rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

Photo by Rebecca McKinnon

Its hard to follow-up when others have done it much better than I could

Reports are pouring in from ACIA: the International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age, held on January 19-20 in Taipei, Taiwan. The resounding conclusion: it was a phenomenal success!

The workshop, organized by CC Taiwan and hosted at Academica Sinica, focused on bringing together members of the “Asia Commons” to meet and discuss regional strategies and initiatives. The program opened with a keynote by Terry Fischer on “Solutions to the copyright crisis,” in which he sought to combine legal reforms and business models with digital technologies that compensate creators while enabling cultural and economic benefits. Both Ts’ui-jung Liu, VP of Academia Sinica, and Der Tsai Lee, director of the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, were at the opening ceremonies and delivered greetings to the workshop participants.

CC Vice President Mike Linksvayer chaired a session featuring plans for “The Making a Totally Open Phone”, Sony’s integration of CC licensing for their eyeVio video sharing service, techniques in musical collaboration with “Jamming with Machines”, and “Making Creative Commons Common in Asia” by CC’s Jon Phillips (slides).

Later in the day, CC Australia Project Manager Jessica Coates presented open licensing compatibility in “Playing Well With Others” at a panel with Chunyan Wang from CC China Mainland and Alina Ng from CC Malaysia. The CC Team from Australia and the Creative Commons Clinic also announced the release of the Asia and the Commons case studies booklet, a fantastic collection of reports on individuals and organizations engaged in the commons in the Asia-Pacific region.

Their work was followed by Lawrence Liang and his debate about concepts, “How Does An Asian Commons Mean.” The ACIA workshop drew to an close with Chu-Cheng Huang’s final remarks on the changing phases of property in “From res nullius to res communis,” a session chaired by the event’s organizer, Tyng-Ruey Chuang from CC Taiwan.

The social program picked up as the sun set with the CC Asia Mega Mix Concert featuring acts by Monbaza; Pig Head Skin; MoShang (video), Kuo Chou Ching, Chang Jui-chuan, and André van Rensburg, Bust This, Sudev Bangah, and Lisa Diy.

There are plenty of pictures here and here. Formal proceedings from ACIA are available for download, and of course the case studies and discussion summary are well worth a read.

Asia and the Commons Case Studies 2008, presented at the ACIA workshop. The project, initiated by CCau and the Creative Commons Clinic, represents an effort to uncover exemplary individuals and organizations engaged in the commons in the Asia-Pacific region.

Photo by Rebecca McKinnon

And, Rebecca McKinnon posted some great insights into Asia and Isaac Mao’s concept of “Sharism” and the place of CC in Asia:

Many people attending the meeting in Taipei wondered whether Creative Commons in Asia is likely to be more successful as a social movement than as a set of copyright licenses (as Peter Yu has pointed out in the past). There was also a feeling that in order to be truly relevant to the globe, the CC movement’s central message needs to undergo a shift that would incorporate more non-Western approaches to the idea of “commons,” content creation, and sharing.

And, then she offered through Isaac Mao’s concept, a conceptual framework for moving this forward:

During Sunday’s discussion, Isaac Mao raised his idea of "sharism" as a framework for promoting the goals of Creative Commons that is more likely to gain widespread acceptance in Asia, in contrast to Lessig-esque terrms like "free culture." The problem, as Liang pointed out, is that the words "free" and "freedom" have been irreparably polluted by American geopolitics and tainted by perceived agendas of regime change, making anything labeled with those words a hard sell in the developing world. Riffing off the expression "free as in beer," he remarked: "free as in America is unhelpful." There was a widespread sense among people in the room that an emphasis on "public good" and "sharing" will enable the movement to have a much deeper impact, ultimately.

Hopefully by having myself in Guangzhou, China over the next 6 months and Catharina Maracke (CCi Director) in Tokyo more regularly over the next 6 months to a year will hopefully place some emphasis on asia beyond the already super-active CC affiliates in the region.

Here is a script I made ages ago to enable at startup my thinkpad’s rubber nipple (thinkpoint):

#!/sbin/runscript
#
# This starts the thinkpad thinkpoint so you can select, etc.
#

checkconfig() {
        if [ ! -e /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/press_to_select ] ; then
                eerror "You cannot set the thinkpoint select. Check settings."
                return 1
        fi
}

start()
{
        checkconfig || return 1

        ebegin "Starting Thinkpoint Select"
        echo -n 1 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/press_to_select
}

stop()
{
        checkconfig || return 1

        ebegin "Stopping Thinkpoint Select"
        echo -n 0 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/press_to_select
}

I put this script here on gentoo:

/etc/init.d/thinkpoint_select

And, do this to set it to run at startup:

rc-update add thinkpoint_select default

I realease this all under GPL. Hats off to anyone who creates and ebuild for this and posts it into gentoo portage.

I’m presenting about Overlap.org, Fabricatorz.com and the soon to be updated Scalejournal.org under the umbrella, “Models of Collaborative Art Production, or Dispelling the Myths of Sole Authorship”.

Tomorrow I’m presenting about, Making Creative Commons Common in Asia: Effectively scaling Creative Commons community and business development strategies internationally in 2008 at ACIA: Asia and Commons in the Information Age at Academia Sinica in Taipei. Come on out if you are in the area! The entire conference will be brilliant. Tyng-Ruey never dissappoints.

