Oceana chose her license at #rdcHQ yesterday – she selected a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, and we walked through the procedure of registering a work at the Creative Commons website. The illustrations that she created will be available for download here – we are still putting some finishing touches on them at #rdcHQ, and exporting them for both web and print use.

The question regarding moral rights and licenses was posed to the group – what if someone disregards the chosen license and uses Oceana’s hard work without attribution, or sharing-alike? Artist networks are an important part of what makes the web work, and most creative people want to do the right thing and respect an artist’s wishes so the web remains a vital creative space. Education is a key component of this, and teaching people about the licenses and how to properly use them is important. If a license is not honored, generally an email to the source can correct the problem. Alternatively, many artists use mailing lists and social networks to ensure that artistic copyrights are not abused.

With that said, it would be wonderful to see a registry like Creative Commons go to the next level of development when it comes to registering works. In addition to being a repository for license deeds, it would be infinitely more useful if it could track usage of a particular work across the web. This could be achieved using a unique identifier and trackback system (source URLs automatically provide a unique identifier when a work is registered). A comment system could give the community a mechanism to report cool sightings of the work on the web or potential license violations. Systems like this are already becoming commonplace on other social networks – it would be wonderful to see one put to a practical use such as copyright (or, more importantly, “name attribution”)!

We are SO excited at the Rural Design Collective – WE REACHED OUR FUNDING GOAL – the designated funds go to the mentees who have worked so hard all summer. Thanks to our wonderful and generous backers for making this possible! There are a few days left in our fundraising campaign, so we are still encouraging donations. Any surplus funds will be used to continue our work and research on eBooks. Author James Simmons is already thinking about his next book!


We will be updating more frequently over the coming weeks as we move into the production phase of our project. We have a lot to do – including printing and binding our custom-designed eBook, plus we have a Launch Party to prepare for, and a really cool art show is in the works that will coincide with the event. This show will be videocast with heavybubble in Philadelphia, who will be simultaneously exhibiting our Find Way show that was our big end-of-the-year art event last year!

We cannot thank our wonderful backers enough! You helped make this happen with your generosity! Thank you for paving the way for this project, and proving that anything is possible if you work hard and believe in your art!

Dollar graphic created by Levi Thompson for our WANTED fundraising campaign. The best part about the campaign was that we got to tell people we were printing money at #rdcHQ

Oceana put the finishing touches on her cover design and sent a final PDF to author James Simmons for review. She finalized the design featuring the child and the XO laptop, using the alternative title suggested by the author below:

We have posted a screenshot of the final cover, along with our specific questions regarding licensing of the interior illustrations to FLOSS Manuals Discuss. More details soon!

It was an educational and fun Hacker Wednesday at #rdcHQ this week! The crew viewed “Sita Sings The Blues” (SSTB) by Nina Paley on the big screen as an introduction into matters of copyright, licenses and fair use. “SSTB” is a landmark work, bringing to the forefront many issues that are critical to creativity in the modern age. Nina’s creator-endorsed logo for QuestionCopyright.org was also discussed. The logo is a symbol that a distributor can use to indicate that a work is distributed in a way that its creator endorses.

During the intermission, we reviewed the various types of open source licenses as they apply to our eBook project. FLOSS Manuals is currently licensed under GPL II, which is a holistic license generally associated with software releases. Creative Commons licenses are more suited to creative content (which is relevant to artists like Oceana and Christopher) and have the potential for a more granular level of control (many file-sharing sites support CC licenses on a per-object basis), so we reviewed those in-depth and watched an introductory video on blip.tv (no long online) to introduce the concept.

The license deeds were distributed to all for review, and final copyright determination will be made next week. This experience sparked interesting discussions, and we have questions for the FLOSS Manuals team that we will be posting to their discuss mailing list over the coming days – next week, we get down to the business of making books!