NZCommons

Creative Commons in Aotearoa New Zealand: opening our knowledge and culture for sharing and reuse

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GIF IT UP 2015 entry by Sara Levine of Forest Hills, New York. Source material courtesy the Boston Public Library and Digital Commonwealth via DPLA. Sara writes:

I really enjoyed looking through the archives of Harper’s magazine covers. The ones with women holding or sitting with cats were particularly striking in terms of color and composition. I wanted to bring them to life with some subtle movement.

This GIF is made available under a CC-BY 3.0 License.

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GIF IT UP 2015 entry by Lora Owston of Beckley, West Virginia. Source material (1, 2) care of the National Archives and Records Administration via DPLA, and Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga via DigitalNZ.

This GIF is made available under a CC-BY 3.0 license.

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GIF IT UP 2015 entry by Anneliese Dehner of Portland, Orgeon. Source material courtesy of Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand. Anneliese writes:

The kittens! I love ‘em. Mrs. Shannon and the kitties in her kitty bouquet (Aprilis, Primula, Jimps, and Jemina) are bobbing their cute little heads to music we can’t hear.

This gif is made available under a CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

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GIF IT UP 2015 entry from Nicolas Monterrat of Paris, France. Source material from the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC) via DPLA.

This GIF is made available under a CC-BY 3.0 license.

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GIF IT UP 2015 entry by Nils Pokel from Auckland, New Zealand. Source material courtesy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa via DigitalNZ. Nils writes:

Their awkwardness and inherent stories that allowed me to build upon.

This GIF is made available under a CC-BY 3.0 license.

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GIF IT UP 2015 entry by Nils Pokel from Auckland, New Zealand. Source material courtesy Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga via DigitalNZ. Nils writes:

Their awkwardness and inherent stories that allowed me to build upon.

This GIF is made available under a CC-BY 3.0 license.

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GIF IT UP 2015 entry from James Williamson in Dallas, Texas. Source material courtesy the National Archives and Records Administration via DPLA. James writes:

I just relocated from a small city to Dallas, TX, and the one thing that everybody wanted to talk to me about was parking and traffic. This images captures my new parking reality.

This GIF is made available under a CC-BY 3.0 License.

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GIF IT UP 2015 entry by Nicolas Monterrat of Paris, France. Source material courtesy Brigham Young University—Harold B. Lee Library and the University of California via DPLA.

This GIF is made available under a CC-BY 3.0 license.

[nzcommons]

The Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ June newsletter is out now! Featuring free Creative Commons workshops and clinics for Kiwi schools, plus Miss Winter 1911.

[nzcommons]

Instagram, the Re-Gram and Creative Commons

Instagram is a popular mobile application, infamous for its digital filters with alluring names (think Valencia & Amaro), and the use of the hashtag symbol (#). Instagram allows users to upload pictures or videos colloquially known as “grams”, which can then shared with their Instagram followers and on other social media platforms.

The term “re-gram” has been coined, describing the process whereby an existing gram is copied from one user and reproduced on another’s profile. The reproduction is typically achieved by either a specifically designed application or simply by taking a screenshot of the original gram on a smartphone. In practice this means that  humorous or memorable grams will go viral, spreading to other social media platforms such as Facebook and Pinterest. The spread of certain grams can be accelerated by the use of the hashtag; a user can search for grams based on a particular theme by looking up a corresponding hashtag. And if they like what they see, they may feel compelled to re-gram.

With thousands of grams being uploaded to Instagram every second, the question arises as to who owns them. According to Instagram’s Terms of Use, users represent and warrant that they own the content posted, or that they have the right to post such content. They further represent and warrant that the content posted does not violate, misappropriate or infringe on the rights of third parties, which include but are not limited to privacy, copyright, trade mark, and other intellectual property rights. As a side note, while Instagram does not claim ownership over content, the Terms of Use state that users grant Instagram a non-exclusive and worldwide licence to use their content.

One of the problems regarding copyright ownership is that users, including businesses and celebrities, will often re-gram photos without any consideration for the copyright implications. This is certainly not a socially responsible practice, and it is this blissful ignorance that has led to parties being caught out for using other people’s grams. Further, it is also common for media to be re-grammed multiple times to the point where the original source can not be located, and even then, crediting a source in itself is not a defence to copyright infringement. Interestingly, in the United Kingdom, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 provides a solution to this. It allows a person to use a copyrighted work for free without the consent of the owner if, after a “diligent search” in accordance with the prescribed regulations, the owner cannot be found.

A solution to the danger of the re-gram — and one that all users can benefit from — is Creative Commons licensing. There are a variety of licences available to users; all require attribution and some are for non-commercial use only.  Users can manually add a CC licence in their Instagram profile description or in the caption of a gram. They can also follow this up by hashtagging “creative commons”, thereby enabling other users to search for openly licensed media.

Instagram does not currently facilitate a platform for users to license their grams with ease, but there are other ways of doing this. For example, Instagram allows users to directly share photos to their Flickr accounts and, in turn, Flickr allows its users to choose a particular CC licence under which they can share their photos. Flickr also enables users to search for photos that have been published online under the different CC licences.

Another example is  i-am-cc.org, a third-party archive that allows users to CC-license photos for three months from the date they sign up to the archive. i-am-cc.org’s manifesto explains that the three-month period is imposed as people may forget what they signed up for, and i-am-cc endeavours to be a “legitimate repository of free images”. There are also a variety of websites supplying CC-licensed images for the public that instagrammers may re-use.

It is clear that the re-gram is something that Instagram users should adopt with caution. The use of CC licensing is an excellent mechanism to lawfully perpetuate media, and, the more users who opt in, the more media they have to benefit from. It is yet to be seen whether Instagram will allow users to opt into CC licensing their grams. This may be a smart move, and the issue may become more prominent as more parties are caught out for irresponsible re-grams.

