rohitj's domain

There are 3 posts that I started writing and left incomplete. So, here is the tiny summary to everything:

• I am alive.
• Nostalgia has been replaced by load of technical work. Thank God!!
• Proposal for NERD (a new magazine in IITK which is going to talk about research and development and FOSS and Free Culture) has been approved. The magazine will be released under a CC license (probably CC-BY-SA). Final Compilation of the articles is going on.
• I am admin for some Windows machines now. Can not make the company shift to open source, its impossible. And its a family affair, so I can not deny the work. But this made me believe it even stronger that shifting from windows to linux is as difficult as shifting from linux to windows.
• finally made a flickr account. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohitjiitk/ ….. there are 1-2 photos from my small, yet dangerous hike near a national park
• I have got an XBox. Its bulky, so I can not take it to US, otherwise I would have installed xebian on it. I do not know what to do with it.
• Finally a family trip seems to become reality. We are going to Manali and Rohtang Pas. A 5 day trip, with all luxury.
• Lot of Mangoes …. after 2 Mango-less summers. ….. and before 4-5 mango-less summers
• Finally met my old and gold friends Aakash and Sachin
• The “personal” stuff here, no more exists.
• deleted my orkut account. Only gmail left.

So, yesterday I got a mail from bluehost saying that there are some copyrighted material on my site. I bought an account with bluehost in June/July 2007. I share it with some of my friends. One of them is bheekling who hates US copyright laws and the way they use it to exploit people. If you talk in favor of RIAA, he will probably kill you. . And he also prefers to play with these laws. … so anyways, when we bought the hosting space, we decided that we will not put any pirated material on the site. It so seems that initially we were in doubt that japanese animes are not copyrighted. But it so seems they are. Its not copyrighted in US though. So, US law can not make me remove them from my site. Anyways Bluehost guys said that I have the following thing on site, which I must remove. (they use the word “copy written material”. I have no idea what that means )

Now, “Movie” is surely copyrighted. bheekling uploaded that temporarily by mistake. He has removed.
This is my response to bluehost. Let us see what happens. :

2007 was overall good. I got to learn lots of things, and got to do lots of things. Got to talk to lot of cool people. Though I wouldn’t forget that it also brought 7th semester which was like the most difficult semester I ever had. This semester probably took my anxiety level to top. Some of the highlights of 2007 are below:

1. Got a job at Microsoft, India. I am excited about it.
2. Got involved into Free Culture activities.
3. Shifted 99% to open source softwares. (flash )
4. Shifted 100% to free songs. (though, this is true.)
5. Shifted to wonderful KDE. I will write an entry for it.
6. No more Gentoo, it takes time. Ubuntu on other hand is wonderful. (Apologies to all those who are on Gentoo or are thinking of shifting to Gentoo because I asked them to do so. )
7. Hiking
8. Another hobby now is Photography …. need money to buy DSLR.
9. Bought a new web space to play with different things. Its been wonderful till now.
10. Zeropage removed restrictions from their songs.
11. Kelly Allyn sent me her autograph, need to go home to get it.
12. Met some wonderful people during internship at Virginia Tech.
13. <compressed because its personal>

Hopes from 2008 :

1. Grad School or a good job (or a startup?)
2. DSLR
3. Free Culture Club at IITK
4. Passing IITK
5. openmoko / android
6. make IITK music club release an album under CC ( www.tempostand.com should help us)
7. Finish talk with Vox Populi guys

1 : Zeropage initially released its tracks under CC by-nd-nc. Their tracks are really cool. I specially liked Ambient India. So, I talked to them, and asked them if they could remove the nd-nc clauses, and indeed they did. It’s under CC by-sa now. )

2 : I asked pornophonique. to release their videos in OGG format. Kai stunted me saying “this wmv-stuff is quite a pain in the ass, i know!”. But they didn’t know how to convert the videos, so I suggested then ffmpeg2theora. But it seems they didn’t have time for it, so Kai has asked to me convert the videos and share it for them . I will do that as soon as possible.

3 : Antaragni is a cultural festival organized by IIT Kanpur (of course only students organize everything). Students from all over India comes and participate in this event. This time, antaragni has flash page. The flash used the song “Right Here Right Now by Fat Boy Slim”. Of course I knew that they don’t have license to use this song. Even in IITK, people don’t know that there is something called “copyright” and there is something called “license” and “piracy” is illegal. So, anyways in IITK.MISC newsgroup I raised this issue, and they had to remove the song. . Since the flash is not sounding cool without music, so I suggested them to one of the songs Jamendo offers. I mainly suggested them “Steep”, “Bradsucks”, “pornophonique” (yes, pornophonique’s songs are under ND clause, but they said, they will give permission very easily), “terremoto”, “Josh Woodward” and now I have told them about “Zeropage” as well. I am hoping that they will take my advise.

So, with the inclusion of nd and nc in the different licenses that CC offers, we can actually define Creative Commons License as a license which (at least) allows others to use the work for personal purpose, to distribute the work, to get the work free of cost. “No derivative allowed” basically didn’t (doesn’t?) make sense to me because I usually prefer Free Culture in the sense that I think people should be allowed to use others product in their own product so that the creativity will work upon the existing work rather than to build already existing work. So, with the same thoughts I contacted pornophonique, (Kai basically) and asked him if they could release their songs without nd clause. Well, he was aware of the issues ( I was impressed by that) and gave a good reason for that, quote from his mail

The songs are under nd because we want to know the idea or the script of the video/the remix before someone is using our songs e. g. for some rassist or sexist content. We wouldn’t like to be involved in stuff like that. Also the licence says that everyone should feel free to ask for our permission. And be assured that we got only a few principles that prevent us from giving anyone our authorization.

The reason is pretty genuine. So, I do not know to what extent cc-nd is logical.