An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The Blender Institute develops Blender, a free and open source 3D graphics tool used to create animated films. Sintel and Big Buck Bunny are among Blender's most recognizable titles and due to Creative Commons licensing (CC BY), they are widely shared, used, remixed and reshared. According to original Blender creator Ton Roosendaal, "Open licenses are essential for sharing our films and their source material." Right now, a company is claiming that Blender's free content is actually their content and as a result, must be immediately removed from the internet. We're talking about content that was created with Blender's explicit blessing but even after multiple appeals, not even YouTube will see reason.

Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz is the co-founder and CTO at AI-focused driver safety company, Nexar. On Sunday he informed TorrentFreak that he's also an independent film composer and producer, working with music production libraries, and distributing to the main music platforms. TorrentFreak contacted Bruno after noticing a post he made on a music production forum. He wrote that after uploading a video containing a clip from the Blender movie Caminandes 3 -- Llamigos, YouTube notified him that a rightsholder had filed a copyright complaint, his video had been taken down, and a copyright strike had been issued to his account. The complaint, sent by Uzbekistan-based media/news company ZO'R TV, was not the result of automatic matching under Content ID. It was filed as a formal DMCA notice, meaning that someone probably reviewed the details before sending the complaint. The notice claimed that Bruno had infringed ZO'R TV's copyrights by reproducing content (6:21 to 8:26) from this YouTube video published in 2018.

Since the content in question is obviously from Blender's film Caminandes 3, ZO'R TV was in no position to issue a DMCA notice. On that basis, Bruno followed the recognized procedure by sending a DMCA counternotice to YouTube. It didn't go well. After filing his counternotice with YouTube, Bruno was informed that since he'd provided insufficient information, YouTube could not process it. However, YouTube did inform Bruno of the risks of filing a counternotice, including that his name could be sent to the claimant, ZO'R TV in this case. Determined to have his video restored, Bruno accepted the risks and sent another counternotice to YouTube. This time there was no indication that the counternotice was deficient. YouTube thanked him for filing it -- but still declined to process it. YouTube's email advised Bruno that counternotices should only be filed in case of a mistake or misidentification. Consulting with a lawyer first might be helpful, YouTube added. After three attempts to restore the video and have the copyright strike removed, YouTube responded once again. The message contained yet more disappointment for Bruno. "Based on the information that you have provided, it appears that you do not have the necessary rights to post the content on YouTube. Therefore, we regretfully cannot honor your request," it advised. This signaled the end of the debate as far as YouTube was concerned and by rejecting Bruno's right to send a counternotice, the platform denied him an opportunity to have the video restored, stand up for Blender's rights, and get the strike removed. After notifying Blender of the situation, Blender developed Ton Roosendaal replied, saying the company has "no staff here available to go after situations like this" but suggested they could "escalate it to the Creative Commons organization."

"After all, it's their mission," he added.

He's been a contributing editor at the Linux foundation's Linux.com, a contributor to Linux Journal, and a blogger for Linux Pro magazine. Now Bruce Byfield has teamed with the lead editor for the Open Office authors volunteer group (who was also co-lead on Open Office's documentation project) to co-author a second edition of Byfield's book Designing with LibreOffice.

From the official announcement: The book is available as an .ODT or .PDF file under the Creative Commons Attribution/Sharealike License version 4.0 or later from https://designingwithlibreoffice.com. ["Under this license, you can share or copy the book, or even add to it," explains the book's site, "so long as you mention the writer's name and release your changes under the same license."]

The first edition was published in 2016, and was downloaded over thirty-five thousand times. Michael Meeks, one of the co-founders of LibreOffice, described the first edition as "an outstanding contribution to help people bring the full power of LibreOffice into their document...."

The second edition updates the original, removing outdated information and adding updated screenshots and new information about topics such as Harfbuzz font shaping codes, export to EPUB formats for ereaders, the Zotero extension for bibliographies, and Angry Reviewer, a Grammarly-like extension for editing diction.

