Open Library
Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the world’s books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We’re building that library.
Posted by Giles, Monday, July 16, 2007, at 10:00 PM.
Posted to Computers | Freedoms and rights | Libraries | Public domain | Technology
Three of Potential Interest
Checking my email online tonight, to discover more than thirty open tabs in the browser; stuff to read later, stuff to blog on, stuff to deal with, etc. Here are three:
— Sports Artist Sued for Mix of Crimson and Tide:
In the solemn cathedral of college football devotion and instruction that is the Paul W. Bryant Museum here, a large painting dominates the main chamber. It is called “The Sack,” and it shows an encounter between a Notre Dame quarterback and a human locomotive in crimson and white.
“I’ve never been hit like that before,” the quarterback, Steve Beuerlein, said after his near-lethal sack by Cornelius Bennett in 1986, in the University of Alabama’s first victory ever over his team.
Daniel A. Moore, who painted “The Sack” and scores of other renditions of signal moments in Alabama football history, said he felt something similar last year, when his fax machine began to spit out a lawsuit from the university.
Downward spiral. Here’s a wish for recovery before impact.
— Droolworthy, and, uh, funny as hell:
MacRumors Apple ad contest winner. See more.
— I’d noticed the font used in the Sony Alpha ads recently, and wondered about it. Lo and behold, in my (astonishingly large stack of) email was an ad for it:
Vista Sans, from Emigre. (Natch. Love their stuff.) Read some of the designer’s notes on Vista and others at FontShop.
More ASAP.
Posted by Giles, Tuesday, November 14, 2006, at 12:00 AM.
Posted to Advertising | Computers | Design | Ethics | Freedoms and rights | Personal | Public domain | Publishing | Technology | Type and typography | Whatever
Polling Place Photo Project
From the AIGA (!):
The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action. By documenting their local voting experience on November 7, voters can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.
Did I mention it’s being spearheaded by the AIGA? Wow. And some friends:
The Polling Place Photo Project is part of Design for Democracy, an initiative of AIGA, the professional association for design. William Drenttel of Design Observer initiated the project, working in collaboration with Jay Rosen, founder of NewAssignment.Net (a project of New York University’s Department of Journalism).
Good for all of them — applause from here. I’ll be doing my part (after I check the rules for photography hereabouts). Please do the same!
Posted by Giles, Friday, November 3, 2006, at 1:55 PM.
Posted to Design | Ethics | Freedoms and rights | Personal | Photography | Public domain
British Library on Copyrights
From yesterday’s Ars news:
The British Library has the Magna Carta, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, but it’s still not happy. Why not? Because it has the intellectual property blues.
The Library issued a manifesto today on intellectual property law in the UK and offered six suggestions for cleaning up the current mess, all of which attempt to strike a proper balance between the rights of creators and consumers of content. […]
Overall, the proposals are well-balanced, though parties on both sides of the debate will find bits to dislike. Copyright holders will dislike the restrictions on contracts and DRM, while those in favor of “open access” may be disappointed that the British Library advocates a “life + 70 years” copyright term. Still, it’s good to see an institution with the stature of the Library arguing for such a balanced set of proposals, and we hold out hope that the Library of Congress will one day advocate for many of the same proposals on this side of the pond.
Hear, hear.
Posted by Giles, Tuesday, September 26, 2006, at 9:15 PM.
Posted to Books | Ethics | Freedoms and rights | Libraries | Public domain | Writing
Google Book Search Allowing Downloads of Some Books
From Ars:
When Google Print was first unveiled, it was clear that the site would become an amazing resource. It provided full access to books that were already out of copyright, but only if you viewed them online, one page at a time. What people most wanted, though, was the ability to download full PDF versions of the books, which they could read or print at their leisure and on their own machines. Oh, and they wanted Google to provide this free of charge.
Google went ahead and did it. Books no longer in copyright are now available for download from the Google Book Search site.
Wow. Google strikes again, in a big way.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, joining Apple’s board is an interesting thing, too. They certainly have become the company to watch.…
Posted by Giles, Friday, September 1, 2006, at 12:36 AM.
Posted to Book sellers | Books | Computers | Freedoms and rights | Libraries | Public domain | Publishing | Technology | Writing
Independence Day, Part One
Heard how easy it is to steal an election?
On this Independence Day in America, please think about what made our nation great and one way we can working on making it great again — by supporting the Steal This Election project.
