Aaron Landry

Tag Archives: olpc

An Example of Creative Commons Not Working

Measure on the XO Laptop, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

I’m a big fan of Creative Commons. If you’re not familiar, Creative Commons is a solution for licensing work that’s more flexible than copyright but with more control thatn public domain. It’s a way to allow other people to use your work freely with simple requirements such as requiring attribution or asking it not be used for commercial purposes. If you want to learn more about Creative Commons, I strongly recommend Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig’s talk at TED as well as Creative Commons’ about page.

I release almost all of my photography on Flickr under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. In basic terms, this means that anyone can use my photography freely as long as they give me credit and it’s for non-commercial use. I think it’s a very flexible license especially for other bloggers and nonprofit organizations. For anyone that wants to use my photography for other means, I’m very clear on my Flickr page to contact me if you’d like to use my photography for other means.

In most cases that people contact me wishing to use my photography, I let them use it for free. Although I do charge for for-profit print publications, for example.

On Boing Boing

On Wednesday night a photo of mine (shown above) showed up on Boing Boing with my hand with my OLPC Laptop in my living room. It’s not often that I show up on what’s considered by some to be the most popular and one of the most authoritative blogs in the world. My photo was posted without attribution and in a commercial situation. (Boing Boing, incorporated as Happy Mutants LLC, certainly makes money.)

Normally I am not surprised when someone uses my photography on their website without attribution as it’s common right now for copyright and Creative Commons to be ignored in this kind of context. What is surprising about this situation is that this post on Boing Boing is written by Cory Doctorow, one of the most vocal advocates of Creative Commons in the world. He’s featured on Creative Commons’ website as he’s published entire books under Creative Commons licenses. Doctorow talks about Creative Commons so much that on BoingBoingBingo “Creative Commons is So Awesome” and “Cory’s Book is Translated” (a natural benefit of Creative Commons licensing) are two squares on most of the bingo boards.

So why would Cory Doctorow use my photo in a way that breaks the Creative Commons license? It has to be a mistake, right?

On Other Sites

I went back to the story that Boing Boing linked to, a story on OLPC News about overclocking the XO Laptop. A lower resolution version of my photo is used there and it links back to my original Flickr page. As far as attribution goes, this is good enough for me and this kind of use.

What’s interesting though is that Boing Boing used a higher resolution version of the photo than what’s posted on OLPC News. This means that Doctorow would have had to click the image and go to my Flickr page to get a version of the photo to place on Boing Boing. On that Flickr page is the Creative Commons license.

So I commented on that Boing Boing post: “I’m a bit disappointed that Boing Boing, which is a pretty avid supporter of Creative Commons didn’t follow the CC license on the photo, which was shot by me.” I also sent Cory Doctorow an email asking him to replace the photo or to follow the license. I also gave him permission to use the photo (although Boing Boing isn’t non-profit) if he links back to my Flickr page with attribution. I got no reply from Doctorow, but a few people chimed in with support in the comments.

As with many stories on Boing Boing, other blogs re-blog the content to reach their own audiences and spur their own conversations about it. Creative Commons is designed around this idea of information sharing and republishing, but if one part of the chain doesn’t give attribution and rereleases it under another Creative Commons license, it doesn’t do it’s job.

My friend Ed Hunsinger pointed out to me that Slash Gear picked up the story and the same photo without attribution or a link back. I commented right away and Slash Gear editor James Allan Brady fixed it up right away. Ed later showed me that MAKE blog posted about it too and didn’t give attribution to my photo either. I commented on their blog about it but as of right now is still not approved nor has their post been updated to respect the license.

I’m almost positive that other blogs have reposted the content of Boing Boing’s post as well. All it takes is for one person in the chain to disregard the license for the license to be broken on all subsequent uses.

I’m Curious About Creative Commons

I am not upset at anyone but I am curious. I would let almost anyone use that photography for free, even in many commercial situations. The photo isn’t anything special to me and I have no reason to need extra traffic to that photo on Flickr. This situation has caused me to think more about Creative Commons and how much more realistic it is than copyright as we move more into a culture of information and media sharing at levels that are hard for most people to imagine. If one of the biggest mouthpieces for Creative Commons will seemingly disregard a Creative Commons license and not respond when being asked to fix it, what does that tell us about a future when Creative Commons becomes more widespread?