In the future, the writers plan to release other editions as necessary to keep Designing with LibreOffice current.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader nanday for sharing the news.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares this announcement from the EFF's DeepLinks blog:

This weekend, EFF is celebrating the life and work of programmer, activist, and entrepreneur Aaron Swartz by participating in the 2022 Aaron Swartz Day and Hackathon. This year, the event will be held in person at the Internet Archive in San Francisco on Nov. 12 and Nov. 13. It will also be livestreamed; links to the livestream will be posted each morning.

Those interested in attending in-person or remotely can register for the event here.

Aaron Swartz was a digital rights champion who believed deeply in keeping the internet open. His life was cut short in 2013, after federal prosecutors charged him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for systematically downloading academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR. Facing the prospect of a long and unjust sentence, Aaron died by suicide at the age of 26....

Those interested in working on projects in Aaron's honor can also contribute to the annual hackathon, which this year includes several projects: SecureDrop, Bad Apple, the Disability Technology Project (Sat. only), and EFF's own Atlas of Surveillance. In addition to the hackathon in San Francisco, there will also be concurrent hackathons in Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil. For more information on the hackathon and for a full list of speakers, check out the official page for the 2022 Aaron Swartz Day and Hackathon.
Speakers this year include Chelsea Manning and Cory Doctorow, as well as Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, and Creative Commons co-founder Lisa Rein.

"Our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation," quips TechCrunch, discussing a new project called "Harmonai" backed by Stability AI (creators of the open source AI image generator Stable Diffusion): In late September, Harmonai released Dance Diffusion, an algorithm and set of tools that can generate clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs.... Dance Diffusion remains in the testing stages — at present, the system can only generate clips a few seconds long. But the early results provide a tantalizing glimpse at what could be the future of music creation, while at the same time raising questions about the potential impact on artists....

Google's AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows... an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn't been open sourced. Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what's known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it's fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works....

It's not the most intuitive idea. But as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and other such systems have shown, the results can be remarkably realistic.
Its lyrics are gibberish, TechCrunch concedes — though their article also features several audio clips (including a style transfer of Smash Mouth's vocals onto the Tetris theme).

And the article also notes a new tool letting artists opt of of being used in AI training sets, before raising the obvious concern...

The project's lead stresses that "All of the models that are officially being released as part of Dance Diffusion are trained on public domain data, Creative Commons-licensed data and data contributed by artists in the community." But even with that, TechCrunch notes that "Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore."

For example, beyond the question of whether "training" is itself a copyright violation, there's the possibility that the algorithm might accidentally duplicate a copyrighted melody...

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is trying to clean up the messy state of crypto copyright. From a report: Last week, the company introduced what it dubs "Can't Be Evil" licenses: a series of agreements that let creators grant non-fungible token owners partial or near-complete rights to NFT art. It's fighting a problem many experts have called out -- one that's persistently undercut claims that NFTs let you "own" a work. The "Can't Be Evil" licenses (named after a common claim about blockchain businesses) are based on the Creative Commons (CC) copyright framework. But unlike Creative Commons, which provides blanket licenses to wide swathes of people, a16z's licenses lay out the relationship between an NFT buyer and the person who created the original art it's linked with. As explained in a blog post, the licenses are meant as a relatively simple but legally sound framework for setting the rights of NFT holders, open to modification by individual projects. It's something many NFT projects -- including some massive brands like Bored Ape Yacht Club -- fail to do consistently. There are already attempts at making a standardized NFT license, but so far, none have seen the kind of success Creative Commons has in the non-crypto world. And a16z, which has invested a huge amount in the crypto ecosystem, has a vested interest in solving the problem.

waspleg writes: Fedora, the popular Linux distribution, will no longer incorporate software licensed under CC0, the Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved" license. In order to support the wide re-use of copyrighted content in new works, CC0 provides authors "a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law." The license arose in response to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the duration of copyright by 20 years at the expense of the public domain. But CC0 explicitly says the licensor does not waive patent rights, which for free and open source software (FOSS) is a potential problem. That means, for instance as described here, if you use CC0-licensed code in your project, and the author of that code later claims your project is infringing a patent they own regarding that code, your defense will be limited. Avoiding the use of CC0-licensed code is one way to steer clear of these so-called submarine patents that could years later torpedo you.