Lu posted on here blog here about Taipei Tomorrow! 台北，明天出发！:

We are heading to Taipei tomorrow. In this five days trip, we will attend ACIA (Internationl Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age) 資訊時代之亞洲與公眾創用國際研討會. On Friday night January 18, Jon Phillips, Christopher Adams, Wang Chunyan and I will be hosting Media Exchange 2 at VT Art Salon. Media Exchange 1 took place last winter, with a big group of artists and students lead by our artist friend Huang Xiaopeng in the new mega university town of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts campus. The initiative of the event was to present and discuss projects. Now it’s already one year! So to me it will be an “annual report” on my work.

Here is more information on Media Exchange 2. Sorry it’s a last minute call. But if you are in Taipei. Show up with your friends or your work!

Media Exchange 2: Open Call

Location: VT Art Salon
Address: Yitong St., #47, B1
Map: googlemaps , vtartsalon
Time: January 18, 2007 Friday 9:00 - 11:00 PM
Contact: christopher.lee.adams@gmail.com
Tel: 09-53-036-630

Open Call to Exchange Media: come and present your project this Friday at VT Art Salon in Taipei. Media Exchange 2 is a night of presentations about art projects, models of art practice and art communities. The set presenters of the night are Christopher Adams, writer and critic based in Taipei; Jon Phillips (www.rejon.org), Open Source Developer and artist from San Francisco; Deer Fang (www.deerfang.org), media and video artist from Guangzhou and San Francisco; and, Wang Chunyan, project Lead for Creative Commons China, and a Professor at Renmin University of China Law School.

If not presenting, come to have a drink and discuss the topics throughout the night. And, if you want to present, contact us as soon as possible. Otherwise, show-up the night of and we’ll have a projector and sound system to plug you in. （Email: christopher.lee.adams@gmail.com, Tel: 09-53-036-630)

Christopher Adams - CRUFT: The generative and procedural artwork of Robert Spahr (digital images)
Jon Phillips - Collaborative art models with Overlap.org and Fabricatorz
Deer Fang - Straight Outta HK and Panda Express. (video screenings)
Wang Chunyan - CC Photo Contest in China

媒體互換 2：公開召集

地點：非常廊
地址：伊通街47號B1
地圖： googlemaps , vtartsalon
時間： 2007.1.18 星期五 晚上九時到十一時
联系：christopher.lee.adams@gmail.com
电话： 09-53-036-630

“媒體互換 2”公開召集：我們邀請您這個星期五來 “非常廊” 展示您的作品和項目。“媒體互換 2” 是一次展示藝術作品，藝術工作和藝術團體模式的活動。預定展示者包括Christopher Adams， 駐台北的作家和評論家；方力中Jon Phillips (www.rejon.org)， 來自舊金山的開放源發展者和藝術工作者；方鹿 (www.deerfang.org)， 廣州和舊金山的媒體和影像藝術工作者；和王春燕，中國人民大學法學院教授和創意共同體中國大陸項目主任。

如果您不打算展示作品，請來一起參加我們的討論。如果您希望參加展示，請盡快和我們聯繫。（christopher.lee.adams@gmail.com， 09-53-036-630）

Christopher Adams － CRUFT: Robert Spahr 的生成和程序式的藝術作品(數碼圖片）
方力中－ 合作性藝術模式（Overlap.org和Fabricatorz)
方鹿－ “直出香港”和”熊貓快遞” (錄像播映）
王春燕 － 中國CC攝影比賽

Asheesh blogged about the super-cool liblicense 0.5: first stable version of C library supporting CC metadata - Creative Commons. The thing I would add for all you out there in licensing land is that this generalized to support all free and open content licensing as long as it uses the great RDF developed by CC to express a license:

With the help of Hubert Figuiere, Nathan Yergler, Peter Miller, Scott Shawcroft, and Jason Kivlighn, I’m happy to finally announce a new version of liblicense. Summary: Now this is really worth using.

For those just joining us now, liblicense is a library to make it easy to add CC metadata support to desktop and server side software you write. The biggest reason to choose liblicense rather than handling CC metadata yourself is that we (huge thanks to Jason and Hubert) have written handlers for many file formats. We use Hubert’s Exempi library that is derived from Adobe’s Free/Open Source XMP library.

The two major driving factors on this release were making it crash less and providing a stable interface (API and ABI) for others to build upon. Earlier versions of liblicense would crash on invalid files. Also, crucially, this release has metadata inside the library, called “shared object versioning,” indicating what features the library supports.

As always, you can reuse this under the terms of the GNU LGPL. It’s interoperable with our metadata panel for Adobe applications, supports embedding into files ranging from JPEG to MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, and is available from SourceForge.net. It is written in C and comes with bindings for Python and Ruby. Finally, thanks to Venkatesh Srinivas for his tireless help.

I haven’t had as much time to blog about this project. I’m super proud of the work done by Scott, Jason, Asheesh, Nathan Y., Hubert, Peter Miller and many others! Thanks guys.

Now, onto the big business! Let’s get this library added to KDE 4.1, the Gnome desktop, and some other example apps like Eye of Gnome (EOG), Rhythmbox, Inkscape, etc. Is anyone interested in this? We need to get it plugged-in. Currently, KDE folks are planning on including in KDE 4.1, so I’d like to talk more with other about getting it into Gnome apps, and more specific apps to drive usage and development of this app. Also, we want to get liblicense integrated into OpenMoko, as liblicense creation happened in order to enable content license read/write on al our devices…ebooks, mp3s, etc, that have their licenses inside.

BTW, liblicense comes with an awesome command-line program called license. All it does is allow for getting and setting of license information on files on your desktop!!! It handles content right now, but there is no reason it can’t handle other things…like source code, etc…just need developers!!!