Creative Commons - the 'good stuff'

...flexible

Tanzanie by bouba_bzh (2010). Found on flickr.com - a Creative Commons afficionado.
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC) license.

'Absolute number of CC-licensed photos on Flickr, from April 1, 2006 – November 1, 2008' by Christian (2009).
Available under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

...identifiable

Ghosts I-IV album cover art by Rob Sheridan (2008).
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

'Ghosts Nine III' by Nine Inch Nails (2008).
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.



...accessible

Click To Play

Science Commons by Jesse Dylan (2008) - director of "Yes We Can" - with will.i.am
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.


...Public Domain versus 'Infinite Copyright'

Mickey's Infinite Copyright by David John Goodger (2005).
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

Disney-infinite-copyright by AnonMoos (2008)
Available as part of the Public Domain.

Essay - Creative Commons

Twenty-first century artists, gamers, ‘tweeters’ and programmers operate within an immersive, technology-rich environment. Widespread participation in the ‘read-write’ culture of Web 2.0 has generated ongoing debate concerning the legal, practical, philosophical and creative conflict between restrictive copyright law and the exponential growth of online content distribution and access.

The Creative Commons (CC) licensing framework is one response to the issues inherent in applying traditional licensing practices to digital works especially. The ‘some rights reserved’ stance of the CC framework and uptake of CC licences by recognised figures and groups have caused a stir amongst creative and academic industries worldwide. The following discussion defines the CC framework and demonstrates how the flexible, accessible and identifiable nature of the Creative Commons system sets it apart from other forms of copyright.

 The Creative Commons Foundation set out in 2001 to repair the ‘cultural machine’ (Katz, 2007), motivated by a social shift towards a more collaborative culture, the rise of a “…new global consciousness of sharing and participation across national borders” (Cheliotis, Chik, Ankit et al, 2007, p.1) and the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL). The non-profit organisation provides a set of six core licensing tools that encourage user-creators to legally ‘share, remix, and reuse’ copyrighted works (Creative Commons, 2010).

These free licensing tools provide a middle-ground of authorship protection between copyright and public domain (PD). Licensors allow users to freely share and use their work provided they: attribute the use of the work (CC BY); use the work in a non-commercial capacity (CC NC); make available any resulting works under the same license (Share-Alike or CC SA); or use the work as originally created (non-derivative or CC ND) (Creative Commons, 2010). More recently, the CC Zero (CC0) was developed as a ‘universal waiver’ to give authors an opportunity to bring works closer still to the public domain, while the CC Founder’s Copyright provides a more balanced option for short-term licensing.

The recent explosion in popularity of the CC licenses is due in part to the flexibility they lend authors in sharing their copyright video, audio and written works with others on a large scale. It is estimated that over 350 million items are currently licensed under the Creative Commons worldwide (Cobcroft, 2008), in various combinations that give licensors a balance of control over their work; a way to “…protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them” (Katz, 2006, p.392).

Australia’s Copyright Act 1968 was developed before the advent of the internet and the more recent evolution of the Read-Write Web: in contrast, the user-friendly CC framework was developed by and for contemporary user-creators. Subject to ongoing improvements that recognise the pervasive nature of multimedia formats available online (Gordon-Murnane, 2010), the commons assist users to sidestep the “edgy trip into the legal maze of copyright” (Pallas Loren, 2007) by filling out a web-based application form and distributing their licence-encoded works as desired.

Flickr’s migration to the commons as its principle content-licensing option was met with a phenomenal response that is showing exponential annual growth [Insert diagram]. Ten million CC-licensed images in 2004 jumped to over 100 million in 2009: more than 12 million of these are attribution-only licensed (CC BY) (Thorne, 2009), meaning they are completely free to download, share and reuse, commercially or otherwise, provided that the licensor is duly attributed.

In addition to a flexible licensing platform, CC licensors have the advantage of a three-way coding system that makes commons material and its licensed uses readily identifiable to the public. Whereas traditional copyright is automatically attached to works and ‘other subject matter’ (that is, film, video, sound recordings and other electronic multimedia) without any process of registration, publication, or even display of a copyright notice (Commonwealth of Australia, 2005), each CC licence or combination is made clear. A “…legal code, a human-readable deed, and machine-readable code” (Peters, 2009) allow electronic works to be easily located and used via purpose-built search engines hosted by the Creative Commons, Yahoo!, Flickr, YouTube and others.

                American band Nine Inch Nails stunned the music industry when it released its two most recent albums under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence. Kevin Kelly of online record label Magnatune explains that this revolutionary approach to licensing allows musicians like Nine Inch Nails, The Grateful Dead and Radiohead to take full advantage of the identifiable nature of CC licences by capitalising on the ‘considerable incentives’ for releasing original material that is ‘free’ (as cited in Cobcroft, 2009, p.33). This particular CC success story resulted in international prominence in the press, and a substantial profit accrued from subsequent ‘Deluxe Edition’ CD sales (Cobcroft, 2009). The contrast with the stringent implementation of copyright and infringement by traditional record companies is illustrated in the reciprocal degree of ‘fan respect’ that is linked to the reasonable assertion of copyright by creative authors (Pallas Loren, 2007), and the clear communication of permissible uses to audiences.