Hemma Vara is a young professional and avid fashionista who resides in Wellington.

[nzcommons]

Catch up on the Creative Commons Road Trip with Matt McGregor from Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, Keitha Booth speaking about open government, Te Papa’s copyright guru Victoria Leachman, and Mark Crookston from the National Library of New Zealand.

[nzcommons]

VUW student speaks out about open education

As a student at Victoria University, my main expense — barring course costs — is textbooks. Often these are simply a collection of photocopied excerpts from various books and journal articles. While textbook costs vary, it is not unusual to spend thousands of dollars over the course of a degree for books that are often used for little over three months.

In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began OpenCourseWare, a project in which they began publishing their course materials under Creative Commons licences, making them freely available to the public for reuse and repurposing. Since then several universities have followed suit, openly publishing course materials and making them available to the commons. In New Zealand a number of tertiary institutions are already part of the Open Education Resources Universitas (OERu), an independent network that offers free online courses for students worldwide. Despite the benefits of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and their increasing popularity among tertiary institutions, the movement has not garnered widespread publicity or institutionalisation.

Throughout my time at Victoria University I have noticed small changes taking place. It is becoming increasingly common for courses to be based on a series of online journal articles instead of a textbook. However, these journal articles are usually not openly licensed, and are instead made available to students and staff members of Victoria University through agreements the university has with other institutions. This means they cannot legally be shared outside of the university domain and are vulnerable to changes in intellectual property law. For example, current negotiations regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement could jeopardise the use of several online journal articles at university. Thus, while these changes indicate an awareness and interest in moving forwards from expensive textbooks, they do not address the wider issue of open education.

I spoke with several professors at Victoria University to hear their perspectives on the matter. Ideologically, staff members were very supportive of open education policies being adopted in universities, speaking positively about the benefits of OERs. These include expanding the scope of education, especially to those in financially restrictive situations; enabling them to enrich their students’ learning experience with increased resources; and allowing students to easily teach others what they have learned. Staff were also very enthusiastic about publishing their works openly, allowing them to easily share and distribute their work without worrying about restrictive copyright laws. Despite the ideological alignment and positivity shown by staff, many were at a loss concerning the logistical implementation of OERs and how it would affect the university financially and commercially.

My conversations demonstrated the necessity of increased visibility of the open education movement and its proposed solutions to current problems. There are a number of economic benefits for educational institutions using OERs: for example, the money saved through using existing OERs from reliable institutions; and efficiencies created from the collective action of several institutions creating a large depository of academically sound OERs across a wide range of disciplines and through institutional backing and grassroots community support. The formulation of alternative business models allowing for the sustained production of OERs and an increased awareness of the alternative forms of copyright available is an integral aspect of furthering the use of OERs in tertiary institutions.

Hunter Wilson-Burke is a third-year BA student at Victoria University studying Political Science and Philosophy. He is currently interning at Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, focussing on the use and adoption of open education in New Zealand´s educational institutions.

[nzcommons]

Greek Gifts

Robin Bond, a semi-retired Classics lecturer from Canterbury, has spent his life translating and directing ancient Greek theatre. Over the years he has amassed a series of his own translations of all the Greek plays we know of, in verse, created specifically to be staged, as well as studied.

He could have published these as a volume, a small run from an academic press that would have been the culmination of a career (not that his career is over by a long stretch, you’d have to physically restrain him from teaching, directing and studying). This could have sat in academic libraries, and influenced classics students for years to come, if they bought it. Libraries already have copies of all of these already — different translations, translated for different purposes, and even editions in the original Greek. In these lean times for library acquisitions sales might have been pretty sparse.

Instead, over lunch, I convinced Robin to send me the manuscripts, I had a book designer look over them and make them beautiful, and we have started to pop them up on our Institutional Repository. The first play we have put up is Antigone, by Sophocles. We will have them all up by Open Access Week (October) this year. They are all published with a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY).

I’m hoping that something will happen. Sitting on the repository is useful, but they are just raw material. Content. I’m hoping that someone will make a lovely web page for them, or include them in a course, realising that they are free for anyone to use. I really hope that someone will stage one of these, using these as the text to work from, because that’s what they were originally for. What I most want though, is someone uses them for something that we haven’t even thought of. That a school picks one up, and turns it into a musical. Or animates one. Or projects it into space on a laser beam for aliens. Actually, I might do that.

Here’s an arduino library to create the Morse code — so now all I need is the laser…

Anton Angelo is the Repository Manager at the University of Canterbury Library, and a member of the NZCommons editorial board.

[nzcommons]

Translation into English

Openly licensed translation of Sophocles’ Antigone from Robin Bond of the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand

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[bitter1stuff]

When poets were POETS.

[todaysdocument]

GIFs from .Gov Records

todaysdocument followers will know there’s nothing we enjoy more than breathing new life into historic government records by sharing them in animated GIF form.

Last week we were privileged to be on a panel of other SocialGov GIF practitioners for DigitalGov’s “Essentials of Animated Gifs for Public Services”, including fellow .Gov Tumblarians peacecorps, icontherecord, usagov/ gobiernousa, and 18fblog.

See the complete webinar below for our tips on finding free, public domain GIF sources from the National Archives catalog, plus other great advice from our colleagues on engagement, storytelling, accessibility, and open source GIF-creation tools:

via Sharing the Essentials of Animated Gifs for Public Services

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If the whole point of publishing scholarship is to get your research seen, why hide your work behind paywalls where only a minuscule portion of the population can read it?