This is my dissertation “The Freedom to Create & Creating freedom”. It was written as part of my final year project for BA Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins College in 2006. [click to continue…]
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From the category archives:
Freedom
Yesterday, while strolling through one of the torrent sites, I came across a new album by NIN, called Ghosts I.
I normally buy the Nine Inch Nails albums, but I thought I’ll download it to check it out first. When Ghost I was downloaded I discovered a readme.txt file in it:
This torrent is an official upload from Nine Inch Nails.
We’re very proud to present a new collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV. Â Almost two hours of music recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I-IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.
Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.
We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc. Â It’s licensed for all non-commercial use under Creative Commons.
We’ve also made a 40 page PDF book to accompany the album. Â If you’d like to download it for free, visit http://ghosts.nin.com/main/pdf
Ghosts I is the first part of the 36 track collection Ghosts I-IV. Â Undoubtedly you’ll be able to find the complete collection on the same torrent network you found this file, but if you’re interested in the release, we encourage you to check it out at ghosts.nin.com, where the complete Ghosts I-IV is available directly from us in a variety of DRM-free digital formats, including FLAC lossless, for only $5. Â You can also order it on CD, or as a deluxe package with multitrack audio files, high definition audio on Blu-ray disc, and a large hard-bound book.
We genuinely appreciate your support, and hope you enjoy the new music. Â Thanks for listening.
Hence, what started as the illegal act of downloading an album over a torrent site, ended up as a totally legal act, approved by the creators of the content.
Maybe BitTorrent is not a bad word after all…
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“I didn’t grow up buying every book I read,” said the English born Mr. [Nick] Gaiman, 47. “I read books at libraries, I read books at friend’s houses, I read books that I found on people’s window sills.”Eventually, he said, he bought his own books and he believes other readers will, too.
Neil Gaiman decided to give away one of his books free online (initially for a month), as a “celebratory birthday thing” for his blog’s 7th birthday.
You can vote and help him choose which one its going to be on his site.
At the same time, NYT publishes an article on how HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site.
About a month ago Lawrence Lessig announced that the last of his books is now free to download (and remix).
After a productive and valuable conversation with my publisher, Random House, they’ve agreed to permit The Future of Ideas to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
On January 1st, Charles Sheehan-Miles decided to give the electronic version of his book, Republic, for free.
No more sample chapters, partial books that end in the middle, none of that. You can download and read the complete book. Share it with your friends, email it, do anything you want with it except sell it.
Here’s why: the biggest challenge most authors face isn’t online piracy. It’s not people out there diabolically copying their works and distributing them for free. In fact most authors (including yours truly) suffer from a different problem entirely — no one has ever heard of them. After all, literally hundreds of thousands of new titles come out every year, and only a few hundred writers in the entire United States (if that many) actually live off their books full time. So, by giving away the book, I hope more people actually read it.
Chris Anderson wrote about it at the time:
For the vast majority of authors, being read is actually reward enough. How to turn that recognition into a living is a whole other process, and not necessarily one that depends on the traditional book industry to deliver. Good thing, too, since it so rarely does.
I think 2008 is a good year for electronic book publishing. Let’s see what it’ll do for other media publishing..
BTW, a nice feature is that you can search in most of these books (and many more) in Google Book Search.
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