A consequence of the efficient CC identification system is increased accessibility of a wide range of works to fellow artists, researchers, educators and user-creators around the world. The various and complex layers of traditional intellectual property protection pose mounting challenges that frustrate efforts by CC and other organisations to revive the public domain (Peters, 2009).

Creative production workshops and short film competitions such as Bush in 30 Seconds and Video Slam 02 encourage the use and creation of original works made up almost entirely of CC-licensed material, that contribute in turn to a bigger and better cultural commons. Produced by Josh Nichols, Jules Sholer
and Alister Robbie during a 48-hour “instant filmmaking marathon” (Open Channel, 2008), So Hard is one such example. The result of a ‘limited abandonment’ of protective rights by creative content authors is a reworking of original works for new purposes and audiences: it is also diametrically opposed to the restrictions and ‘overly broad ownership rights’ imposed by traditional copyright law on works such as those produced by Disney.

 Since 2005, CC has cast the net wider still, beyond the domain of creative works. By “…identifying and lowering unnecessary barriers to research, crafting policy guidelines and legal agreements, and developing technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use” (Creative Commons, 2010) CC hopes to build commons-based infrastructure for scientific research and educational materials.

The work of the Creative Commons has been called a temporary experiment; a revolution in ‘social media’ sharing; a significant phenomenon of ‘open’ cultural production and distribution. While several issues have necessitated revisions of the legal licence codes for different jurisdictions, exponentially-increasing support for the commons across a range of media and in both developed and developing countries would suggest that the ‘some rights reserved’ option is a welcome alternative to other forms of copyright.

                As traditional copyright and patenting laws become more and more difficult for the average person to navigate, the flexible, accessible and identifiable nature of the Creative Commons framework is garnering popularity and espousal, by recognised organisations and celebrity figures as well as the individual user.

Is the CC licensing framework a timely solution to ongoing private-public gain conflict? Should the trends in international uptake of CC licences continue in the same vein, it would seem that the folk at Creative Commons are moving in the right direction to meet the needs of intellectual property protection in the twenty-first century.

References

Cheliotis, G., Chik, W., Ankit, G., & Kumar Tayi, Giri. (2007). Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons Licenses and Evaluating its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and for Copyright Law [Electronic version]. Retrieved October 12, 2010, from http://wiki.creativecommons.org/images/7/71/Taking-stock-of-the-creative-commons-experiment_eng.pdf

Cobcroft, R. (Ed.). (2008). Building an Australasian commons: Creative commons case studies volume 1. [Sydney?]: CC Australia.

Commonwealth of Australia. (2005). Copyright Law in Australia: A Short Guide [Electronic version]. Retrieved October 15, 2010, from http://www.ag.gov.au/agd/WWW/rwpattach.nsf/VAP/
(CFD7369FCAE9B8F32F341DBE097801FF)~Copyright+Law+in+Australia+-+A+Short+Guide+-+June+2005.pdf/$file/Copyright+Law+in+Australia+-+A+Short+Guide+-+June+2005.pdf

Creative Commons. (2010). History. Retrieved October 15, 2010, from http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright

Lessig, L. (2001). The future of ideas: The fate of the commons in a connected world. New York: Random House.

Open Channel. (2008). Video Slam 02: Teams. Retrieved October 18, 2010, http://www.engagemedia.org/Members/openchannel/videos/VS02_TEAM-02.ogg/view

Pallas Loren, L. (2007). Building a Reliable Semicommons of Creative Works: Enforcement of Creative Commons Licenses and Limited Abandonment of Copyright. George Mason Law Review, 14(2), 271-328.

Peters, D. (2009). Expanding the Public Domain: Part Zero [Press release]. Retrieved October 18, 2010, from http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/13304

Katz, Z. (2006). Pitfalls of Open Licensing: An Analysis of Creative Commons Licensing. IDEA, 46(3), 391-413.

Thorne, M. (2009). Analysis of 100M CC-Licensed Images on Flickr [Press release]. Retrieved October 18, 2010, from http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/13588

Course Evaluation

So, it's that time of year when students have the opportunity to work out some of their frustration by evaluating courses....

I won't waste this opportunity by summarising everything I learned during my studies in 1501HUM. I will, however, note several concepts and tasks that had significance for me as a 21st Century citizen and as a future teacher of coming generations of 'digital natives'.

Positive Feedback

1) The delivery of the course was fairly relevant - rather than simply talk at students about different aspects of new communication technologies, I was relieved to find myself working on a computer, trialling web search engines other than Google, using a digital camera to create original video content, consciously acting as content user and creator and disseminating this 'cultural artefact' to others viaYouTube... 

