I’ve been talking to a lot of teachers lately about copyright, Creative Commons and how we might deal with the issues that arise when we want to use other peoples’ images and media and remix them into something new and creative. The restrictive thinking of traditional copyright has become an anachronism in the digital age. It just doesn’t serve us well any more.

The example I’ve been citing is the one I heard Larry Lessig mention, and that’s the story of how when land owners were once given title to their land, the title of ownership used to be phrased in language that essentially said they owned not only the parcel of land, but all the ground below it to the center of the earth and all the sky above it to the heavens. It was a nice romantic concept, this idea that you owned not just the surface of the land but the infinite column of space that extended above it.

Well, it was a nice romantic concept until the airplane was invented, that is. As more aircraft started to appear in our skies a number of greedy land owners started to make demands for payment to allow these aircraft to pass through “their” space, which they technically owned. The point is that the original land titles which gave them ownership of this space above their land were drafted in a time when the idea of travelling through the space was unimaginable. It was simply not a problem that anybody envisioned and so the laws were written in a way that did not take account of the possibility. As aircraft took to the skies, the laws had to be changed to allow for it… for to not adapt the old, outdated laws would have completely stifled the development of flight. Put simply, the old laws no longer made sense - the airplane caused a complete rethink of how these laws should work.

It easy to see the parallels with copyright law in the digital age. Many of our copyright laws were written in a time when the implications of the digital age were equally unimaginable. Copyright law is not written with the notion that creative works could be infinitely reproducible and easily mashed together to form new creative works, and that digital convergence allows all media types to be easily brought together and combined, edited and remixed in new ways. Copyright law was written in a time that never imagined that the price and power of computing devices would drop to the point that they could be used to make artwork, create music, edit movies and build media that would have required highly specialised equipment and thousands of dollars only a few short years ago, so that the barrier to entry is such that anyone who wants to create can produce professional looking work with limited resources. Finally, consider that not only has the cost of making media dropped to virtually nothing, but the cost of distribution of that media has also dropped to almost nothing… consider that a creative kid sitting in their bedroom can now use a computer and their own creativity to make a video and distribute it to a global audience of millions at essentially no cost. This is not the world that copyright was written for.

Creativity has always been built on the work of others. Our great artists, musicians and film makers have always stood on the shoulders of the giants that came before them, building on their ideas and extending them into new areas. Very little creative work comes from a foundation of nothing… it nearly always uses, references or extends upon the work of others. Manet influenced Monet, who influenced Renoir, who influenced Gauguin, who influenced Picasso, who influenced Duchamp, and so on. Some of the greatest creative minds in history were great because they built on the ideas of those who came before them, adding to them and creating yet more new ideas because of it.  We have always been a remix society.

I have no idea what the long term answer is to all this but I do know that we need to find one. Creative Commons goes some way towards providing a balance between protecting the intellectual property rights of the creator and allowing some reasonable use of their work for remixing and recreating. It provides some common sense to an area where it often seems to be lacking.

This video is a great example of what can be done when someone wants to be creative with the work of someone else… the song, Again and Again by The Bird and The Bee, is borrowed to provide a soundtrack for an amazing piece of visual work that is creative in it’s own right.  Created with nothing more than a Macintosh computer and an amazing degree of creativity, the video has been viewed nearly a million times on YouTube.

We may be just a couple of NYFBs, but I had the pleasure yesterday of catching up with Jenny Luca from Melbourne, author of the Lucacept blog. Jenny was in town with her friend Helen to attend a presentation by Garr Reynolds on how to do better presentations. We made tentative plans to catch up and fortunately things fell into place and we were able to actually meet up.

After the ridiculously difficult task of finding a parking spot, made all the more difficult by the fact that I left my wallet at home and so had no money to pay for even meter parking, I eventually found a legal parking spot only a short walk from where we could meet. Thank you universe.