In a message to The Fedora Project's mailing list for legal issues, Richard Fontana, a technology lawyer for Red Hat (which sponsors Fedora), explained that while CC0 is cited as a "good license," it won't be for much longer. "We plan to classify CC0 as allowed-content only, so that CC0 would no longer be allowed for code," said Fontana. "This is a fairly unusual change and may have an impact on a nontrivial number of Fedora packages (that is not clear to me right now), and we may grant a carveout for existing packages that include CC0-covered code." Fontana said there's a growing consensus in the FOSS community that licenses without any form of patent licensing or forbearance aren't suitable. CC0, he said, like other Creative Commons licenses, includes a clause that explicitly states no patent rights are waived by the licensor.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library and a massive repository of online artifacts, has been collecting mementos of the ever-expanding World Wide Web for over two decades, allowing users to revisit sites that have since been changed or deleted. But like the web, it too has evolved since its genesis, and in the aughts, it also began to offer a selection of ebooks that any internet user can check out with the creation of a free account. That latter feature has gotten the organization in some trouble. Internet Archive was sued by a suite of four corporate publishers in 2020 over copyright controversies -- with one side saying that what Internet Archive does is preservation, and the other saying that it's piracy, since it freely distributes books as image files without compensating the author. Last week, the ongoing case entered a new chapter as the nonprofit organization filed a motion for summary judgment, asking a federal judge to put a stop to the lawsuit, arguing that their Controlled Digital Lending program "is a lawful fair use that preserves traditional library lending in the digital world" since "each book loaned via CDL has already been bought and paid for." On Friday, Creative Commons issued a statement supporting Internet Archive's motion.

In 2006, Internet Archive started a program for digitizing books both under copyright and in the public domain. It works with a range of global partners, including other libraries, to scan materials onto its site (Cornell University made a handy guide on what works fall under copyright vs. the public domain). For copyrighted books, Internet Archive owns the physical books that they created the digital copies from and limits their circulation by allowing only one person to borrow a title at a time. Book publishers, namely Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley Sons, and Penguin Random House, were not keen on this practice, and they have been seeking financial damages for the 127 books (PDF) shared under copyright. Vox estimated that if the publishers win, Internet Archive would have to pay $19 million, which is about "one year of operating revenue."

In the most recent filings, the publishers accused Internet Archive of amassing "a collection of more than three million unauthorized in-copyright ebooks -- including more than 33,000 of the Publishers' commercially available titles -- without obtaining licenses to do so or paying the rightsholders a cent for exploiting their works. Anybody in the world with an internet connection can instantaneously access these stolen works via IA's interrelated archive.org and openlibrary.org websites." In its defense, Internet Archive, which is being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that "libraries have been practicing CDL in one form or another for more than a decade," and that Internet Archive lends its digitized books on an "owned-to-loaned basis, backstopped by strong technical protections to enforce lending limits."

The non-profit Creative Commons (founded by Lawrence Lessig) opposes a new anti-piracy bill that "proposes to have the US Copyright Office mandate that all websites accepting user-uploaded material implement technologies to automatically filter that content." We've long believed that these kinds of mandates are overbroad, speech-limiting, and bad for both creators and reusers. (We're joined in this view by others such as Techdirt, Public Knowledge, and EFF, who have already stated their opposition.)

But one part of this attempt stands out to us: the list of "myths" Sen. Tillis released to accompany the bill. In particular, Tillis lists the concern that it is a "filtering mandate that will chill free speech and harm users" as a myth instead of a true danger to free expression-and he cites the existence of CC's metadata as support for his position.

Creative Commons is strongly opposed to mandatory content filtering measures. And we particularly object to having our work and our name used to imply support for a measure that undermines free expression which CC seeks to protect....