2) Many of the questions raised by the course (How secure are the details you provide in exchange for access to social networking sites? What rights do you have regarding original content uploaded to the web? Should the government regulate web content as they do other media forms? Where can cyberpunk go from here? Is the operational quality of Open Source software comparable to that of 'closed source' systems like Windows or Apple?) resonated with elements of my personal experience that I had never previously considered as problematic or contested. Since beginning this course, I have been at pains to remove (or avoid giving out) my personal details from social networking and other sites; I have trialled several examples of freeware and Portable Apps, and am now considering a permanent migration from Windows to OpenOffice; I am considering my options in terms of protecting, controlling and sharing my original digital content, and rethinking the ways that I access and use the content created by others.

3) The key questions raised and concepts explored were also relevant to my wider acquaintance. Teacher education has turned out to quite a specialist field of study, which tends to preclude sharing meaningful conversations about educaiton-specific content with people not in the field. The concepts of this course, on the other hand, was the catalyst of numerous arguments and debates with my family members and friends that helped me to clarify my understandings, devise pathways for further investigation, benefit from other's knowledge, ideas and experiences, and extend my own. My siblings were particularly helpful in that they starred in a video advertising campaign I directed for the Culture Jamming task.

One of my family members experiencing smart phone frustration.

4) The first small group task was successful in getting students out of the classroom, and communicating and collaborating with one another. It was a good getting-to-know-you activity that set me up for the rest of the semester in this course. It was also a reasonable task for the time allowed, although no prior warning meant that many students were not as prepared as they could have been, and had to complete the task at a later time.

Constructive Criticism

1) I felt that the assessment criteria for the course might have been much clearer - perhaps it would be helpful to future students if succint task outlines and marking rubrics were provided for each assessment item at the beginning of the semester. This applies especially to the weblog tasks: I found it very stressful to develop a blogging style that would satisfy requirements; feedback was also not available to those wishing to improve their results for the second set of blogs.

2) The role of students in the lectures was largely static, and the delivery one-sided. I have been fortunate enough to experience some highly engaging lecture styles during my studies, that succeeded in getting students out of their seats, raising their hands, asking questions, sharing their stories. I think this was partly due to the dynamic presentation skills of the lecturers, but also derived from the use of special guest lecturers, hands-on activities during lecturers, and the habit lecturers had of roaming around the theatre to oblige students to get involved.

3) Exciting as they were, I felt that many of the tutorial tasks/TuteSparks were a little too involved for the time allowed and the resources available to students within the classroom and at home.  I sometimes struggled to understand how the task was linked to the key course concepts and felt that the tutorial was largely a time for self-teaching rather than guided or collaborative learning. I would estimate that I spent more than twice the number of at-home study hours suggested for 20CP courses completing these tasks at home.

Culture Jamming - Final Summary

This task turned out to be a larger project than I originally predicted.

Very Gold Co$t is Born

We developed several initiatives in service of this culture jam. This began with the development of logo to replace the unpopular 'Very Gold Coast, Very GC' branding promoted by Gold Coast Tourism until last year. Our replacement brand - Very Gold Co$t - has become a fully-fledged anti-corporate identity package over the last few weeks, including bumper stickers, windshield flyers, and posters. It was hoped that these would slowly and subversively attract the attention and curiosity of Griffith University staff and students and the wider community. We have been dispersing these bits and pieces randomly around the Griffith University campus and other 'hot spots' around the Gold Coast. While we haven't been able to gauge the attention received by this branding experiment, we know for certain that the posters have been noticed - they tend to be very quickly removed from ATMs and shopfronts.

Home for the Homeless on Facebook

The second route we took towards getting noticed by the community at large was a Facebook page that documents audiovisual artefacts of our jam around the Gold Coast. The Facebook page has only been active for a short time, but it has already received patronage from a handful of people who are genuine strangers to the members of our group.

Gold Co$t Calling Advertisement Video



After stumbling across an interesting advertising campaign designed by California Calling (tourism company for California, United States), we were inspired to develop a third course of action: a parody Gold Coast tourism video using our own reworked branding and focusing on the lesser-known aspects of the Gold Coast that are seen as important issues to Gold Coast locals. Given the significant rate of youth homelessness in Queensland, we thought it would be interesting to give the Gold Coast homeless a voice and feature homeless people (or rather, actors playing homeless people) as hosts of the ad. Originally, we wanted to approach genuine homeless and other struggling, disenfranchised, digruntled, and otherwise disenchanted Gold Coasters to appear in the ad. Our study schedules and the short time frame limited our efforts, however... and ensured that the end-product could not be misconstrued as defamation rather than parody!



Now that the California Calling ads have started to air on Australian National television networks, we feel that there is much potential for local and wider Australian audiences to relate to our slightly more skeptical version.

