Romulus, Remus, Lavazza. Flickr image from todd mecklem.
Despite the fact that we are well under 65 years old, my boyfriend and I are subscription people.
Delivery people visit us almost daily, materializing out of Monterey Bay to bring us everything from the Wall Street Journal to Yoga Journal. There’s also Men’s Health, Sierra Club, New Yorker, Vanity Fair and AAA magazines (come to think of it, I think our magazines are cooler than we are!)
They also bring us coffee.
Yep: We subscribe to coffee. (If Amazon should ever start selling beer, we would never leave the house!)
Three different kinds of espresso, no less:
First, there’s Lavazza Caffe Espresso Ground Coffee. In our house, its name is the “jar one” or sometimes “the black one”. It’s fab for cappuccino, which I somehow manage to make every morning before even waking up. I don’t know how it happens, but one moment I’m sleeping and the next moment I’m standing in front of the coffee machine. Sometimes I suspect Dave is somehow responsible for this, but I’m never sure.
Next there’s Lavazza Qualita Rossa. In our house, it’s known as “the red one” (which although I don’t speak Italian, I think is a fairly accurate name!) Its job it to be our after-dinner espresso. (Seriously, how else could we stay awake to watch all those Criminal Intent marathons? duh).
Flickr image from user Joshua Rappeneker
Finally, we have added Lavazza Crema e Gusto, a.k.a “the blue one”. Its job is to kick our butt should the other coffees not be enough to get us through the afternoon.
I should note here that we also enjoy Illy coffee from time to time. We’ve also tried Cafe Bustelo. So don’t think we’re brand-focus snobs (only pro-Italy, anti-drip snobs. Sorry Folgers, but ICK).
(To be fair, Bustelo is apparently the hippest espresso north of the equator and is available on subscription. But Dave prefers Italian over Mexican coffee. So as Heidi Klum’s tacky tacky producers would say, Bustelo got “Auf’d”!)
One of my favorite bloggers (who I sometimes comment to but never e-mail responses to (sorry Vrabel! It’s not you, it’s me and my horrible horrible lack of focus)) recently wrote an entire blog post just to made me feel a lot about better about all these subscriptions:
“a study…published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a title that it’s very difficult to not make a childish joke about, involved two large studies that followed professionals for over two decades. And it found that people who drank at least five to seven cups of coffee a week — around here we call that “the crossword puzzle,” but whatever — had a significantly lower risk of dying from anything compared to those inexplicable freakshows who didn’t drink any at all. Those who drink four to five cups a day had even better protection, although it’s difficult to congratulate them on it, because they’re in the bathroom all the time.”
In other coffee-related fabulousness, are you familiar with Lavazza’s super cool yearly calendar? It’s so exclusive and hip that it seems impossible to buy anywhere on the entire Internet.
Me: Law-abiding journalist who takes blurry photos. Looking for illustrative photograph to run alongside article or blog post. Editor at a not-for-profit by day, sometimes producing video for established media brands.
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons licences are an evolution in copyright.
Copyright law has so far developed mainly within nation-states; copyright law in the UK developed differently than copyright law in Italy or Germany.
The Internet enables more collaboration between people and businesses in these countries, though, necessitating a harmonized way to share.
Creative Commons licences allow creators of original works – be they photographs, articles or videos – to easily label their works with copyright permissions.
There are six versions of the licences, ranging from restrictive “Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives” permissions to an “Attribution” licence that allows the work to be used for commercial and not-for-profit work as long as its attributed.
Permission granted
Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, the not-for-profit that helps write and distribute the licences wrote:
“Imagine an amateur filmmaker creating content to upload to their website as they try to clear the rights of music that they’ve gathered from across the Internet.
Or imagine someone who wants to give a television broadcaster the right to use, with attribution, a photograph that they had posted on their blog.
In most cases, the legal fees would exceed the value of the transaction and the sharing would fail, either because the parties would ignore the law, or opt not to share because the legal cost of doing so was prohibitive.”
Creative Commons allow for a reversal of permission paradigms.
Editors or filmmakers previously had to find and ask authors or studios for legal permission to use a particular original work.
Creative Commons allows authors and studios to label their original work with legal permissions. Anyone who sees the work is then aware of how they may or may not legally use the work. They don’t have to ask permission.
What’s happening in Europe?
Creative Commons licences have been written for 25 of the 27 member states of the European Union. Legal experts in each country have written the licences to comply with the basis of local legal codes.
Proliferation of Creative Commons seems to be in line with current thinking in Brussels. Fostering a climate that enables Internet users to easily share their creative work is a priority within the EU.
