Tag Archives: commons

Burying vs. Wu wei

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Went to the doctor yesterday, going to get an MRI soon. Hope for the best.

Anyway, there has long (over two years, actually) been an active and heated discussion about Digg’s bury brigade, which is seen more as a demonym for a large and disparate group of Digg users who are united only by their fondness for organized "burying" (downmodding) of recently-posted URLs based on their different agendas or impulses.

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More on furry and copyleft

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I think I may have previously asked 

[info]greenreaper

 about how WikiFur relates to copylefted media, but I don’t think that the topic of how the furry fandom makes use of copyleft/copycenter licenses hasn’t been fully explored yet.

I mean, sure, you already have the following freely-licensed media:

And also, the vast majority of text on WikiFur is licensed under the GNU FDL (which is also used by Wikipedia).

However, I wonder about other forms of furry media expression, such as sound and video. While the former hasn’t historically possessed an overbearing influence within the furry fandom (visual content reigns supreme), video and 2D/3D animation (via YouTube and other Flash video hosting services) is fast becoming an apparent, accessible and useful means for furry media expression.

The problems which I see with this rise of Internet-based furry video and animation are the following:

  • User licensing for the content uploaded to YouTube (currently the majority repository for furry video), say, if the user wants to license it under cc-by-sa-3.0, isn’t as explicit or standardized as on Flickr.
  • The user who makes the video may use clippings or samples from non-free, proprietary-licensed media (furry or non-), such as images, video, 3D models or sound, thus putting them into legal jeopardy.
  • The Flash video formats (FLV and SWF) are proprietary and legally restricted (until only recently) to the Adobe Flash player, while the Ogg Theora/Vorbis and SVG formats, which are open and freely-licensed formats, are in a very tiny minority in comparison to the usage frequency of FLV/SWF, Windows Media, DivX and QuickTime. Theora doesn’t even make a blip on the furry radar (not even on WikiFur, hence why almost all videos on WikiFur are either embedded or linked from elsewhere), AFAIK.

Thus, for Internet video posting, sharing and editing, the furry fandom is already in a deep, three-layer heap of legal shite.

(PS: For the record, I currently follow the “GNU school” in that I don’t consider any license that restricts Derivative or Commercial usage to be a copyleft license, hence the no-show of cc-by-nc and cc-by-nd in the above list of licenses).

BTW,

[info]greenreaper

, Has WikiFur considered the idea of a “FurryMedia Commons” akin to the WikiMedia Commons as a repository for freely-licensed furry media that anybody can use in their own videos? This, of course, should probably only happen when WikiFur moves off to its own servers, whenever that may occur.