California Calling is also currently running a competition to encourage California locals to get involved in the campaign by creating their own videos. We will soon be uploading our video as an entry in this competition, as well as to YouTube, and sending the link to the Gold Coast City Council, The Gold Coast Bulletin, and our State Government representative for their convenient viewing pleasure. It is unfortunate that we cannot as yet comment on the impact of these actions, but I, at least, am motivated to continue developing this aspect of the culture jam and fully realise its potential to garner public attention and perhaps even ancourage positive changes on the Gold Coast.

Week 9 Tutorial Task and TuteSpark - Essay Planning

We’re drawing close to the end of another Semester of study. In Week 12, I will be posting an academic essay on How Jaime Sees It about the Creative Commons and how it differs from other forms of copyright. Since completing the Week 7 TuteSpark, this topic was the simple choice. A slightly excessive web-trawling expedition for that task set up my preliminary research for this essay.

The most interesting journal articles I came across approached the issue of licensing in a more balanced, logical way than expected: benefits as well as the lesser known drawbacks of using the Creative Commons were presented, including the irrevocability of CC licenses.

Articles that I foresee forming the core of my research from include the following:

- David Bollier’s Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2008);

- Creative Commons: Copyright Tools for the 21^st Century (2010) by Laura Gordon-Murnane;
- Zachary Katz’s The Pitfalls of Open Licensing: An Analysis of Creative Commons Licensing (2006);

- George Cheliotis’ From Open Source to Open Content: Organization, Licensing and Decision Processes in Open Cultural Production (2009); and

- (despite the ludicrously long title) Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons Licenses and Evaluating Its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and for Copyright Law (2007) by Cheliotis, Warren Chik, Ankit Guglani and Giri Kumar Tayi.

Together, I feel that these articles represent an historically comprehensive, philosophically sensitive and balanced cross-section of recent academic works. I would like to explore in more depth the place of the Creative Commons within the wider context of the Open Source Movement and the future of cultural dissemination, including the broader application of the ‘Commons philosophy’ to other spheres of society.

In my research I also stumbled across several mentions of the application of the Creative Commons beyond the protection of works of art, literature, popular culture, and the other usual suspects. Of note are the Science Commons, which are perceived by some to be an answer to issues with gaining access to research and studies for future applications; perhaps to foster greater scientific collaboration worldwide and unlock some of the potential of technological and scientific know-how for the good of mankind. A brief overview of these will likely appear in my essay.

Reference List

Bollier, D. (2008). Viral spiral: How the commoners built a digital republic of their own. New York: New Press.

Cheliotis, G. (2009). From open source to open content: Organization, licensing and decision processes in open cultural production. Decision Support Systems, 47(1), 229-244.

Cheliotis, G., Chik^, W., Guglani, A., & Kumar Tayi, G. (2007). Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons Licenses and Evaluating Its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and for Copyright Law [Electronic version]. Retrieved September 27, 2010, from http://web.si.umich.edu/tprc/papers/2007/805/CreateCommExp.pdf

Gordon-Murnane, L. (2010). Creative Commons: Copyright Tools for the 21st Century. Online, 34(1), pp 18-21.

Katz, Z. (2006). The Pitfalls of Open Licensing: An Analysis of Creative Commons Licensing. IDEA – The Intellectual Property Law Review, 46(3), 391-413.

Week 9 Lecture - Cyberpunk

Although it’s always uncomfortable meeting an unknown concept to begin with, I was excited when I realised that Cyberpunk (CB) was the focus of the Week 9 lecture. The term cropped up briefly while I was studying crime fiction, Film Noir, and the predecessors of that screen genre/style last semester. Several students in my class seemed familiar enough with the term that they were willing to debate about it. Meanwhile, I was left wondering what on Earth cyberpunks do, and envisaging a person of indiscriminate sex, adorned with a mishmash of geek- and 70s punk-inspired accessories (think ‘Artie’ from Glee with a mohawk and stonewash denim).

Some elements of the lecture were familiar: I encountered William Gibson’s work, for example, in the same popular media course mentioned above. Perhaps best known beyond literary and science fiction circles for coining the term ‘cyberspace’ in Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984), Gibson is one familiar name set atop a list of cyberpunk pioneers. Bruce Sterling, who appears himself on the list, refers to these figures – his peers - as the ‘most fearsome gurus’ of the cyberpunk movement (Sterling, 1998). Sterling’s use of the term ‘guru’ here is slightly sardonic, however, as it implies that cyberpunk is a strict literary genre (or a sub-genre of science fiction) with a replicable formula. Below I will suggest why this connotation is not one desired by the pioneers of cyberpunk.