The suggested outcome? A how-to book, which as someone suggested in the comments, should be called Stealing Elections For Fun And Profit: A Practical Guide To Making Modern Democracy Work For You.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
This post is ospreydesign.com’s 2000th in the Movable Type system — not as prolific as some (or even what was originally planned here), but still, not bad for three years and change. Most of ’em are even about book design, too…;)
Posted by Giles, Tuesday, July 4, 2006, at 1:53 PM.
Posted to Ethics | Freedoms and rights | Personal | Public domain | Publishing
Big Brother Assisted by Georgians -- Yuk
Gregory Abowd, an associate professor leading the project, says the new camera-neutralizing technology shows commercial promise in two principal fields - protecting limited areas against clandestine photography or stopping video copying in larger areas such as theaters. “We’re at a point right now where the prototype we have developed could lead to products for markets that have a small, critical area to protect,” Abowd said. “Then we’re also looking to do additional research that could increase the protected area for one of our more interesting [sic] clients, the motion picture industry.”
Abowd said the small-area product could prevent espionage photography in government buildings, industrial settings or trade shows. It could also be used in business settings - for instance, to stop amateur photography where shopping-mall-Santa pictures are being taken.
You know this won’t stop there — this is the beginnings of yet another battle for control. More details — love the trumpeting (not) — here. (At least it doesn’t work with SLRs!)
Dr. Gregory Abowd of Georgia Tech, get stuffed.
Posted by Giles, Wednesday, June 21, 2006, at 5:27 PM.
Posted to Business | Ethics | Freedoms and rights | Photography | Public domain
Preserved for Posterity
Found myself downright barking at a professional photographer tonight who had argued that restricting access to her work online was better than dealing with a few people out to cause trouble. I felt kinda bad afterwards; I was perhaps a little harsh. (Who? Me?)
I’m not a professional photographer, in the sense that I earn a living exclusively selling photographs, but I do sell photos, deal with photographers’ rights, and sell a creative, copyrighted or work-for-hire product/service that, while not as easily “stolen for use elsewhere,” is subject to a good deal of competition. Above-board, honest people and grab-your-ideas-and-undersell-you-later types alike.
Pushing your work farther and farther out into the world instead of walling it off clearly works. Foreword is my evidence.
Click through to Flickr and look at all the little notes by moving your mouse over the boxes on the photo. They’ll run you through all the stuff in the picture, including the icons, menu items, etc. (Warning: geek alert…;)
Sure, there are hassles. (Looking at new web servers [hosts] this week, for instance, so we can rebuild pages in the middle of the day without timeouts. You wondered why so few mid-day posts…?) It’s definitely a challenge to post regularly with the quality we’d all like to see — and that keeps traffic growing. Oh, and have I mentioned there’s still the rest of the web site to finish?
But it’s so worth it. Glad we can be here together, learning about book design. Whether it’s your first visit or your thousandth, thanks for coming by.
Posted by Giles, Monday, April 10, 2006, at 5:51 AM.
Posted to Book and design blogs | Book cover photography | Book design | Books, design, art | Business | Computers | Design | Ethics | Flickr | Freedoms and rights | Jobs | Love | Personal | Photography | Public domain | Publishing | Site news | Technology | Type and typography | Whatever | Writing
The Search's Copyright: A Good Discussion
Tom Evslin, author of hackoff.com, mentioned not too long ago, has a good conversation with John Battelle, author of The Search — which is about Google et al — regarding the copyright warning in his book:
This warning seems directly aimed at Google Book Search, a project which intends to scan the collections of some of the world’s great libraries and make them searchable online. Now you can find similar language on the copyright page of lots of books but John Battelle is a known strong supporter of the value of having almost everything searchable as anyone who reads either his book or his blog knows.
So I emailed John and asked him about the apparent contradiction. He said the decision was the publisher’s (Penguin) decision to make but “I totally disagree with it.” Of course, at the time he signed his contract with Penguin, no one knew that this issue would exist. He readily agreed to talk to me it.
Tom also notes that hackoff.com has been selected for the short-list of titles being considered in the fiction category for the Lulu Blooker Prize. Congrats.
Posted by Giles, Thursday, March 9, 2006, at 1:18 PM.
Posted to Book and design blogs | Book people | Book prizes | Books | Business | Computers | Ethics | Freedoms and rights | Libraries | Public domain | Publishing | Technology
Happy 22nd Birthday
…to the Macintosh.
