Nine Inch Nails - Credit: uglynoid on Flickr (CC BY)

Nine Inch Nails’ “34 Ghosts IV”, which is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, has been nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.  In addition, Radiohead’s “House of Cards” has been nominated for several Grammys as well.

Congratulations to Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead for the nominations. Also, congratulations to all of the other artists whose work was nominated for Grammys this year, including Brian Eno, Diplo, Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo (AKA Gnarls Barkley), My Morning Jacket, Gilberto Gil, Peter Gabriel, Thievery Corporation, and Cornelius - all of whom have used Creative Commons licenses and/or have supported CC over the years.

Good deal.  I still have to make my mandatory comment about it not being CC BY-SA.

• Creative Commons

Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Lessig.  It is titled “In Defense of Piracy”.

How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there’s some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? “Let’s Go Crazy” indeed!

Note: Lessig did not choose to name the article “In Defense of Piracy”.  That was WSJ’s doing.

• WSJ
• Slashdot

Most of you know about or have used Blackboard. Blackboard has been actively involved in pursuing and enforcing aggressive patent and IP policies. Thankfully, there are several open-source alternatives that provide similar functionality: Moodle and Sakai.

The Sakai Community develops and distributes the open-sourceSakai CLE, an enterprise-ready collaboration and courseware management platform that provides users with a suite of learning, portfolio, library and project tools.

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

Most surprisingly, our very own Virginia Tech has been working on a customized implementation of Project Sakai. It’s called Scholar and is accessible to anyone with a VT pid. At least one person I talked to had used this CMS in their classes. Does anyone else know more about this project?

Scholar is an innovative and robust collaboration and learning management system. Designed by higher education for higher education, it offers tools in support of teaching and learning, research and collaboration, and assessment/accreditation projects.

Little Brother has been featured in a New York Times article

“Little Brother” is a terrific read, but it also claims a place in the tradition of polemical science-fiction novels like “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Fahrenheit 451” (with a dash of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”). It owes a more immediate debt to Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s comic book series “DMZ,” about the adventures of a photojournalist in the midst of a new American civil war. … MY favorite thing about “Little Brother” is that every page is charged with an authentic sense of the personal and ethical need for a better relationship to information technology, a visceral sense that one’s continued dignity and independence depend on it: “My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn’t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.”

There have been a lot of CC-related NY Times articles lately. Sweetness.

• Boing Boing
• New York Times

The NYT has published an editorial on the problems involved with publicly-funded universities patenting technology. The article is entitled “When Academia Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder”.

James Yan

…

In the past, discovery for its own sake provided academic motivation, but today’s universities function more like corporate research laboratories. Rather than freely sharing techniques and results, researchers increasingly keep new findings under wraps to maintain a competitive edge. What used to be peer-reviewed is now proprietary. “Share and share alike” has devolved into “every laboratory for itself.”

In trying to power the innovation economy, we have turned America’s universities into cutthroat business competitors, zealously guarding the very innovations we so desperately want behind a hopelessly tangled web of patents and royalty licenses.

Yes, this is a problem. Thank you for noticing.

• New York Times
• Patently O

The NY Times has just written an article about getting free music and avoing legal trouble.

Illustration by The New York Times

There are other sources for free, legal downloads besides individual labels. Creative Commons is a site that helps copyright holders decide which rights they want to share — for instance making songs free for personal use and distribution, but not for sampling or commercial use. The five-year-old organization said it had licensed about 1 million songs, and lists them at creativecommons.org/legalmusicforvideos. One user of Creative Commons, the eclectic radio station WFMU-FM, posts legal in-studio performances at freemusicarchive.org.

It seems like major papers have been giving free culture a lot of plugs lately. The the specific branding of “free culture” in its general form has yet to get through to the masses.

• NY Times
• Creative Commons

The LA times has printed an article on free/open textbooks.

Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven’t looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away — online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.

…

Thus far, their quest has been largely quixotic, but that could be changing. Public colleges and universities in California this past year backed several initiatives to promote online course materials, and publishers and entrepreneurs are stepping up release of electronic textbooks, which typically sell at reduced prices.

McAfee is a leader in his academic field, a featured speaker at the Yahoo Big Thinkers India conference in March. Tall and genial, he dresses in khakis, a polo shirt and geeky river sandals. A coauthor of the best-selling book “Freakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt, has described him as brilliant. What McAfee is not is anti-capitalist.

“I’m a right-wing economist, so they can’t call me a communist,” McAfee said.

…

Just mention textbook prices to university students and the response is outrage and a willingness to switch to online readings.

OER is slowly gaining mindshare, but they are doing it. It’s very good to see.

• LA Times
• Slashdot

Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, made a guest appearance on the Colbert Report.

Jonathan Zittrain wants to save the good chaos of the Internet and separate it from the bad chaos that will stomp on everything.

It’s a decent summary of the problem for the audience…I wonder how many people will understand it.

• Comedy Central
• Lessig