Adam suggested that we read Sterling’s article Cyberpunk in the Nineties to clarify the key themes of this lecture. I have to say that, more than any other academic work or cyberpunk film I have come across (admittedly, there have been few); more than any debate about whether or not the Matrix is ‘genuine cyberpunk’, this article about cyberpunk by a cyberpunk has contributed to dispelling my mystification and scepticism of the movement. From all appearances, the article seems to be a candid, somewhat brutal take on what cyberpunk is and what it isn’t - without gilding the lily. Throughout my studies I have found that most articles of this nature are inherently biased. What most surprised me about this article, then, was the absence of genre-snobbery in its blunt treatment of the birth, life, and alleged death of cyberpunk – not as a kind of sacred genre institution, but as an anarchic cult form that has run its course.

If someone other than myself had written this blog, and I had read the last line at this time yesterday, I would have been thoroughly confused: how is that cyberpunk is a ‘cult form’ and yet not a literary genre? From the Week 9 lecture content, Sterling’s 1998 article, and my recent reading of Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), I have distilled a general understanding of the difference between a movement and genre, as well as a basic ‘feel’ for the cult of cyberpunk. Basically, cyberpunk evolved as a reaction against the lack of readability, irrelevance and imitative nature of traditional science fiction – a genre more suited to the ‘exhilaration’ and mildly ‘disquieting’ technological progress of the 1950s (Sterling, 1998). Cyberpunk, on the other hand, was a vehicle for communicating the more extreme private and societal outlook cultivated by the exponential development of high technology from the 1980s onwards. The resulting ‘genre’ gained notoriety for its darkly foreboding projection of dystopian futures where technology is as ‘invisible’ as it is ascendant; as valuable as it is dangerous.

The very anarchic ethos of cyberpunk rejects the use of a strict literary formula, yet Sterling asserts that a cyberpunk pseudo-genre did result eventually, and ended by killing the original cyberpunk movement with “...dopey shoot-em-up rack-fodder in sci-fiberpunk drag” (1998, no page numbers). They’re strong words, but Sterling has by no means abandoned cyberpunk to the history books (or should I say ‘to Wikipedia’?): the author suggests that cyberpunk lives on as the “voice of bohemia” (Sterling, 1998) in the authors that were there from the beginning.

Reference List

Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. The Berkley Publishing Group: New York.

Sterling, B. (1998). Cyberpunk in the Nineties [Electronic version]. Retrieved October 2, 2010, from
     http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPtext/Manifestos/CPInThe90s.html

One Small Step for Nao, One Giant Leap for Humanoid Kind

Science Daily reports that the world's most revered football players may soon have to step up their game if they want to retain their positions on premier league teams (Blackwell, 2010). The competition? A humanoid robot called Nao.

The latest era of relentless progression in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has dawned in the form of 'Nao' - a football playing robot series set to dominate a sport sacrosanct across Europe. Move over Beckham, Pele and Cruyff. Nao is equipped with dribbling and manoeuvring skills, speed and game tactics to rival the greats... with one significant advantage: Nao's abilities will never be diminished by physical or psychological fatigue. Relative newcomer to the robotic technology/AI scene, French company Aldebaran has stunned audiences with demonstrations and operating specifications that reveal the abilities of their ball-bending prototype to the general public. At this stage, the Nao Robot series is able to complete a range of rudimentary tasks reminiscent of George Lucas' C-3PO: running, crouching, grasping, environmental perception, basic programmable communication, WiFi connection and Nao to Nao cooperation (Blackwell, 2010).

Many technology-enthusiasts will be chortling with glee over the scientific and computing progress the Nao series represents. Science fiction afficionados and football fans, however, may be more cautious with their praise. As the ability of Nao to orientate within and negotiate complex environments; to react to and interact with humans and other digital devices and artifical intelligentsia improves, the observable differences between Nao and man will slowly diminish. Claude Summut from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems in Sydney reviewed the technology demonstrated at this year's RoboCup international robot soccer competition in Singapore (Blackwell, 2010). Sammut observed that the interaction between robots on the football pitch required and exhibited advanced perception, reasoning and movement capabilities that would see the development of a team of fully autonomous robots fit to down any world football championship team by 2050 (Blackwell, 2010).

These latest developments in robotic AI are rapidly approaching the long-imagined goal of a physiologically flawless blend of human and computer that would make differentiation between the two next to impossible. Aldebaran and its fellow AI pioneers would do well to consider the possible future ramifications of unrestrained continued development of this astounding technology.

In 50 years our world-class athletes may be out of a job. How long before other careers, and the value of humankind in general, become obsolete?