Limitations and exceptions are a crucial feature of a copyright system that truly serves the public, and filter mandates fail to respect them. Because of this, licensing metadata should not be used as a mandatory upload filter-and especially not CC license data. We do not support or endorse the measures in this bill, and we object to having our name used to imply otherwise.

Engadget reports: With two weeks to go before its February 25th release date, Valve has published CAD files for Steam Deck's exterior shell to GitHub. Making them available under a Creative Commons license, the company noted the release is "good news" for DIY enthusiasts, modders and most notably, accessory manufacturers. All three groups can use the provided technical drawings and schematics to 3D-print custom shells for the handheld.

As Eurogamer notes, Valve's decision here is an interesting one. It suggests the company will allow case makers to freely make aftermarket shells for Steam Deck. In fact, Valve said it was "looking forward to seeing what the community creates!" Contrast that to the approach Sony has taken with the PlayStation 5. When Sony's latest console first shipped and only came in one color, an entire cottage industry of companies sprang up to produce colored plates for the PS5. However, Sony quickly moved to shut down those projects before it went on to announce a set of first-party covers for people to purchase.

"As part of their growing battle against popular open source software tool youtube-dl, three major music labels are now suing Uberspace, the company that currently hosts the official youtube-dl homepage," reports TorrentFreak: According to plaintiffs Sony, Universal and Warner, youtube-dl circumvents YouTube's "rolling cipher" technology, something a German court found to be illegal in 2017.... While the RIAA's effort to take down youtube-dl from GitHub grabbed all the headlines, moves had already been underway weeks before that in Germany. Law firm Rasch works with several major music industry players and it was on their behalf that cease-and-desist orders were sent to local hosting service Uberspace. The RIAA complained that the company was hosting the official youtube-dl website although the tool itself was hosted elsewhere.

"The software itself wasn't hosted on our systems anyway so, to be honest, I felt it to be quite ridiculous to involve us in this issue anyway — a lawyer specializing in IT laws should know better," Jonas Pasche from Uberspace said at the time.

In emailed correspondence today Uberspace informed TorrentFreak that, following the cease-and-desist in October 2020, three major music labels are now suing the company in Germany... According to the labels, youtube-dl poses a risk to their business and enables users to download their artists' copyrighted works by circumventing YouTube's technical measures. As a result, Uberspace should not be playing a part in the tool's operations by hosting its website if it does not wish to find itself liable too....

The alleged illegality of youtube-dl is indeed controversial. While YouTube's terms of service generally disallow downloading, in Germany there is the right to make a private copy, with local rights group GEMA collecting fees to compensate for just that. Equally, when users upload content to YouTube under a Creative Commons license, for example, they agree to others in the community making use of that content. "Even if YouTube doesn't provide video download functionality right out of the box, the videos are not provided with copy protection," says former EU MP Julia Reda from the Society for Freedom Rights (GFF) to NetzPolitik. "Not only does YouTube pay license fees for music, we all pay fees for the right to private copying in the form of the device fee, which is levied with every purchase of smartphones or storage media," says Reda.

