"Shuttle Launch" by oneaustin on Flickr (CC-By-SA-2.0)

Released under the AGPLv3, Launchpad is now Free Open Source Software.

Karl Fogel writes on the Launchpad Blog:

This is a post I’ve been looking forward to for a long time:

Launchpad is now open source!

We released it today under the GNU Affero General Public license, version 3. Note that although we had previously announced that we’d be holding back two components (codehosting and soyuz), we changed our minds: they are included — all the code is open.

Big congratulations (and thanks) to the Canonical Launchpad team, who worked overtime to make this happen sooner rather than later, and to Mark Shuttleworth, whose decision it was to open source Launchpad in the first place.

I’ve been waiting for this a good deal of time now, and I’m sure many others have been too. I favor the Bazaar VCS over git, so I’ll have no second thoughts using launchpad for any future application development.

• Entry on Launchpad Blog

Google Images - Credit: google.com

Google Images now recognizes Creative Commons and let’s you filter your searches based on the suite of licenses as well as other licenses.

Let’s say you’re a blogger. You’ve just returned from a trip to New York City, and you’re writing a post on New York landmarks. You want to illustrate your travel guide with an image — as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s easy to find images of New York online. But you want to make sure that you don’t use images without the permission of their owners, and you can’t afford licensing fees for professional photographers.

Today, we’re launching a feature on Image Search to help you find images that you can use for free, while respecting the wishes of artists and creators. This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

A little late.  I was expecting this about a year ago.

• Google Blog
• Creative Commons

ZeXx86 has created ArenaLive, an MMOFPS that can be accessed from the Web. According to ZeXx86’s Slashdot submission, ArenaLive is based on OpenArena.

Arena Live is a free, open source, Quake-based massive multiplayer, first person shooter.

This work is distributed under the GNU/GPL2 License, which means that you are free to use and modify it for any purpose.

When you are interested in development or you need answer for question around Arena Live, join to IRC channel #arenalive on irc.freenode.net server.

The Slashdot submission says that only GNU+Linux and Firefox are supported right now, but more platforms will be appearing soon. Sounds like an interesting project.

• Arena Live
• Slashdot

Watterlogged Pirate - Credit: Aak Ook on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

The Pirate Bay has announced that it will close its tracker and remove its torrents prior to being acquired.

Perhaps even more significant for the BitTorrent community is the thus far unreported decision to close down the BitTorrent tracker. Up until today Pirate Bay’s public tracker connected more than half of all BitTorrent users but this is about to change.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.

To decentralize TPB even further, the torrents that will be listed on the site wont be hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers anymore. In the near future the site will use a new torrent hosting service that will store the torrents for them. This new hosting service will be open to other torrent sites as well and can be accessed through an API.

In the end The Pirate Bay is making these changes to ensure that the BitTorrent ecosystem stays intact no matter what happens, Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. By decentralizing the different aspects they hope that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone. The burden will now be spread among several independently operated services.

For now it remains a mystery what GGF CEO Hans Pandeya meant with “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.” That’s worrying to say the least.

In addition, GGF also acquired Peerialism who apparently have developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. How this related to the new tracker and external torrent hosting remains unknown.

Half of me thinks this is a late April Fool’s joke.

• TorrentFreak

Video Bay - Credit: thevideobay.org

The Pirate Bay has launched a public beta of VideoBay.  It runs on HTML 5 video tags (no flash) with ogg videos.

Well, this should make the Pirate Bay’s court appeal interesting. For the last couple of years, the guys have been working on an anything-goes, censor-free haven for online video sharing called VideoBay, and it’s now gone into “Beta Extreme.”

“This will be an experimental playground and as such, subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don’t bug us too much if the site ain’t working properly,” the site’s front page currently warns.

I can’t wait for <video>/<audio> tags to become more popular and for ogg to become a more recognisable format.HTML 5 standards.

• Gizmodo

Creative Commons - Credit: creativecommons.org

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved the licensing switch to Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike after a 75% vote.

Earlier today we blogged that results of the Wikipedia community vote on adding the CC BY-SA license. Over 75% of votes were cast in approval of the change, but as has been pointed out by Wikimedia Foundation Deputy Director Erik Moeller and board member Kat Walsh, this number understates the level of support for the change. 14% voted “no opinion”, while only 10% opposed.

In any case we are deeply gratified that such an overwhelming majority (88% of those who voted with an opinion) approved this change worked on over several years by the Free Software Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, and Creative Commons, are proud to stand with such trusted organizations, and will live up to that trust!

