I was on a panel about copyright at the media and democracy conference, with Tina Piper and Owen Chapman. Someone asked about Public Domain music, and I said, yes there is a site, but I can’t remember what. Well, via Geist, it appears the International Music Score Library Project, a volunteer, non-profit public domain music [...]
Michael Geist on HMV’s decision to drop the price on back-catalog CDs: This week, HMV announced that it was reducing the price on hundreds of back-catalog CDs generating a surprising amount of news coverage (Post, CBC). The move is good for everyone – the recording industry gets an important retail outlet to reduce prices on [...]
I did a quick text interview with Jon Udell about public data, over at datalibre.ca.
Says da boing: The New York Public Library has just installed an Espresso book-on-demand machine and they’ll print any of over 200,000 public domain titles from the Open Content Alliance free of charge for any patron. [more...]
from montreal pals evan and niko, comes vinismo.com: Vinismo is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable guide of all wines in the world. It uses the Wiki technology that lets people like you freely create and modify its pages. Two comments: -this is graphically the best looking wiki i’ve ever seen [...]
From the Globe (registration/fees required) comes an article by Elizabeth Church about the price of academic journals, and the emerging movement towards open access academic journals: This year, the University of Toronto’s library system will spend $20-million on acquisitions. But less than one-third of that money will go to books. The majority will pay for [...]
Evan writes an excellent piece on why you shouldn’t pay wiki contributors (hint, it has nothing to do with keeping all the millions for yourself). He’s got seven points and a main conclusion: If you think you need to pay people to work on your wiki, then you’re doing something wrong. Instead of trying to [...]
[ramble] This is probably old hat for many, but it occurs to me that what LibriVox and many of the other successful web aps and projects out there are about is helping people do things, rather than helping people get things. The best web providers (say google, flickr, wikipedia) these days all help you do [...]
Austin, a founder of the top-secret start-up Akoha.org, has a post about gift economies, which I commented on. He got me thinking and, I left a long rambly comment, which I’d like to expand on… soon ;-) … anyway, here is my comment: one crucial point about online gift economies (and perhaps other gift economies [...]
You should go check out a group project I am involved in, datalibre.ca (so it’s a group blog, currently consisting of a group of two, one of them not me). Tons of neat stuff going on in this space internationally, and in Canada. In particular, I just posted about the Istanbul Declaration from the OECD, [...]