Infinity
Okay, say I create a blog post with an iframe of itself in the body? Would it break the web? Let’s find out.
As we can see, the answer is NO.
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Flickr’s Commons is a fantastic attention hog
![Japanese-American camp, war emergency evacuation, [Tule Lake Relocation Center, Newell, Calif.] (LOC) by The Library of Congress.](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2158/2179117045_86f3e069c5.jpg?v=0)
It’s a beautiful thing when history geekery and photo geekery collide with online geekery copyright-free geerkery. And it can keep me from doing all sorts of likely more necessary things for an hour or more.
I’m once again fixated on Commons searches at Flickr. The Commons project started early last year, and has turned into a fantastic ever-growing archive of the world’s history in free-to-use public domain photography. It’s not the only public domain photo exhibit out there, but it’s likely the neatest and the most open for contributions. Organizations can join and add their own photos and any Flickr member can add to the information on the images: correcting dates, locations, adding a name if they recognize the people, etc. It’s sort of how Howard Zinn would (or should) do A People’s History online.
Here we have a Japanese-American internment camp in Tule Lake, California (1939-1945). Tons of stuff to be found in this archive. To see more photos of the sordid history of rounding up Japanese civilians during World War II, take a search around the Commons.
With the goals “to increase access to publicly-held photography collections,” and “to provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!),” right now, membership to this part of Flickr is reserved to cultural heritage institutions. I’d like to see it extended to personal family archive photos as well, released with the same “no copyright restrictions” as everything else of course. My family has stacks of photos of life in the northernmost corners of the Pacific Northwest going back about a century and a half and it would be neat to be able to add them to the mix.
Oregon copyrights its state laws
During a typical daily trolling of the website BoingBoing, I came across the following interesting nugget about the state where I grew up and attended high school:
“The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.”
What you say? a government body copyrighting their laws and barring others from publishing them? Is this actually legal? Are Orgeon laws some sort of privately held intellectual property that turns some sort of profit?
Legal or not, it’s happened.
Being that copyright isn’t exactly part of the democratic system of government and that laws in Democracies such as U.S. states are generally thought to be, well, not “owned” by anyone exactly, but belonging to the people, I thought this was strange. However, as many strange things go, it turns out to be true. Both Justia and Public.Resource.Org have been served with cease and desist letters from the Oregon state government demanding that their laws be removed from public view on these websites.
Public.Resource.Org’s outlaw law compiler Carl Malamud wrote:
“Oregon is not unique in asserting copyright over state law, but they are definitely one of the more aggressive in this kind of FUD campaign. Justia and Public.Resource.Org have decided this is an important issue to resolve and we’re going to hold firm on this. Anybody else who is making a mirror of the Oregon law should drop me a line and let me know.”
It got me thinking about what the state can actually claim to own. Shouldn’t pretty much anything owned by the state be considered in the commons? If I take a picture of a state park in Oregon’s Columbia River gorge, am I violating the state’s rights by displaying the natural beauty of the state’s land without giving it compensation? If another state wants to enact one of Oregon’s more progressive laws, would they be barred from doing so? How does this effect other community-driven public information tools, like Wikidpedia?
I checked out the section of the Oregon State Legislature website where laws are, and as a web designer, I wasn’t too taken with it. Obviously, matters of personal taste are highly subjective. However, framed in one of the tasty pages here at drew3ooo, I think it’s a stunning work of art, and I prefer to be able to look up drinking ages and various age-of-consent prohibitions in the comfort of my own domain name. So, for all of you who don’t want to go slogging through the ugly, weirdly non-centered, image-heavy and non-web standards Oregon legislatures website to find out what it says about pumping your own gasoline or the the access people have to higher education awards while in internment camps, check out the Beaver state’s laws right here on d3.
My spanking new Oregon State Law page
The Large Hadron Collider Appreciation Society
I’ve upped my geek status another notch by becoming an admin of the Facebook Large Hadron Collider Appreciation Group, which I’m thinking needs more of a cult following. Parenthood and employment obligations bar me from running off to the Franco-Swiss border to attend the last open-house tour before they fire it up, so the chances of me getting the first mini black hole created there named after my son Jasper are growing increasingly remote, but at least I can visit the thing virtually; Peter McCready has snapped a series of VR panorama tech-porn shots (link via Neatorama) of the CERN beauty.
I love Make Magazine
Learning how to make a fireball shooter is just one cool reason to check out this site and buy their magazines. This is the real DIY stuff.
Make a Fireball Shooter! – video powered by Metacafe
— Make Magazine (via BoingBoing)
WikiScanner
WikiScanner lists anonymous wikipedia edits from “interesting organizations.” I found it via this BoingBoing post about CIA, FBI and associated spooks editing WikiPedia entries about Iraq and other crimes. More than just an outing service, it’s fun to type in various organizations to see what comes up.
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“I’m an atheist and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.”