The Mac was the brainchild of Jef Raskin, who originally wanted to bring computing to the masses at under $1000. That proved unworkable, Raskin left the project, and the price ballooned to $1499. John Sculley stepped in as Apple CEO. He felt the Mac needed a serious media push and, in an effort to pay for it, pushed the price to $2495.
Read more at Apple Matters.
Meanwhile, Disney is buying Pixar, giving Apple extraordinary influence, and my iMac’s screen continues to give me trouble. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess…;)
Posted by Giles, Tuesday, January 24, 2006, at 2:41 PM.
Posted to Advertising | Business | Computers | Personal | Public domain | Technology
Typography I Like Tonight
From the always-interesting Dave Gorman:
It only took three trips over two nights to get a complete alphabet of these. They’re by a graffiti artist called Eine apparently.
Hats off to Dave, the commenters who helped him score the whole set, and especially Eine. Nicely done.
Posted by Giles, Wednesday, January 11, 2006, at 9:14 PM.
Posted to Art | Ethics | Flickr | Freedoms and rights | Photography | Public domain | Type and typography | Whatever
Emergency Copyright Help Needed
It looks as if Arthur Rackham’s illustrations from the early 1900s are in the public domain. Does anyone have any further information?
Any help is appreciated.
Posted by , Tuesday, September 7, 2004, at 6:48 AM.
Posted to Public domain
But is it Art?
Our government is really good for some things: Public domain photographs and illustrations from the CDC. The image above is a photomicrograph of a Echinococcus vogeli protoscolex taken from a cyst within a gorilla. You can search for images here.
Posted by , Friday, July 23, 2004, at 9:13 PM.
Posted to Public domain
A Better Looking Project Gutenberg
via Jason Kottke
Posted by , Friday, May 7, 2004, at 8:31 PM.
Posted to Public domain
This just in
Duke University, of Durham, North Carolina, purchased the entirety of the public domain late last evening for a fee of 2.2 trillion dollars. Sources familiar with the negotiation report that Duke’s reclamation of the public domain is unprecedented. As a result of the purchase, Duke University is the sole rights-holder to a huge collection of materials, including the Bible, the works of Shakespeare and Dante, and Francis Scott Key’s The Star Spangled Banner.
and
Professor Lawrence Lessig, a tireless advocate of the public domain and founder of the Creative Commons, announced early this morning that “from this moment on, the Creative Commons will be known as the Creative Copyright Foundation.” The Creative Copyright Foundation, Lessig stated, “exists to ensure that rights holders are benefited in a most creative fashion. Let’s say that you create a play about a fictional automobile race through the desert, and this play becomes successful and profit-making. Wouldn’t you rather be compensated in a creative way, such as a all-expenses paid automobile ride through the desert? This is the expressed goal of the Creative Copyright Foundation.” Lessig went on to provide a number of other “creative” examples, each one increasingly more odd than the last.
More shocking developements here.
Posted by , Thursday, April 1, 2004, at 8:16 AM.
Posted to Public domain
Free Culture
Larry Lessig’s new book, Free Culture, has been made available online using a Creative Commons license!! Larry credits Cory Doctorow with proving — thanks to his doing the same thing (see BoingBoing) — that books available for download can sell well, too. Good move, Penguin.
Some detail:
A landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind.
Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America’s most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they’re inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation.
All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What did he know that we’ve forgotten?
Posted by Giles, Thursday, March 25, 2004, at 10:04 AM.
Posted to Books, design, art | Freedoms and rights | Public domain
No Photoshop needed
These Polaroid pics are pretty interesting. Here’s more info on the instant pic manipulation method.
Have any Foreword readers tried this?
Posted by , Tuesday, October 14, 2003, at 7:59 PM.
Posted to Public domain
Open CourseWare
“Every lecture, every handout, every quiz. All online. For free. Meet the global geeks getting an MIT education, open source-style,” says Wired in the intro to this piece on MIT and their decision to offer course materials to a wider audience.
While all courses won’t be available on their website until 2007, the 500 or so that will be available starting next month aren’t just the entry-level stuff — from philosophy to nuclear physics, there are options aplenty.
Talk about benefitting a larger community!
Posted by Giles, Tuesday, August 26, 2003, at 1:23 PM.
Posted to Public domain
Project Gramophone
Steven Cohen links to a story and Project Gramophone’s site which is beginning to promote and pass along music and recordings that have passed into the public domaina sort of Project Gutenberg for music!
Posted by , Wednesday, August 13, 2003, at 8:16 PM.
Posted to Public domain