Original signatories to the manifesto include Knowledgeland, a Dutch thinktank working toward a knowledge-based economy; iCommons, a UK charity promoting open-source software; and Digitale Allmend, a Swiss association dedicated to securing public access to digital assets. Other original signatories include like-minded Italian, Slovinian, Croatian, Brazillian and American groups.
The COMMUNIA is mainly concerned with open access and making analogue versions of cultural heritage available to the public in digital form. The Commission-funded digital museum project, Europeana, is a reflection of this effort.
The COMMUNIA defines open access as:
“a movement away from an ‘all rights reserved’ approach, by which rightsholders reserve every single use possible, towards a “some rights reserved” approach, by which rightsholders voluntarily renounce to some of the exclusive rights granted by copyright law.”
Future of EU copyright law
Addressing the future of copyright law online in Europe was from 2006-2010 the job of commissioner Viviane Reading, who for the second Barroso Commission has shifted to work on another portfolio.
Before Reading took this role in the second Barroso Commission, she
spoke in favour of reforming European copyright law to better enable protection of orphan works as well as the digitalisation of cultural heritage.
Dutchwoman Neelie Kroes now presides over the task of online copyrights. Like Reading, Kroes has said that allowing for the development of a single market for online content is the best way to fight Internet piracy. (Other commissioners may disagree with this approach.)
Kroes, who worked on international competition issues during the first Barroso Commission, is most famous for imposing fines on Microsoft related to an antitrust case with the American software maker.
Kroes’ stated priorities in her new job include creation of a single clearinghouse for music rights in the EU.
She could be supportive of initiatives like Creative Commons, according to Reuters reporting from 21 January, 2010:
“Kroes, however, has shown little appetite for extending crackdowns on piracy — France, for example, has legislated to disconnect consumers from the Internet for illegal downloading — before a properly functioning market is in place.
‘Copyright is important for economy and culture, people deserve its protection, but no proper action is possible while there is no single market,’ she told the European Parliament last week in a final “interview” for the Digital Agenda post.”
So what?
Whether you’re working on a non-profit media site like this one, a private media startup, a government or a blog, Creative Commons makes it possible for you to share or use writings, photography or videos.
In January, 2009, Al Jazeera began hosting a repository of Creative Commons-licensed footage from Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza.
With seven reporters based in Gaza, Al Jazeera had access to exclusive footage while the Israeli Defence Forces would not allow more journalists into Gaza. Al Jazeera could have charged other broadcastors by the second for its exclusive content.
Moeed Ahmad, the head of new media for Al Jazeera, said his company benefitted from incoming links from sites like Wikipedia, which used still images from Al Jazeera videos.
In the summer of 2009, Al Jazeera opened its blog section for re-use with a Creative Commons license.
What for photographers?
Many photojournalists worry that the proliferation of free photography will lead to the devolution of photojournalism as a profession.
Others have used Creative Commons to search for new ways to profit from photography.
In autumn, 2009, professional photographer Jonathan Worth circulated Creative Commons licensed photographs of science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. The images were licensed for commercial and non-commercial use.
Alongside these, Worth began selling series of limited-edition prints of his work alongside Doctorow’s book, For the Win. He wanted to see if the free photos generated publicity for the paid-for versions of his work.
“What’s at stake here is the possibility of identifying practices that enable community-building and audience-building on the fly, around an idea, something we’re seeing more and more of.”
Think legacy media brands are not reinventing and repackaging themselves?
Check out some video and print ads I’ve found online promoting news products from Russia Today to O Globo (Brazil) and TV3 (Estonia).
A slick Simpsons parody advertises Estonian news (Thanks for the tip, RFE). I was told via Twitter that the ad was very believable in its portrayal of Estonian life (kidding!).
In Belgium, this quirky ad showcases an artist frying a steak to promote cobra.be, a culture site with content from Belgium’s state broadcaster. The theme in this campaign seems to be that whenever someone famous in Belgium - like actress Marie Vinck - Cobra.be will be there to cover it.
These nice videos (with subtitles, helpfully!) come from Brazil, where they promote O Globo. It is the biggest newspaper in Brazil.
This one is my favorite. I love the action of the “mouse” picking up trash or helping students. The ad shows the paper as a partner for motivated citizens.
This one promotes O Globo as being more than “just the paper” in a newspaper
This cheeky ad comes from France, where it advertises Le Monde Magazine. The tagline is “Bring the world into focus.” It seems to be a big hit online; the two YouTube versions of it that I’ve found each have more than 50,000 views.
Finally for now, these ads promoting the international TV channel Russia Today are causing a stir in the United Kingdom. The theme here is promoting Russia Today as a channel whose journalists ask tough questions and challenge commonly held beliefs.
