Around this time, I look to cooking magazines for inspiration and new recipes. This year, my attention and what seemed like the entire Internet’s attention was drawn to the small publication Cooks Source and an out-of-control PR nightmare that eventually lead to its demise. The complete chain of events can be found many places, including Kathy Gill’s Storify page and Wikipedia.

The magazine had reprinted an article by author Monica Gaudio without her permission. That’s right, instead of contacting Gaudio and asking for her permission to print the article, they just ran it. When Gaudio discovered this, she asked them to make a donation to a local college in lieu of compensation. The magazine responded,

But honestly Monica, the web is considered ‘public domain’ and you should be happy we just didn’t ‘lift’ your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace….

The magazine’s director, Judith Griggs, continued, stating that the piece was so poorly written that the author should compensate her.

There are a couple things to learn from Griggs and her major missteps, including copyright and how to effectively respond to PR emergencies. For now, let’s talk about copyright.
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Today we talk about foley. Your film creation cannot live on music alone, unless you are making a silent movie, or you make sure you record every footstep sound carefully, you will need some sounds effects to enhance the action on the screen.  Most professional editing suites come packaged with all sorts bits and bites that you can use. If you do not have those, there is hope on the internet for non-commercial use: basically for free for students and filmmakers for online distribution and film festivals, with possibility of licensing for commercial when (more realistically, if) needed.

The resource I want to share with you today is The Freesound Project. Freesound makes available an ever-growing database of sound effect licensed under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license. This means you can use and abuse the samples for non-commercial purposes including remixing, file sharing and webcasting.

You may search the site using freeform text, tags, descriptions, usernames, or geotags.  There is also a “sounds-like” type of browsing available on the site. An account is required, but sign-up is free.

Yes, this is a little late in coming, but I wanted to blog about it for my friends and colleagues in the MCDM community anyways. It seemed especially fitting to send this out to the gang because not only does the subject cover a multitude of issues we’ve discussed and continue to study relative to the Digital Media program, but it’s got Stephen Colbert, too. And as far as I’m concerned, anything with Stephen Colbert is required viewing.

So, a couple of weeks ago Lawrence Lessig from Stanford appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss how copyright law is complicating things for everybody in the digital era, especially for kids, who are, unfortunately, being turned into criminals by institutions like the RIAA. Here’s the interview:

Lessig on The Colbert Report

Of course, near the end Colbert pretty much invites the world to take his material, even this interview, and “remix” it however they want. Three cheers for encouraging the Colbert Nation to steal Viacom’s intellectual property! And, of course, it was only a matter of time before the Interwebs would be all over this challenge.

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