"Despite this double payment, Sony, Universal and Warner Music want to prevent us from exercising our right to private copying by saving YouTube videos locally on the hard drive."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just one week after Google's DeepMind AI group finally described its biology efforts in detail, the company is releasing a paper that explains how it analyzed nearly every protein encoded in the human genome and predicted its likely three-dimensional structure -- a structure that can be critical for understanding disease and designing treatments. In the very near future, all of these structures will be released under a Creative Commons license via the European Bioinformatics Institute, which already hosts a major database of protein structures. In a press conference associated with the paper's release, DeepMind's Demis Hassabis made clear that the company isn't stopping there. In addition to the work described in the paper, the company will release structural predictions for the genomes of 20 major research organisms, from yeast to fruit flies to mice. In total, the database launch will include roughly 350,000 protein structures.
[...]
At some point in the near future (possibly by the time you read this), all this data will be available on a dedicated website hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute, a European Union-funded organization that describes itself in part as follows: "We make the world's public biological data freely available to the scientific community via a range of services and tools." The AlphaFold data will be no exception; once the above link is live, anyone can use it to download information on the human protein of their choice. Or, as mentioned above, the mouse, yeast, or fruit fly version. The 20 organisms that will see their data released are also just a start. DeepMind's Demis Hassabis said that over the next few months, the team will target every gene sequence available in DNA databases. By the time this work is done, over 100 million proteins should have predicted structures. Hassabis wrapped up his part of the announcement by saying, "We think this is the most significant contribution AI has made to science to date." It would be difficult to argue otherwise. Further reading: Google details its protein-folding software, academics offer an alternative (Ars Technica)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Muse Group -- owner of the popular audio-editing app Audacity -- is in hot water with the open source community again. This time, the controversy isn't over Audacity -- it's about MuseScore, an open source application that allows musicians to create, share, and download musical scores (especially, but not only, in the form of sheet music). The MuseScore app itself is licensed GPLv3, which gives developers the right to fork its source and modify it. One such developer, Wenzheng Tang ("Xmader" on GitHub) went considerably further than modifying the app -- he also created separate apps designed to bypass MuseScore Pro subscription fees. After thoroughly reviewing the public comments made by both sides at GitHub, Ars spoke at length with Muse Group Head of Strategy Daniel Ray -- known on GitHub by the moniker "workedintheory" -- to get to the bottom of the controversy.

While Xmader did, in fact, fork MuseScore, that's not the root of the controversy. Xmader forked MuseScore in November 2020 and appears to have abandoned that fork entirely; it only has six commits total -- all trivial, and all made the same week that the fork was created. Xmader is also currently 21,710 commits behind the original MuseScore project repository. Muse Group's beef with Xmader comes from two other repositories, created specifically to bypass subscription fees. Those repositories are musescore-downloader (created November 2019) and musescore-dataset (created March 2020). Musescore-downloader describes itself succinctly: "download sheet music from musescore.com for free, no login or MuseScore Pro required." Musescore-dataset is nearly as straightforward: it declares itself "the unofficial dataset of all music sheets and users on musescore.com." In simpler terms: musescore-downloader lets you download things from musescore.com that you shouldn't be able to; musescore-dataset is those files themselves, already downloaded. For scores that are in the public domain or that users have uploaded under Creative Commons licenses, this isn't necessarily a problem. But many of the scores are only available by arrangement between the score owner and Muse Group itself -- and this has several important implications.

Just because you can access the score via the app or website doesn't mean you're free to access it anywhere, anyhow, or redistribute that score yourself. The distribution agreement between Muse Group and the rightsholder allows legitimate downloads, but only when using the site or app as intended. Those agreements do not give users carte blanche to bypass controls imposed on those downloads. Further, those downloads can often cost the distributor real money -- a free download of a score licensed to Muse Group by a commercial rightsholder (e.g., Disney) is generally not "free" to Muse Group itself. The site has to pay for the right to distribute that score -- in many cases, based on the number of downloads made. Bypassing those controls leaves Muse Group on the hook either for costs it has no way to monetize (e.g., by ads for free users) or for violating its own distribution agreements with rightsholders (by failing to properly track downloads).

Bjarne Stroustrup, the 69-year-old Danish creator of C++, just released a 168-page paper (published under a Creative Commons Attributions-NoDerivatives license) in the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, detailing the growth of C++ from its 21st birthday in 2006 up through the year 2020.

It begins by noting that by 2006, C++ "contained parts that had survived unchanged since introduced into C in the early 1970s as well as features that were novel in the early 2000s..." Originally, I designed C++ to answer to the question "How do you directly manipulate hardware and also support efficient high-level abstraction?" Over the years, C++ has grown from a relatively simple solution based on a combination of facilities from the C and Simula languages aimed at systems programming on 1980s computers to a far more complex and effective tool for an extraordinary range of applications... [T]his is also the story of the people involved in the evolution of C++, the way they perceived the challenges, interpreted the constraints on solutions, organized their work, and resolved their inevitable differences.
From the abstract: From 2006 to 2020, the C++ developer community grew from about 3 million to about 4.5 million. It was a period where new programming models emerged, hardware architectures evolved, new application domains gained massive importance, and quite a few well-financed and professionally marketed languages fought for dominance. How did C++ -- an older language without serious commercial backing -- manage to thrive in the face of all that?