The addition of the CC BY-SA license to Wikimedia sites should occur over the next month. Now is a good time to start thinking about whether your works and projects ought to interoperate with Wikipedia. If you’re using (or switch to) CC BY-SA, content can flow in both directions (your work could be incorporated into Wikipedia, and you can incorporate Wikipedia content into your work). If you use CC BY or CC0, your work could be incorporated into Wikipedia, but not vice versa. If your work isn’t licensed, or is under a CC license with a non-commercial or no derivatives (NC or ND) term, nothing can flow in either direction, except by fair use or other copyright exception or limitation.

Does 75% strike you as a little low?  Why was it even that controversial?

• Creative Commons

Floppy Disks - Credit: matsuyuki or Flickr (CC BY-SA)

Data.gov, a website hosting US federal government data has launched.

Data.gov, an OA warehouse of datasets created by the U.S. federal government, launched yesterday. See, e.g., coverage by the Washington Post.

Also yesterday, the Sunlight Foundation launched a new contest for best re-use of data from Data.gov, Apps for America 2. First prize is $10,000.

OK, so a cool app idea: make charts on the names of different congressmen. Did they use to begin with more vowels? But seriously, someone should come up with some good ideas.

• Open Access News

Monster: M-80 - Credit: The Master Shake Signal on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

Hansen Beverage Company has sent a takedown notice to Desktop Nexus.  However, it is concerning trademark, not copyright.

They are asserting a trademark claim? They also said very clearly this was not a copyright claim. I suddenly regretted deleting those wallpapers, because I have a feeling what they’re doing is illegal. I did a little research on Continental Enterprises and turned up a number of horror stories involving their operation. To quote tabberone.com:

In our opinion, Continental Enterprises qualifies as the personification of a Trademark Extortionist. This Indianapolis-based company has taken trademark extortion to a new level.

They even went as far as filing a trademark infringement lawsuit against Tippman Sports a few days ago.

Desktop Nexus has over 600 new wallpapers being uploaded every day, making it impractical for us to manually moderate all the uploads. For this reason, sites like ours are protected under DMCA law, which requires us to take down content that violates copyrights in the event the copyright holder (or authorized agent) contacts us and makes a formal request. No problem. This however, is not a copyright issue. Continental Enterprises clearly stated they were not making a copyright claim. So I ask, does DMCA cover trademark issues as well, or are they trying to bully a smaller company into yielding to their whims? Did they have legal grounds to request we remove the wallpapers, and if so, did they approach it in a proper, legal way? Do we have any recourse in a situation like this? I want to remain legal in all of our actions of course, however I also feel large companies who abuse the legal system should be called out and have their ways exposed.

So I’d like to see these wallpapers.  I’m not sure how much it would affect the case here, but I wonder if they are actually portraying the drink.

• Desktop Nexus

Obama - Credit: The Official White House Photostream on Flickr (PD)

White House photos on Flickr are now labeled as “United States Government Work” on Flickr.

Someone must have been listening, because sometime over the weekend, the licenses changed, and now the photos are labeled “United States Government Work” and link to an explanation on copyright.gov. The White House, however, continues to use the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license for all third-party content published on the www.whitehouse.gov site.

The change marks a first for Flickr, which to date has not had a license for government works, other than a “No Known Copyright Restriction” license that is used on photos from its Commons project, which includes photos from some of the world’s greatest museums and libraries. Those photos include ones from the Library of Congress, for instance, that never were copyright since they were made or paid for by the federal government

I don’t understand why they didn’t just add a “public domain” or CC 0 option.  That would have made more sense to me.

• Wired

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deeplinks Blog reports that the Wikimedia Foundation has demanded that Wikipedia Art, a site commenting on art and Wikipedia, cease using the domain name “wikipediaart.org” on the grounds that the domain name violates the Wikimedia Foundation’s trademarks.

Last February, a pair of artists, working with several collaborators, created a Wikipedia article and invited the general public to add to it, following Wikipedia’s standards of credibility and verifiability. The work was intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. But Wikipedia editors did not take kindly to the project, and it was shut down within fifteen hours for being insufficiently “encyclopaedic.”

Fast forward a couple of months. The artists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, have created a noncommercial website that documents the project, called Wikipedia Art. The domain name for the project: wikipediaart.org.

Yep, they used the term “wikipedia” in their domain name. “Wikipedia” is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. And now the Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name peaceably or it will attempt to take it by (legal) force.

I fail to see any trademark problems here. Trademark law exists to avoid confusion among customers with regard to brands, logos, and names. Based on the EFF’s article, it appears that all this site was doing was using the name to refer to the site itself, not host a faux Wikipedia or deceive Wikipedians into going to Wikipedia Art instead. The site itself even has a disclaimer at the top of the page denying any involvement with Wikipedia. I for one am grateful that the EFF has not overlooked their principles on free speech just because the site in question just happens to be Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation should retract their accusations and apologize immediately (or at the very least provide an explanation for this action).

• Electronic Frontier Foundation