Learning with the Fang

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The act of publishing this work made me feel really nervous and almost caused me to give up.  I chose to press on because that would be self-censorship and would set a bad example for my kids who will need to work hard to keep their creativity and enthusiasm for innovation alive.

Let me try to explain.

Is my work really Machinima?

Having recorded some screen shots, video and audio of the concert in Second Life, I was keen to share my stuff as requested by the organisers.  So I uploaded some of the smaller files to my .mac account and headed off to the Creative Commons wiki to share my work.  Then I had to decide where to put the links to my work.  I decided the ‘Machinima’ section looked best.  As I pressed enter on the wiki edit screen I asked myself - is my work really Machinima??

Is my work a Derivative?

The second question, that I want to get some answers from the community on, is - at what point do my recordings, edits, copy/pastes, mashups become a derivative??

Why ‘No Derivatives’?

The Concert in Second Life was licensed Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial, No Derivatives.  At first this seemed reasonable but now Im not so sure.  Exactly what was the intent of the organisers / artists in placing this restriction on future work.  My gut tells me that the intent is to share various experiences of the event as widely as possible. 

Is it all too hard?

I am beginning to come around to the Stephen Downes point of view that in order for digital work to get re-mixed, creators need to renounce all rights on future use.  Perhaps even the whole idea of ‘Some Rights Reserved’ is too restrictive.  A few weeks back Stephen called for mashups / remixes of a piece of propaganda about campusdownloaders - I made a ripper but am afraid to publish it in case I get sued - what is with that crap??

Maybe we need society to evolve around a cutlure of responsibility (of consumers) rather than rights (of creators).  For now, I am changing all my Creative Commons licenses to ‘Attribution’ - the least restrictive option.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:remix, mashup