Updates

Fun to wake up the next morning to see a lot of good comments and emails.

Most importantly, Cory Doctorow fixed the post on Boing Boing. He didn’t get my email but he was alerted to the comments on the post just recently (many of which seem to be removed except for mine). He apologized and said it was an honest mistake. I believe him completely. We’ve shared a couple good emails. I still think this situation raises questions of how effective Creative Commons can be, most importantly among people that disregard copyright in the first place.

Thumbuki writes in the comments that the same thing happened to him on the same day:
(Original Photo, Boing Boing post). This one also has since been fixed.

Joshua Benton writes a very insightful post that addresses my interpretation of “commercial” and illustrates how vague Creative Commons is in this regard. Recommended reading.

Derek Powazek chime ins with a similar example of his wife’s photography used on Boing Boing TV. The kicker here is that his wife also happens to be the Community Manager at Flickr. Boing Boing also eventually resolved this one by removing the photo.

Taylor Carik Takes a look at The New Social Circulation: Frontline, Out of Print, and the XO Laptop Photo

Nature photographer Jim M. Goldstein chimes in on the issue that Creative Commons is only as good as those that use it.

More links and discussion in the comments. A lot of great conversation on this topic; thanks everyone.

¶ Posted 28 March 2008 § Media, Blogging and Technology ‡ Comments (24) ° Also tagged: boingboing, creative commons

One Laptop per Child - XO Laptop

XO Laptop, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

I got my XO Laptop shipped via FedEx this morning. In the box was the laptop itself, a battery, a charger and two sheets of paper, one of them being a thank you note from Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and CEO of One Laptop per Child and the other simply shows how to open the laptop, what the ports are and a short description of the home and neighborhood views. There’s no other documentation.

This is my second time with one of these, the first being in DC with Mike. The first things I’ve noticed right away compared to the pre-production unit I played with: the logo color on the top is different, the applications and interface feel a bit more refined and the applications feel a bit snappier.

I was reminded that it is small. Even my small cat thinks its small.

I’ve also (finally) had two very, very important things sink into me when working with these devices. First, I needed to remove my initial conceptions and expectations on what a laptop is and what it’s used for. For example, the first time I played with one the two applications I initially opened were the web browser and RSS reader. While web browsing and RSS work fine on the laptops, it’s not exactly the primary reason why these laptops exist. Secondly, I’ve learned to realize that these were truly designed for very young children from the ground up, not for adults using adult software and existing ideas on how interfaces should work. For example, Nicholas Deleon wrote at CrunchGear that the idea of porting Windows XP to this laptop “gives [it] an air of legitimacy.” I was so disappointed in his post showing how little some people understand the XO Laptop’s purpose.

What is it’s purpose? The XO Laptop was created as a tool for children for spreading information, learning and collaborating with others, especially in countries and remote areas where technology and educational materials are sparse. Likely, many of the kids that use an XO Laptop have not used a web browser before, let alone an RSS reader (or the necessity to be compatible with Microsoft Windows).

Opening up and booting my new XO Laptop for the first time lead me put in my name and then to choose my avatar’s color scheme. It then put me on the home view where you can choose activities to load from the bottom, similar to an OS X dock. On the top right of the screen as well as the keyboard are four icons that are a way of navigating. On the far left is the neighborhood view, which shows your laptop in comparison to everything else it sees on the network. The next is the group icon, which shows other laptops you are collaborating with. Next is home, which shows your laptop and the activities it is running. Finally, the far right button is activity, which shows your current running application.

Moving your mouse cursor at any time in any of the four corners of the screen brings up a frame containing those four icons at the top as well as the available activities at the bottom to load another application.

The bundled activities have a wide range of depth including Memorize, which is a simple memory game to programming languages such as one similar to Logo called TurtleArt and Pippy, a front-end for coding in Python. There’s also some other applications for building other games and programs from scratch which are currently way over my head. I thought about the appropriateness for such a young age for awhile and then remembered when I started writing my own code: at age 5 on an Atari 800XL. I realized that many people my age that are involved with technology now started by writing stuff on machines like that or others such as the Commodore 64. Man, learning languages is a lot easier to pick up at that age.

