« Posts tagged Creative Commons

Do What We Say, Not What We Do…

June 9, 2010 / Anthony Smith posted in Harmonic Vicissitude / 2 Comments

BEGIN RANT

Last week, I touched a little bit on Creative Commons licensing and how it is being utilized in the creation of The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet.  The notion of making absolutely everything within the album accessible to the public, at no financial cost, is an idea that is bold, stunning and definitely worth supporting.  Which, by the way, other people are agreeing with, since the basic production cost of 4588 euros has been raised.  Regrettably, I have not been able to donate as of yet, due to a serious lack of fundage due to potential baby raising and, more immediately, the formerly past-due medical bills that assisted in the pending baby raising.  Still, I look forward to when I am able to listen to the tracks online, and hope to be able to provide to the cause sometime between now and July 13th.

Now, the Creative Commons concept is there to benefit the public and artist alike.   The normal person benefits by being able to read or hear whatever the artist is offering for free, not to mention share with whatever friends he or she wants to.   The artist benefits by being able to get his or her work out there into the internet to share while still retaining rights to the material.  For example, Bad Karma Ink here has a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.  Basically, at least for bkI, you can share whatever is on here where ever, just as long as you refer back to bkI via a link, do not alter the work, and do not make money off of it.

Not a bad trade-off, right?   The public gets free stuff and the artist gets noticed.

So, you would expect a big media company to respect these rights, correct?  After all, big media such as the RIAA and MPAA (That be the Recording Industry and Motion Picture Associations of America) expect you to follow copyright law.  One would think that big business would actually practice what they preach.

»Read More

The (Soon To Be) Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet

June 2, 2010 / Anthony Smith posted in Harmonic Vicissitude / 1 Comment

http://www.the-album.cc/ There are two things in the world that will get my attention.   Good music and anything that is free.  So, when I was directed towards http://www.the-album.cc/ by our resident content wrangler Pat, naturally I was intrigued.   Of course, the title was a draw, too.   After all, just how many albums do you know of that come right out and claim that it is the most remarkable album on the face of the Earth?  Never mind the fact that I never heard of the artist before.  A proclamation like that isn’t something I could just ignore.  I had to investigate…and by investigate, I mean listen to the artist, paniq, and see just what would make this potential album the most remarkable album on the planet.

»Read More

Podcasts We Like: Escape Pod

December 4, 2009 / uhwhat posted in Fiction, Podcasts / 2 Comments

My day job, while involved, doesn’t eat all my brain power very often. I’m also part pedestrian, so I ride the bus quite a bit. These two facts afford me plenty of opportunity to listen to music and podcasts.

I’m pretty good about splitting my time between both, but if I had to choose one, I’d probably go with podcasts. Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE music, but I generally only use it for those times when I have to do a lot of repetitive tasks.

Podcasting, on the other hand, allows me to learn something and/or be entertained. I LOVE learning and you can only learn so much from just listening to music.

I’m an eclectic guy, if you haven’t noticed, no I listen to a variety of things, from techie subjects to weird music-casts, but my favorites are the fiction podcasts.

Now, just like everything else, 90% of podcasts are crap. Thankfully the social power of the internet filters out a lot of the shit and let’s the cream float to the top. (Is it just me or does that last sentence sound really dirty? Maybe I’ve been here in the gutter too long…)

baD kARmA INk is here to help with at shit sifting. To that end, we present a new and hopefully regular series entitled “Podcasts We Like” and we are launching with a doozy of a fiction podcast.

Escape Pod was founded by Steve Eley and debuted in May of 2005. Escape Artists, the parent organization of Escape Pod and it’s sister podcasts Pseudopod and PodCastle is one of the few paying fiction markets on the internet.

Escape Pod herself focuses on science fiction and, let me tell you, they produce some great stuff. The recordings are usually about half an hour and each one ends with some analysis and listener feed back.  The stories, well, they are great and varied. From robots to aliens, humor to fear, all with a sense of wonder, every episode is joy to the ears. I think my personal fave is “Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk“,  about a robotic children’s toy that bares a resemblance to a certain silly old bear.  If, at the end of the story, you aren’t wiping a tear from your eye,  you are obviously an emotionless, green-blooded alien.

I’ve been listening for a couple of years now and I cant tell you how thrilled I am every week when I find an episode in my podcatcher. All the episodes are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives, which means I can save my faves and later on subject people to them without fear of legal repercution. Some people call that torture; I call it forcing people to expand their horizons.

Escape Artists makes the money to pay their authors through donations and by selling cd’s of old episodes at PodDisc so if you love Escape Pod as much as I do, please donate or purchase something from them. Escape Pod is a real internet treasure. Do your part folks, spread the word and toss a few bucks their way.

WP SlimStat