This paper focuses on the major changes to the ISO C++ standard for the 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2020 revisions... Themes include efforts to preserve the essence of C++ through evolutionary changes, to simplify its use, to improve support for generic programming, to better support compile-time programming, to extend support for concurrency and parallel programming, and to maintain stable support for decades' old code... Specific language-technical topics include the memory model, concurrency and parallelism, compile-time computation, move-semantics, exceptions, lambda expressions, and modules.
"I hope other languages learn from C++'s successes," the paper concludes. "It would be sad if the lessons learned from C++'s evolution were limited to the C++ community."

The British Museum has revamped its online collections database, making over 1.9 million photos of its collection available for free online under a Creative Commons license. ianVisits reports: Under the new agreement the majority of the 1.9 million images are being made available for anyone to use for free under a Creative Commons 4.0 license. Users no longer need to register to use these photographs, and can now download them directly from the British Museum. Under the terms of the Creative Commons license, you are free to share and adapt the images for non-commercial use, but must include a credit to the British Museum. The relaunch also sees 280,000 new object photographs and 85,000 new object records published for the very first time, many of them acquisitions the Museum has made in recent years, including 73 portraits by Damian Hirst, a previously lost watercolour by Rossetti, and a stunning 3,000-year-old Bronze age pendant. You can view the whole online collection here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A global group of scientists and lawyers announced their efforts to make their intellectual property free for use by others working on coronavirus pandemic relief efforts -- and urged others to do the same -- as part of the "Open Covid Pledge." Mozilla, Creative Commons, and Intel are among the founding members of this effort; Intel contributed to the pledge by opening up its portfolio of over 72,000 patents, according to a press release. Participants are asked to publicly take the pledge by announcing it on their own websites and issuing a press release.

"Immediate action is required to halt the COVID-19 Pandemic and treat those it has affected," the pledge states. "It is a practical and moral imperative that every tool we have at our disposal be applied to develop and deploy technologies on a massive scale without impediment. We therefore pledge to make our intellectual property available free of charge for use in ending the COVID-19 pandemic and minimizing the impact of the disease." From there, people and companies are asked to adopt a license detailing the terms and conditions their intellectual property will be available; while pledgers are permitted to write their own license based on their needs, the organizers wrote "Open COVID License 1.0" as a template for immediate use, which grants usage rights to anyone working toward "minimizing the impact of the disease, including without limitation the diagnosis, prevention, containment, and treatment of the COVID-19 Pandemic." The license is effective until one year after the World Health Organization declares the pandemic to be over. Other participants include Berkeley and UCSF's Innovative Genomics Institute, Fabricatorz Foundation, and United Patents.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has uploaded more than 150,000 images of biological sketches, some dating back to the 15th century, onto the internet. A report adds: They're all in the public domain, and free for anyone who wants them. The images are pulled from journals, research material, and libraries, altogether more than 55 million pages of literature. BHL is "the world's largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives," according to its website. On top of public domain content, BHL also works with rights holders to get permission to make copyrighted materials available under a Creative Commons license.

This year's "International Day Against DRM" is highlighting user-disrespecting restrictions on educational materials.

An anonymous reader quotes the Free Software Foundation's Defective By Design site: The "Netflix of textbooks" model practiced by Pearson and similar publishers is a Trojan horse for education: requiring a constant Internet connection for "authentication" purposes, severely limiting the number of pages a student can read at one time, and secretly collecting telemetric data on their reading habits.

