rohitj's domain

Finally Bluehost guys didn’t listen to any logic. I sent them a complete list of all songs and their source and license. They still weren’t ready to listen. Of course I didn’t remove the songs. So, my site was pulled down. 1 day before the given deadline. I hope I didn’t loose any important email. The mailing list I made on my account are still working .

Anyways, I now plan to run my own server. Where (yes, this is the first question)? Not sure. When? Not sure. Will decide very soon. Till then I am using NearlyFreeSpeech.net . Because of the tight schedule, I couldn’t do this before. NearlyFreeSpeech ‘s services are rather impressive. Leave emails, for which they don’t provide any near decent solution, rest of the things are quite good. I will be charged for what I use. I think if I remove my photo section (which I have as I don’t have enough net speed) my cost would be pretty low as compared to Bl(oody)uehost. Also, they didn’t ask for passport copy or license copy for ssh access. That was nice. The concept of “site” is pretty nice. You can make as many “site”s as you want, and you can ssh to the site individually. I had some glitches with php file write permissions, but it was settled soon. Their  control panel is way too decent. They have put the neccessary things only. Not like cPanel where you find lot of random stuff which you never use. I hope to have happy time here.

There might be some broken links in this site now. Please excuse me for that, I am in process of fixing some broken links that I could find.

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.

So, this was going to be last weekend in US. So, me and Conley decided to do something interesting. We were thinking of a 2 day hike, but we couldn’t plan that. So finally we decided to make a video, and Conley came up with ‘Dragon Hunting’. And then, we decided that Conley will be the dragon hunter and I will be the cameraman. We roamed about Blacksburg and Cascades and asked people some dumb questions. No doubt, it was perfect fun for us. Some people gave real funny reactions to our questions. Some people were boring enough to speak any interesting thing. We tried talking to some shop keepers but most of them refused to come on camera. But anyways, it was a great hunt.

You can download the video using one of these torrents :

• .avi (Xvid + mp3) torrent
• .ogg (Theora + Vorbis) torrent

Conley did the editing of video and he did that very well. We have used “Steep”‘s songs which are under Creative Commons license. You can find Steep on jamendo.com. Our video is of course under Creative Commons License.

Enjoy the video :

part 1

part 2

part 3