Bundled as well is a very simple application for playing live music and another for recording audio and video. There’s a more advanced application for sequencing music too. There’s a basic calculator that has advanced algebraic functions, a word processor, chat application and a number of other applications including a full terminal (deep down it runs a stripped down version of Fedora Linux). Again, the applications really do range from extremely basic to advanced. A lot more applications are in development.

The key ingredient to making the XO Laptop work, in my opinion, is its collaboration features. The XO Laptop is designed to build its own mesh networks, and most of the applications are designed to communicate and share information with other laptops on those networks. For example you can have a project that was built on one laptop, and immediately share it with all the other laptops on the network. The mesh networks will also share an internet connection if it’s available.

Also a teacher or a school can have a server that delivers information to all the laptops when kids are near, and they can then take that information home to their communities and families and share it. The future of how books in classrooms and information is spread really gets my gears turning on the possibilities of these devices… and this is just version 1.0.

My XO Laptop came with a US AC outlet charger, but the port is designed to take a very wide range of power sources for charging the battery. Foot pumps, hand cranks and solar panel grids are possibilities.

I’ve had a few hiccups with it so far. For example, while it seemed to see a ton of wireless networks in my area, I had a hard time staying connected to my home WiFi. I couldn’t get WiFi working at all at the Town Talk Diner but could use it fine from my phone. Also, when the screen is folded back there were times where it would cause the mouse cursor to move by rubbing against the trackpad underneath.

Peter Fleck asked what I plan on doing with the laptop. Honestly, I don’t know. I support the One Laptop per Child project and wanted to donate one through the Give One. Get One. program. That was my primary reason for getting one. I can’t see myself using this as a normal laptop by any means as it isn’t really designed to be really fast or use a lot of applications simultaneously. It doesn’t match up with my device habits currently so I don’t know in what capacity I’ll use it. I don’t plan on writing applications for it. Also, the browsing speed is comparable to my iPhone on WiFi. I’ll probably tinker more and learn more of the applications. It’s only my first couple hours and I’ll be diving into it further. Honestly though, I think it’s possible that when I’m done telling everyone I know about the project in the next few months I’ll donate it to an organization that will have more use for it than I will.

See more photos with my OLPC tag on Flickr.

¶ Posted 15 December 2007 § Media, Blogging and Technology ‡ Comments (15) ° Also tagged: xo laptop

My First Experience With an XO Laptop

XO Laptop, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

I met up with Mike Lee in Washington to test out his development XO Laptop.

If you’re not familiar with the XO Laptop or the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, from laptopgiving.org:

The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege.

Mike has been testing with a development unit for awhile. The first thing I noticed is that it is very small and confusing to open the first time. Once I knew that the WiFi antennas, or “ears,” pop up first (they act as a lock) it opens quite easily.

It boots fairly quickly with 256mb of RAM and opens to a screen where I have what feels like an OS X Dock at the bottom to choose applications. After about 10 minutes I felt really comfortable getting around it and everything worked in a rather simple manner.

Browsing was about as fast as the iPhone on WiFi and there were a few music creation applications that I didn’t spend the time to figure out. I tested out the RSS reader on it as well and it was pretty swift.

One of the most interesting things about the XO Laptop to me is in the collaboration features. It creates mesh networks on its own with other XO Laptops and will share a common internet connection, which is very useful in remote areas. In the absence of internet connectivity, it will share resources with the other laptops. Teachers can share information to other laptops live and students can then take them home and share the information and pages with their families and others.

They’ll also take a wide and dirty range of power to charge it. You can use things such as a solar panel, a foot pump or hand crank in addition to using a normal power adapter.

I ordered one through the Give One, Get One program a week and a half ago. You order two. One gets shipped to you and one gets donated. I can’t wait to play around with it more. UPDATE: On 15 Dec 07 I got my own OLPC XO Laptop.

See more photos from my Washingtontrip as well as Mike’sphotos from when we met up.