Reference List

Wiley Blackwell. (2010, September 13). How football playing robots have the future of artificial intelligence at their feet. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 4, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2010/09/100913080952.htm 

Week 8 Tutespark & Tutorial Task

In order to really immerse myself in the themes of cyberpunk, I set myself the task of watching (or re-watching) several influential cyberpunk films. This task in itself required some additional background research, as many unofficial websites, fansites and books I referred to disagreed as to what does or does not consitute a work true to the cyberbunk genre. The online database Cyberpunk Review lists several glossy hollywood blockbusters such as I, Robot (Proyas, 2004) that have been otherwise shunned by commentators who adopt a stricter definition for works of cyberpunk fiction and film. After cross-referencing the Cyberpunk Review database with other sources (Cyburbia Productions) I felt fairly confident that Blade Runner, Fifth Element and the Terminator films fit the cyberpunk genre, and set about watching them with a new perspective and a consciousness of the gritty, dark, dystopian aesthetics they share. I felt that these films are also connected via their exploration of the fusion of man and machine - one of several recurring themes in cyberpunk social and political theory. The following extract from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick (1968) will give you an idea of the complex moral dilemmas posed by cyberbunk literature crafted around this theme:

"This problem," Rick said, "stems entirely from your method of operation, Mr. Rosen. Nobody forced your organization to evolve the production of humanoid robots to a point where — "

"We produced what the colonists wanted," Eldon Rosen said. "We followed the time-honored [sic] principle underlying every commercial venture. If our firm hadn't made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have. We knew the risk we were taking when we developed the Nexus-6 brain unit. But your Voigt-Kampff test was a failure before we released that type of android. If you had failed to classify a Nexus-6 android as an android, if you had checked it out as human — but that's not what happened."

His voice had become hard and bitingly penetrating. "Your police department — others as well — may have retired, very probably have retired, authentic humans with underdeveloped empathic ability, such as my innocent niece here. Your position, Mr. Deckard, is extremely bad morally. Ours isn't."

By trawling through a range of science/technology-related online news providers (Sydney Morning Herald - Technology; Science Daily; CNET; et cetera), I located an article about a football-playing humanoid robot developed by French company Aldebaran Robotics. The article, 'How Football Playing Robots Have the Future of Artificial Intelligence at Their Feet' (Wiley Blackwell, 2010), is available on the Science Daily website. The following clip will give you an idea about the current status of this artificial intelligence project:

See my next post - a would-be expository persuasive piece that (hopefully) reworks the news story mentioned above, giving it a decidedly cataclysmic spin that prophecies the steady rise of the humanoid , the decline of the human-computer divide, and the inevitable transformation of the world as we know it into a ‘post-industrial dystopia’!

Reference List

Dick, P. (1968). Do androids dream of electric sheep? London: Doubleday Publishing.

Wiley Blackwell. (2010, September 13). How football playing robots have the future of artificial intelligence at their feet. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 4, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2010/09/100913080952.htm

Week 8 Lecture - Virtual Philosophy

This week we delve a little deeper into the contested philosophy that lies behind new communication technology, 'social media', the ‘Free Culture’ movement and cyberpunk literature. This topic has presented possibly the most challenging ideas of all the lectures in this course to date: once able to wrap my head around [some of] these ideas, I found that I did not necessarily subscribe to the overriding tenet of modern thought outlined below…

The Western school of philosophical thought, dominant until the early twentieth century and the communication technologies development explosion, was shaped by the ideas of Plato, Parmenides’ sole poetic work, the widely adopted Socratic Method… Undeniably, these works have had a significant impact on the progress and practice of scientific and general philosophical disciplines that firmly differentiate reality and representation. The increasing pervasiveness and convergence of communication technologies in our lives, however, brings us ever closer to a Virtual Reality (VR) indistinguishable from reality. The direction of this progress is towards a seamless human-computer interface capable of blurring the lines between virtual and actual worlds; of rejuvenating many industries, encompassing military applications, education and training, environmental simulation and town planning.  This once-dubious vision for the future was prophesied (albeit in dystopian fashion) in such cyberpunk works as Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984), The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) and The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999).

Today, the Oxford English Dictionary describes ‘virtual reality’ as “…not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so”. Andy and Lana Wachowski played with this definition with The Matrix, forcing us to question the place of hyper-realistic VR in our lives; to consider the possibility that circumstances such as those illustrated in The Matrix (humans blissfully ignorant of their domination by sentient machines) are transpiring now.

Images retrieved from krausology.blogspot.com

The dialogue of this lecture gave me the same unsettling feeling that I experienced as I watched Inception at the Yatala drive-in a few months ago. The key question asked by that film – how can we be sure that what we are experiencing is reality? – was oddly reminiscent of the voyeuristic themes explored in The Truman Show, and the way concepts of reality and virtuality were shaken up by The Matrix. Just as those protagonists and anti-heroes found doubt (or at least the ‘suggestion’ of an alternative) of the ‘realness’ of reality to be the ultimate predicament, I found myself entertaining vague doubts and philosophising about how we know the difference between dreams, virtual realities, and reality or actuality. The challenging ideas presented in Inception in particular led me to consider that for some people, defining realities isn’t important – it’s deciding which reality is preferable, and discovering how to live as completely as possible in that preferred reality, be it virtual, actual or otherwise.

