Gimlé

Ned Beaumont mumbled something about Fedink and sat up. He was in a narrow bed without sheets or bedclothes of any sort. The bare mattress was blood-stained. His face was swollen and bruised and blood-smeared.

Dried blood glued his shirt-sleeve to the wrist the dog had bitten and that hand was caked with drying blood.

He was in a small yellow and white bedroom furnished with two chairs, a table, a chest of drawers, a wall-mirror, and three white-framed French prints, besides the bed.

Facing the foot of the bed was a door that stood open to show part of the interior of a white-tiled bathroom.

There was another door, shut.

There were no windows.

Dashiell Hammett—“The Glass Key”

Everybody’s talking about the Creative Commons.

I won’t waste my effort at doing another executive summary, apparently there is a flash animation which describes the concepts perfectly (Danny O’Brien has provided us with a mirror of the file).

The irony here is that I can’t watch this ingenious presentation because it is in the flash file format.

The Macromedia Flash Player is closed source and recent versions of the file format include a proprietry patent-ridden movie codec which makes the task of making a Free Software equivalent impossible.

So, my poor Gentoo/Linux-ppc ibook can’t play flash files.

This also highlights why—while the Creative Commons licenses are definitely A Good Thing—other issues in the content world are far more important.

Who cares if it is legal for me to do funky things with your mpeg4-encoded short movie if the mere act of playing it on my linux laptop is illegal?

Why should I remix your remix-friendly, CC-licensed mp3 tune if the mere act of installing an mp3 player on my machine places me in violation of patent laws?

Control over content is being enforced by other means than traditional copyright law.

The Creative Commons effort is necessary so that we have an alternative to putting our content under an iron-clad lock and key for a duration likely to exceed a century.

It is, in the current climate of copyright tyranny, an innovation.

But the sky is thick with a cloud of patents. Sucking the life out of our culture like a carpet of bloodsucking insects crawling over our exposed, frightened skins. Their serrated little beaks gnawing into our pores, leaching. Eating into the skin of our eyes.

Leaving us as blind, illiterate invalids who are spoonfed the babyfood of merchandise tie-ins and blockbuster slime.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.