Jenny is one of the refreshing voices in the Aussie blogosphere, with so much passion and enthusiasm for education and how technology can make it better. I was very keen to meet up and have a chat. After finally meeting on the corner of Grosvenor and George streets, I suggested we go take a look at the new Sydney Apple Store at King and George, just a few blocks away. We talked all the way up the street, into the Apple Store, up the stairs, and I think we talked the entire time we were there. Helen got into the shopping spirit and picked up a nice set of Bose speakers for her son’s Mac, but I think Jenny and I just talked the whole time.

Eventually we went over the road, found a little coffee shop in the Strand Arcade, and sat and talked some more. As Jenny and I observed numerous times, it really IS all about the conversations and although I love the intellectual to-and-fro of the blogosphere, there is something very nice about having a face to face conversation. Jenny has a lot of great insights and ideas, (despite her insistence at being a mere noob, her Clustrmap gives a different picture!) and I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to catch up with her in person.

Heck, it’s even made me an even more LR.

I love this photo…

Unless you’ve been walking around with your fingers in your ears and loudly singing “lalalala!” it’s been hard to avoid noticing Apple’s amazing renaissance. Not so many years ago it was hard to imagine that Apple had any real long term future at all, but things have certainly turned around since Steve came back. Apple’s growth is quite phenomenal at the moment. It’s hard to know exactly why this is happening, but it undeniably is.

Whether you attribute it to the iPod’s viral “halo effect“, the effective and very funny “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” advertisements, the sheer style and beauty of the new Macs, the frenzy that was whipped up by the release of the iPhone, the drawcard success of Leopard, or just the exodus away from Windows following the disaster of Vista, there is no denying that the Mac platform is enjoying enormous growth at the moment. Recent statistics claim that Mac sales are growing at four times the computer industry average. (Dell is the market leader, but currently has a negative growth rate…)

And the place where Apple seems be gaining the most traction is in education. With such a strong focus of the use of digital media like video, audio, graphics and podcasting, many schools are seeing that the Mac makes a lot of sense. Add the fact that viruses, malware and other nasties are virtually non-existent for Mac users, it’s built on an industrial strength operating system is stable, fast and easy to use and intuitive, and there are some pretty compelling arguments to switch over from the dark side of Windows.

As an existing customer of 3, Australia’s first 3G mobile phone network, and an avid user of Skype, I was interested to see this new product just about to be released here in Australia. It’s a 3G/Wifi enabled phone that lets you make free Skype-to-Skype calls over wireless LANs. Given that I spend all day at work, and all my time at home bathed in the radiant glow of wifi, the ability to make free calls is pretty attractive. I’m assuming that it reverts back to a standard GSM phone when you wander off the grid, and switches back to wifi when you get back into a wifi zone. I need to read the fine print of course, but it’s an intriguing idea.

While it’s not exactly an iPhone (far from it) it certainly looks interesting and suggests that the already competitive mobile phone business is about to get a whole lot more heated in the next 12 months. There’s been no word from Apple as to when the iPhone might land in Australia, so this push by Skype and 3 might be a positioning strategy to establish themselves as players in the developing VOIP mobile scene before Apple gets a chance to dominate it completely.

Either way, we live in interesting times!

Tags: skype, 3mobile, iphone

I really like iTunes. It’s a wonderful piece of software that just works as expected and does it’s job really well.

I’ve been asked to talk at the PowerUp conference on the Gold Coast this weekend and was given an open opportunity to talk about whatever I wanted. Although I think the Web 2.0 story is the one most people still need to hear, the general feeling was that there were already plenty of people talking about web 2.0 stuff, so something a bit different would be good. (Besides, my other session will be about web 2.0 stuff anyway, looking at tools for collaboration)

I’m a bit wary of being caught out without Internet access when I present… I’ve been in situations before where I was told there would be access, where there was access, where I should have been able to get access, but for whatever reason the firewall gods were not smiling upon me and I had none. I don’t expect that to be the case this weekend, and of course I plan to present it live… but I’m starting to learn to cover my bases and to that end I’ve been making a few screencasts using iShowU, capturing those portions of my presentations that require access to the cloud. Just in case.