Leonardo could have lived indefinitely with his wife in any of a number of dream worlds; Truman might have decided to continue living in the ‘bubble’; you or I (contemporary technology users) might, in the near future, opt to spend the majority of our time and energy interacting within virtual worlds and communities, rather than ‘actual’ ones: worlds that are just as ‘real’ – just as significant as reality. Edward Castronova (2007) predicts an exodus of hundreds of millions of people from the real world to the virtual over the next two generations, claiming that 20 to 30 million people worldwide currently immerse themselves regularly in “…worlds of perpetual fantasy” (p. xiv).

The prospect of further blurring of the lines between virtuality and truth as a consequence of changes to the global social climate I find both disconcerting and intriguing. Call me old-fashioned, but, like Socrates, I like to keep my actual and virtual worlds in two neat piles. While I can’t keep these two piles from getting mixed up from time to time, I like to think that I, at least, will not be one of the hundreds of millions of users who choose to throw everything into one pile and reside indefinitely in VR.

Reference List

Castronova, E. (2007). Exodus to the virtual world: How online fun is changing reality. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Oxford University Press. (2010). Oxford Dictionaries: virtual. Retrieved September 29, 2010, from
     http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0930170#m_en_gb0930170

Rorty, R. (2009). Philosophy and the mirror of nature [2^nd ed.]. New Jersey, USA; Oxfordshire, UK: Princeton University Press.

Week 7 TuteSpark - Open Source Week

I happen to own half a laptop... My sister and I share the hardware, so the following anecdote contains strictly privileged information!

A throwback from my days as a Graphic Designer, I tend to flit back and forth between my Windows-based laptop and my enormous eMac, depending on what kind of computing work I have scheduled. Other platform double-agents and moonlighters among you will be familiar with the annoying (if temporary) disorientation that comes with going to sleep with Apple Safari and waking up with Internet Explorer. Given my frustration with the Mac-Windows operating system dichotomy and the brand affiliations software developers tend to make with one of these giant corporations, I welcomed the opportunity to give a third party software source a spin: I chose to trial Mozilla Firefox as my first tentative (conscious) experience with open source software.

In brief, my verdict is in favour of Mozilla Firefox. Less briefly, the software itself was, in my opinion, more aesthetically pleasing than either Internet Explorer or Safari: the general layout is uncluttered, and the choice of customised 'skins' impressive. Secondly, I was pleased to find that I was not regularly pestered to change my default home page or search engine to one affiliated with Apple or Windows: I was given the option to set the default when I first opened the program and haven't had to protect that decision since. Thirdly, the program works. Not only does it work, Firefox does its job smoothly and with no need for troubleshooting... so far, at least.

I've most likely maxed out my family's monthly downloads completing this TuteSpark. Nonetheless, I feel that the cost of downloading this particular 'freeware' specimen has been well worth it, and certainly cheaper than purchasing 'kosher' copyright software via the legal channels. The most significant part of this learning curve has been simply trying open source software for the first time. In doing so, I feel I am far more likely to seek out and make a permanent transition to freeware. While 'traditional' software has always seemed to me to be the safe and legal choice, I have since learned Open Source software and Portable Apps can be just as professional; just as reliable; just as user-friendly as any Microsoft or Apple product... without the extravagant expense and the constant plague of pop-ups reminding me to update the software, check the internet for troubleshooting tips, send an error report to the manufacturer, or learn more about the fact the software is not genuine.

They say the proof is in the pudding: in this case the 'pudding' is my graduation from a freeware browser to an entire Portable Apps office suite which I am currently trialling using my USB as the portable drive to take my computing history and works from home to university and back again.

See 'Matrix Runs on Windows XP' by CollegeHumour on YouTube for an illustration of the kinds of glitches that characterise Windows and Apple Mac operating systems. The Matrix theme also links to next week's lecture response about Virtual Philosophy.

Week 7 Tutorial - Creative Commons

 Some Rights Reserved by TilarX, 2007

1. What is creative commons, and how could this licensing framework be relevant to your own experience at university?

Creative Commons (CC) is a not-for-profit organisation that offers authors of creative works a flexible, alternative and free approach to licensing. In response to the global Copyright/Public Domain dichotomy of licensing, the organisation provides authors with a range of flexible, mix-n-match licences that can be applied, free of charge, to any works they might create, including those made available to others via the web.

By selecting one or more of the following licences, authors have more freedom to display, disseminate and share their works with web users without relinquishing credit for the works or fundamental authorship. Visit the Creative Commons website for a full description and terms of each licence and licence combination.

Attribution | CC BY
 Share Alike | CC SA
Noncommercial | CC NC
No Derivative Works | CC ND

Creative Commons Australia is the affiliate of the CC organisation, being responsible for administering Australian CC licences.

