The World of Stuff .com

Out of it

I am sick. It started yesterday when I woke up with a throat thing. Now I don’t have much of an appetite. Luckily, I am not sneezing my brains out as I usually do all the time.

I have a temperature. I have the air conditioner on as hot as it will go, but it still feels pretty cool in here. Now I’m wearing heavy clothing. Also, my tongue is burned because I couldn’t wait for my soup to cool down last night.

My roommate has been gone for the weekend, but I’ve instructed him to stay away longer. In fact, we both think that he got me sick, but I wouldn’t want to be hanging around a sick person anyway. You could be a disease vector.

I am into music, and I often imagine what it would be like if I were to have a musical career. What freedoms would I associate with my songs? I know that I would use a Creative Commons license because they help build fan bases and provide free publicity. Brad Sucks is one of the best examples. As I mentioned in my last post, he released his first album under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, whose requirements are pretty self-explanatory. You can do anything with the songs, as long as you provide proper attribution, use them noncommercially, and provide any derivative works under the same license.

Actually, it seems that he has now re-licensed his first album under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which brings me to my point. I believe that the noncommercial clause is unnecessarily restrictive. I would want people to make commercial use of my work. The share-alike provision ensures that no one can have a monopoly over it. You would be able to remix and sell my music, but someone else would be able to remix and sell your remix. Meanwhile, I get the credit for having an awesome song that so many people want to remix. I thus get featured on TV and have lots of sold out concerts. Result: money.

It comes down to allowing equal access for all. I’ve used Creative Commons-licensed music extensively in all of my videos, and I would feel great if I could allow people to use my work in the same way that I’ve used others’. I would really be flattered if someone covered my song, remixed it, translated it, used it in a movie, published the lyrics in a book, or transcribed it for the guitar. And if people could do that for every song without explicit permission from the copyright holders, everyone would be better off.

Of course, I have not taken my musicianship to the next level, but if ever I do, I’ll know exactly how I want things.

Oh, those dolphins: A wild dolphin in Australia is teaching others how to walk on their tails. Apparently, it was taken into captivity due to illness about 20 years ago and learned the trick there.

Wikipedia has a list of United States Presidents by genealogical relationship. In short: a lot of them were related to each other. I wonder if you’d get similar results for any other 42 white Americans.

In this video, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig responds to John McCain’s planned technology policy.