So if you’re interested, here is part of my presentation about iTunes. I thought this stuff was kind of obvious but I’ve spoken to many people lately who still haven’t got their head around this stuff.

This is so cool…

Found this image on Flickr via Digg of a guy who accidentally did a cmd+A in his Applications folder on his MacBook Pro, and then pressed Enter. In case that doesn’t mean much to you, it basically opened every application on his computer at the same time! If you take a look at his Dock, that’s a lot of applications!

The amazing thing is that the machine didn’t crash, which is an amazing testament to the power of OSX. I don’t think I’d even consider trying that on a Windows machine…

Tags: mac, apple, macbookpro

I’ve been having a bit of a play with YouTube lately… not just as a consumer of content, but in true spirit of Web 2.0, as a contributor of content. It’s a pretty cool site and it’s easy to while away the minutes, er, hours, browsing through their stuff.

I was really interested to find that Apple’s totally rewritten new version of iMovie has built in support for adding videos to YouTube. It is nicely integrated too… as you finish working on your movie (using the new interface, which could be the topic of a whole other blog post), you just select YouTube from the Share menu and iMovie does all the digital origami required to package up your masterpiece into the appropriate formats and compression ratios to send it up to the ‘Tube. It’s very neat. It prompts you to add the relevant metadata and tags, and does a fairly efficient job of rendering and converting the file, then uploading it.

As a test, I edited together this little production last night using some Mac vs PC ads I just happened to have laying about on my hard drive. The process is easy, they imported into iMovie very simply, the new workflow is interesting and newbie video editors will probably love it, and the whole thing was put together in a very short timeframe.

I thought it was fascinating to realise how many of these Mac vs PC ads have been made, and to see just how diverse they are.

Tags: youtube, imovie, nlve, web2.0

You know, there’s a good reason that Apple is like it is, and it’s largely because of Steve Jobs’ leadership. Take this quote from His Steveness in the wake of today’s Apple press event…

“Is Apple’s goal to overtake the PC in market share?” Jobs said, “Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends. We want to do that at the lowest prices we can.

“But there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship. And we just can’t do it. We can’t ship junk,” said Jobs. “There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are. And we think that there’s a very significant slice of the [market] that wants that too. You’ll find that our products are not premium priced. You price out our competitors’ products, and add features that actually make them useful, and they’re the same or actually more expensive. We don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products.”

You can hear Steve’s reply to the reporter here…

Listen to Steve’s answer here…

It made me think… where else do you hear people talking like this? Where do you find companies that care so deeply about design and quality and artistic integrity and user experience? It’s hard to name too many other companies where this mindset - this total devotion to doing it right because it’s the right thing to do - is so much an ingrained part of their culture.

I heard Steve Jobs say in an interview once that when you create products that are built with passion and love for what you do, then that passion becomes evident in the final product. According to Steve, an end user can “feel” that passion from designers who truly care about what they make. You only have to look at the new iMacs that were released today, or the iPhone that was released to great fanfare a few weeks ago, or the millions of iPod owners who simply love their music players, or the legions of evangelical Mac owners, to see that Apple’s approach has great validity to many people.

People who use Apple products, who understand Apple products, who experience Apple products… talk about them differently to those that don’t. You don’t hear people talk about loving their Dells, or their Toshibas, or their Acers… they just use them to “get the job done”, usually in a fairly detached sort of a way. Apple’s culture is different. It’s not just about increasing their market share, or raising their stock price, or cutting the costs of production by 3%… it’s about producing the best quality computing devices in the world in a way that the end users of those products can actually feel and appreciate.

I think that is something of which Steve and his team at Apple can be very proud.

Tags: apple, steve jobs, design,