As a university student, I could envisage these kinds of 'middle ground' licensing tools being adopted by undergraduate and postgraduate students to retain a sense of ownership over academic and creative works without prohibiting other students from accessing, using, sharing, or learning from them. The stop-motion short films we created in Week 2 of this course are just one example.

2. Examples of works that are licensed through Creative Commons.



 Thomas Bower, 2008

Photo sharing social media site Flickr encourages the use of the Creative Commons licensing framework. The example here is a peice of digital artwork that was created by Thomas Bower in 2008. The work uses approximately 4000 images from Flickr that are licenced under one or more types of Creative Commons licence.

The music band Radiohead is well known for its espousal of the Creative Commons, both ideologically and practically speaking. The music video included here - 'House of Cards' - was created using laser 3D Plotting technology, and is licenced under the Creative Commons framework.

3. An academic article that discusses creative commons.

As recently as January of this year, Laura Gordon-Murnane penned a succinct analysis of the 'Free Culture' movement entitled, Creative Commons: Copyright Tools for the 21st Century (2010). The article, which appeared in Online journal, describes three major events and a general ideological shift that fished the Creative Commons from the proverbial 'thinktank' and transplanted it into the twenty-first century and increasingly common usage.

The author cites two significant twentieth century revisions of United States copyright laws (the Copyright Act of 1976 and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1988), along with the advent of the internet and the beginnings of the movement away from a read-only, analog-format culture as the principle triggers for the Free Culture movement. The Creative Commons (CC) is described as a 'new category' of copyright protection that has developed in response to the peculiar nature of a burgeoning read/write culture spear-headed by Web 2.0.

Far from singing uncensored praises for the 'Some Rights Reserved' option, Gordon-Murnane outlines both the benefits and drawbacks associated with adopting the framework. Perhaps the most significant of the drawbacks mentioned is the 'irrevocable nature' of CC licences: essentially, content creators can opt to cease distributing work under a CC licence, however, those copies of the work already distributed cannot be withdrawn or retrieved (Gordon-Murnane, 2010). The ease of disseminating and copying digital content online, coupled with this provision of the CC framework mean that potential CC licensors should carefully consider how they want their works to be used by others, now and in the future.

Creative Commons vice president Mike Linksvayer makes the comment to the author that, where Noncommercial (CC NC) licences are concerned, licensors should expect some uses of their work that do not meet with conservative definitions of that CC licensing tool (Gordon-Murnane, 2010, p.21).

It is surprising that this course has provided me with my first contact with the Creative Commons, given that Creative Commons licensing tools (which have parallels with Richard Stallman's GNU General Public License model for software) were released publicly in January 2002... Even more interesting was the note that appears at the bottom of this article when printed from http://www.onlinemag.net/:

"Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission."

Clearly, despite widespread adoption of the framework by academic institutions, libraries, museums, and more recently, scientific communities, some reservations are still harbored by well-informed members of the creative community.

4. What is Portable Apps, and how is it useful?

Let's begin by considering what Portable Apps are and who uses them. Portable Apps - or portable application software - run from portable drive devices, such as CDs, iPods, USBs and external hard drives. Rather than storing files and settings on the host computer or operating system, all configuration files necessary to run the application are stored with the program files on the portable device.

At first I struggled to grasp the link between Portable Apps and the Creative Commons, however, I stumbled across PortableApps.com, which provides a directory of 'free open source software and freeware portable apps'. It seems that both Portable Apps and the Creative Commons subscribe to certain ideals associated with the 'Free Culture' movement. The suite of programs provided on PortableApps.com, for example, is free of charge; the suite is also free from spyware and advertising, doesn't require you to declare your personal details, and won't pester you to purchase or download further software. Essentially, there is no question of users choosing between privacy and accessibiliy, as is the case with many social networking websites and standard software applications. Like some Creative Commons-licenced works, Portable Apps are also free in terms of copying and sharing the software: this characteristic is in line with the tendency of 'social media' devices and applications to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge and culture freely amongst users worldwide.
Various other benefits are commonly associated with Portable Apps including the convenience of reliable transfer of your personal settings, bookmarks, email, et cetera to any Windows computing platform.

Mozilla Firefox (Portable Edition) is an example of a Portable Apps browser combatible with Windows and Wine (Linux/Unix) operating systems. Not only is the software free (excepting downloading 'costs'), but the application allows users to use a familiar and customised browser on any compatible PC without inadvertently installing program files and leaving personal data behind.
OpenOffic.org Portable is a complete office suite (word processor, spreadsheeting tool, and presentation, drawing and database utilities) with the same benefits.

Reference List

Bower, Thomas. (2008). 2500 Creative Commons Licences [Digital artwork]. Retrieved September 12, 2010, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/qthomasbower/3640362081/

Gordon-Murnane, L. (2010). Creative Commons: Copyright Tools for the 21st Century. Online, 34(1), pp 18-21.