The Creative Commons is launching a new initiative, the Science Commons:

Science Commons is a new project of Creative Commons and will launch on January 1, 2005.

The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual property and to share their knowledge with others. Science Commons works within current copyright and patent law to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to sharing.

There’s an interview with Science Commons director John Wilbanks on Open Access Now.

• Cool HP holiday cards
• Jaap’s Xmas Remix (Press HI on top left for better quality)
• typeflake
• Jaap’s PIMP Snowman
• penguin diving
• jaap’s carol (make your own)

Wikipedia is good for a general overview. To get an idea take a look at this photo gallery from Phuket, Thailand.

Boing Boing has got a good overview of how bloggers are covering the disaster in South East Asia:

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An excerpt from post 2:

Rohit Gupta says, “One of my media friends is a TV show host in Sri Lanka, and is writing live accounts of the frenzy on our community blog while rushing around in search of loved ones. Morquendi writes…”

A part of me wants to say fuck you to being a journalist and go out there and get involved in the aid work. Carry bags of food to the people who need it. But another part keeps saying my work is here. Making calls and making sure people stay informed. Seen things today I never thought I’d see. Seen things I don’t ever want to see. How do you ask a question from a father who saw his 4 year old child being dragged off into the sea and be sensitive about it? Do you say sorry? Does that cut it? 2 friends dead. They were on a romantic beach holiday. I like to believe they died holding each other’s hands. 2 more missing. Presumed dead. Find a vehicle in about an hour and head off down South to look for them, or identify their bodies. If anyone had told me the day was going to be like this maybe I’d have stayed in bed.

Alex Steffen points us to another first hand report on the worldchanging.com blog: Link. In Mumbai, blogger Dina Mehta is also covering the disaster: Link. Dina is also participating in the collaborative tsunamihelp.blogspot.com, which is shaping up to be something of a central clearinghouse for blog updates on the aftermath and relief efforts.

Lawrence Lessig is going to be updating his book Code and other laws of Cyberspace:

Beginning in February, we’ll be posting Version 1 of Code to a Wiki. “Chapter Captains” will then supervise updates and corrections. Depending upon the progress, sometime near June, I will take the product and edit and rewrite it to produce Code, v2. The Wiki will stay live forever (under a Creative Commons license). The edited book will be published in the fall. I have donated my advance for Code, v2 to Creative Commons. All royalties beyond the advance will be donated as well.

I’m guessing the site will go online at the current homepage. Lessig’s newest book, Free Culture is currently also available in wiki form, although this has been done with his cooperation.

Also there’s a nice video about the Creative Commons going to Brazil. Features interviews with Gilberto Gil and others in Brazil as well as Creative Commons executives.

Finally, the launch ceremony of the Belgian CC Licences took place in the Bibliotheque Royale in Brussels on 10 December as part of the electronic music and free software festival Jonctions 8.

Depending on who you listen to, Iraq is either a complete disaster or on the brink of a democratic revolution. An overview of some different viewpoints:

Negative:

Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and author. His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. In May 2004, Hersh published a series of articles describing and showing with photos the torture by US military police of prisoners in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib. His take on the current situation in Iraq is that it is a complete disaster. He’s given a couple of speeches that can be viewed online.

Positive:

Iraq the Model is a weblog run by young physicians who see a cross-section of Iraqi patients daily and have witnessed, Ali says, a steep improvement in medical services since Saddam was overthrown. It is this year’s Best Middle East or Africa Blog. One example:

I still hope to visit America some day, but I would love this to happen normally, and not through exceptional procedures and I would be so happy to meet all my American friends and to say thank you to the American people.

There’s also an audio interview with them online. You need to advance to the fourth clip to hear the interview with them.

A recent study (PDF) found that “44% of [American] Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files.”

The study goes on to explain:

“Who creates content? Content creators as a group are younger than the average American. However, in the Internet population, all age cohorts are equally as likely to create content. Content creators are more likely to be urban and suburban than rural, perhaps explained by the greater levels of broadband connectivity in urban centers than in rural areas. Content creators as a group are evenly divide between men and women and show similar racial and ethnic breakdowns as Internet users as whole. Content creators are likely to have higher levels of education – 46% have a college degree or more compared to 26% of all Americans. Income levels are also generally higher among content creators, with 31% living in households earning more that $75,000 annually, compared to 18% of all Americans who live in such households.”

That’s interesting in its own right. But these sorts of trends get really interesting when we think about the diffusion of these tools globally and throughout the civic sphere. That’s where ideas like “Blogger Corps” and Global Voices Online could start to grab some serious intellectual traction.
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The 21st Chaos Communication Congress has started in Berlin. The list of speakers includes Emmanuel Goldstein, Jimmy Wales, and Joi Ito. The schedule has stuff like: Lockpicking, Bluetooth Hacking, GameCube Hacking, Hidden Data in Internet Published Documents, Practical Mac OS X Insecurity, SAP R/3 Protocol Reverse Engineering. Joi Ito will be speaking about the State of Emergent Democracy (See also Wikipedia). He’s got some talking points on his wiki.

Ross Rader writes a passionate response to the ITU “Beyond Internet Governance” paper (DOC / HTML). This is the struggle/debate that we face today and good for Ross for articulating the position many people have but are either not in a position to say or are not informed enough to say. I would be very interested to hear the ITU’s response to Ross. The Internet Governance section @ CircleID has good stuff in general.

The Future of Digital Media is a two-month series, sponsored by Orb, that explores how the empowerment of the consumer over his or her media experience, coupled with the technological innovation that’s broadly democratizing media creation, is leading to a revolution in the way people access, consume, share and remake content.

Through interviews with leading commentators and cutting edge practioners, The Future of Digital Media examines the social, legal and economic impacts of this disruptive and revolutionary change.

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Via the Creative Commons weblog, a new service from Torrentocracy — Prodigem, free BitTorrent hosting for CC-licensed material:

Prodigem can only be used for the distribution of legally licensed material cleared for distribution via p2p filesharing. So, if you are an artist, creator, author, blogger, podcaster, amateur mogul, lead guitarist, independent movie director or person, and you have material which has been licensed openly, such as with a Creative Commons license, the sky is now the limit.

The flipside of the coin: Findlaw’s collection of legal complaints against people allegedly running BitTorrent servers indexing illegal copies of TV programs and movies.

Cyber Divide has an interesting take on the issue of Bittorrent and secondary copyright infringement.