A derivative of Lessig’s work
I’m starting to think that I should make a page just for mirrors. First Ghosts I, then CNGPM, and now Free Culture’s audio and e-books.
I really shouldn’t have been surprised that the audiobook was fan narrated. This is just the sort of thing that the creative commons derivatives-okay license was intended to allow. Even though I’ve been watching the efforts of the like of Project Gutenberg and LibriVox I’m not really sure why these people volunteered their time.
Since their work was noncommercial they didn’t need the authors permission, they just started reading and put together some MP3s. The audiobook is released under the same license terms.
Did the narrators do it out of appreciation to the author? To kill a lazy Sunday? For credit in the readme?
For some reason it feels odd to volunteer and freely release value added to a book that’s still being sold.
3 Comments to “A derivative of Lessig’s work”
Leave a Reply
i think volunteering time to make recordings is similar to the impulse that inspires you to volunteer your time to write this blog.
Sort of similar.
I think I was initially looking at it the wrong way. I can easily see why people volunteer for PG and LibriVox. I’ve proofread a bit for Project Gutenberg. It just took a while to think of another example where people have volunteered to work on a commercially available product.
It hit me: open source. They’re very different but now working for free (well, attribution) on something commercially available doesn’t seem so weird.
wikipedia? soup kitchens? lending your neighbour a shovel (which he could buy at the hardware store)? cooking a dinner for your friends? happens all the time…the net just changed the scale of cooperation, and the scale of distribution (since giving away one is the same, more or less, as giving away a million).