockout the controls to keep the consumer from skipping ahead and force them to watch ads and FBI warnings.

The Creative Commons is a nice start to fixing the copyright mess we are currently in, but it isn’t the final solution since it is essentially a contract.  The concept of the Creative Commons needs to have the full force of law so that it can be upheld in court.  The Creative Commons is no substitute for a healthy public domain.  It makes you wonder what Disney will do when they run out of material to repackage from the public domain.

 

W4 Reading

I kept on reading this week in anticipation of writing a Literature Review. I have found the some of these articles, while they initially looked good aren't going to be a big help in my AR project and I will have to so some additional searches. Also, I have the folder option on EBSCO host working so I can save all my research there as seen below from this weeks reading summaries:

W4 - Final Video AR Project

In this video I provide a brief overview of my Action Research project and invite you to join-in.

PE6 - Doing Multiple Takes in Garage Band

For PE6 I was going to do a video on how to make a techno song in Garage band, but unfortunately it didn't work so well.  Instead, I am going to show you how to do multiple takes in Garage Band.  This is excellent for improvising a part or recording a difficult part again and again until you finally get it right.

This is a hidden feature that is not available on any of the menus and you have to do some setup to make it active.  It works for all instruments as well as vocals.  Enjoy!

PE5 - Mastering, (re)Mastering, and Controlling Your Final Sound in Garage Band

Ever wonder what "digitally remastered" means?  Want to know how to control you sound profile in Garage Band using mastering? If so, then this video is for you.  It took me awhile to truly understand these concepts.  If you are planning to do anything serious with Garage Band you will need to understand mastering and the compressor to get "your sound".   Watching this movie in HD will give you the best sound quality.



If you are interested in dynamic range and the "loudness war" this is a video which compares and contrasts older recording to digitally remastered recordings.  However, everyone is using compressors now (including radio stations) so all music is basically loud with little or no dynamic range.

PE4 - Adobe Contribute CS5 - Blog Manager Software

I haven't done much with the Adobe CS5 Suite so this week I thought I would dig around and see if I could find any lesser known useful Adobe tools.  Currently at FSO, we use the Apple iWeb application for managing our AR website.  Adobe Contribute is similar to iWeb and is designed for for managing blog sites like Blogger where you are currently reading this blog post.  Adobe Contribute can even replace iWeb.

To begin I started up Adobe Contribute CS5 and created a new "Blog Connection"

Adobe Contribute Creating a New Blog Connection

Adobe Contribute is a generic blogging tool so I specified that I would be connecting to Blogger. Adobe Contribute can also connect to WordPress, Mobile Me, and TypePad.

Connecting to a Blogger Blog

So far so good.. I entered my username and password and successfully connected to my Blogger blog site. Next, I tried to pull up an existing blog page (BP11) where I would make a simple change.  It took Blogger nearly 60 seconds to retrieve and display the page.  This slow response was perplexing so  I performed a quick check of the machine and Internet connection and everything seemed nominal.  To make sure this wasn't a anomaly I tried the same process again with the same slow results.

Editing a Blogger Blog with Adobe Contribute

After making a few simple edits to an existing page (BP11) for test purposes I decided to publish my changes back to Blogger and received this perplexing error message.  How could the images, audio, or video files not be unsupported?  I didn't add any audio, video, or images to my post and simply added a few lines of text.  Bravely I clicked "OK" to find out what would happen next.

Warning Message when Publishing a Change in Adobe Contribute

This is where things started to get even worse.  For some reason this edit created two RSS Feed updates with the subject of "##TITLE##" and the content of "##CONTENT##".

Strange RSS Feed Messages Generated by Adobe Contribute Publishing

Thankfully, these strange entries do not appear on my main Blogger page so this must be something internal to the process which Adobe Contribute uses to update pages.  This is where I decided to stop my exploration before something really bad happened and destroyed my Blogger site or corrupted the RSS feeds of my followers.

Before admitting defeat, I did a quick check for software updates and none are currently available for Adobe Contribute.  This tool has ample training material available in Lynda.com so I reviewed the blogging videos just to see if I made a misstep. Unfortunately, I could not find anything that I had done incorrectly. I was really looking forward to a good experience using Adobe Contribute CS5  so that I could work-offline and have an application to manage my blogs. Unfortunately the simplest of tasks are slow and produce warning messages and strange RSS feed messages.

If anyone of my followers is using Adobe Contribute CS5, I would like to hear from you and learn if I am using the tool incorrectly or if this behavior is normal.  In any case, this post was written with the editor on the blogger website and not Adobe Contribute CS5.

A wise philosopher once said, "It is better to learn from the mistakes of others since you may not live long enough to make them all yourself."

W3_Reading

This was the focus of my reading this week:

Online Assessment and Measurement: Foundations and Challenges . By: Hricko, Mary; Howell, Scott. Information Science Publishing. 2006 372 pp. (ED508842)
Online learning is one of the most important topics in distance learning, but practitioners and researchers have experienced difficulty in defining the process. "Online Assessment and Measurement: Foundations and Challenges" approaches the topic by finding a common ground to properly analyze online assessment and measurement. "Online Assessment and Measurement: Foundations and Challenges" explores the development of online assessment and the way practitioners of online learning can modify their methodologies in the design, development, and delivery of their instruction to best accommodate their participants. It acts as a handbook for educators, trainers, support staff, librarians, human resource managers, and anyone interested in online assessment.