Every year, we organize the International Day Against DRM (IDAD) to mobilize protests collaboration, grassroots activism, and in-person actions against the grave threat of DRM. For IDAD 2019, we are calling on Pearson and similar companies to stop putting a lock on our learning, and demonstrate their alleged commitment to education by dropping DRM from their electronic textbooks and course materials. At the same time, it is our plan to show that a better world is possible by encouraging people to contribute to collaborative and DRM-free textbooks, and resist the stranglehold these publishers are putting on something as fundamental as one's education. To help us, join the Defective by Design (DbD) coalition as we organize local and remote hackathons on free culture educational materials, and an in-person protest of Pearson Education on Saturday, October 12th.
The group is joined in this year's event by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and The Document Foundation (as well as 10 other participating organizations). Here's some of the site's suggestions for ways to participate:

• In Boston, we'll be leading the way with our own demonstration on October 12th, 2019, at Pearson Education's corporate offices, followed by an evening hackathon on collaborative, freely licensed educational materials... We'll be providing activists around the world with support on how they can stage their own local in-person event, as well as how to join us online while we help improve the free and ethical alternatives to educational materials restricted by DRM.

• The easiest way to participate is to join us in going a Day Without DRM, and resolve to spend an entire day (or longer!) without Netflix, Hulu, and other restricted services to show your support of the movement. Document your experiences on social media using the tags "#idad" or "#dbd", and let us know at info@defectivebydesign.org if you have a special story you'd like us to share.

• Print and share our dust jacket design, which you can slip over your "dead tree" books (while you still have them) to warn others of the dangers of ebook DRM. Pass them out at coffee shops, libraries, and wherever readers congregate!

An anonymous reader shares a report: Funding online content with small consumer payments rather than intrusive and privacy-compromising ads has for years been a goal for many internet theorists and publishers. "We're at a point where it's clear there's kinds of negative side effects for people and even for democracy of the data-driven ad economy that funds the internet," says Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. Now, Mozilla, Creative Commons, and a new micropayment startup have announced a $100 million grant program to finally bring that dream to fruition.

The program, called Grant for the Web, will give roughly $20 million per year for five years to content sites, open source infrastructure developers, and others building around Web Monetization, a proposed browser standard for micropayments. "When we started Coil, Coil was essentially the first Web Monetization provider," says founder and CEO Stefan Thomas. Coil users pay a fixed monthly fee that's distributed among sites they visit that have Web Monetization enabled, such as the web development site CSS-Tricks, based on how long they visit the sites. The underlying technology supports other providers routing user funding as well.

An anonymous reader quotes The Verge: Cybersecurity stock images are predictable at this point: a hooded man with a shadowy face in front of a keyboard or a mysterious person in front of binary code. A design firm called OpenIDEO thinks these images can be better, so it's hosting a contest to entice visual creators to make images that are eye-catching, informative, and clear.

"Cybersecurity," which could mean data breaches, hacks, or policy changes, is a difficult concept to visually represent, so OpenIDEO is going to reward creators for their work. The group, in association with a private organization called the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, issued an open call late last month for cybersecurity-related image submissions with plans to award $7,000 to up to five people.
The contest rules specify they're not looking for "Overused, stereotypical, fear-inducing images of cybersecurity. These create personal misperceptions and aversions, and may lead to a series of repercussions regarding public understanding of cybersecurity and data safety." And there's even a helpful collection of images providing examples of "What we're not looking for."

The deadline for submissions in August 16th, and all finalists must agree to using a Creative Commons license. "We believe that this type of licensing helps ensure your work reaches the widest possible audience..."

We're reviving an old Slashdot tradition -- the review. Whenever there's something especially geeky -- or relevant to our present moment -- we'll share some thoughts. And I'd like to start with Jonathan Coulton's amazing 2017 album Solid State, and its trippy accompanying graphic novel adaptation by Matt Fraction. I even tracked down Jonathan Coulton on Friday for his thoughts on how it applies to our current moment in internet time...

"When I started work on Solid State, the only thing I could really think of that I wanted to say was something like, 'The internet sucks now'," Coulton said in 2017 in an epilogue to the graphic novel. "It's a little off-brand for me, so it was a scary place to start..."

So what does he think today? And what did we think of his album...?