Thursday, April 19, 2007

Publishing site Lulu partners with Getty Images

Published: April 19, 2007, 7:02 AM PDT
Lulu.com, a site that lets members publish, print and sell their own books, has entered into a multiyear agreement with stock-photo giant Getty Images.

In this deal, Getty will provide its royalty-free--but still copyright-protected--image database to Lulu so that its members can use the contents in their self-published books, photo books and calendars. Lulu has emphasized the copyright-friendly nature of the agreement, explaining in a release that the high-resolution version of a Getty image is not "married" to a Lulu book until right before production. This way, according to Lulu, digital rights management restrictions on the stock images are honored.

Partnering with a company that specializes in copyrighted images is somewhat unusual for a company like Lulu, whose roots are definitively open source. The self-publishing site was founded by Robert Young, who co-founded Red Hat Linux along with Marc Ewing in 1994.

In addition to offering self-publishing on demand to members, Lulu has also sold titles from the Internet Archive's Open Library, considered by some to be an open-source equivalent to Google's controversial Library Project.

ulu touts 200,000 recently published titles with more than 5,000 additions each week. In addition to selling self-published books, the site also offers e-books, CDs, DVDs, and music and software downloads, with editorial and copyright control in the hands of the individual publisher. There's no fee to publish on Lulu, but the site does take a commission from each sale.

The Getty database will be available to Lulu members beginning this summer.

FlickrCash similarly offers FREE, LICENSED images from Flickr TODAY http://flickrcash.com

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VA Tech shootings: world perspective

News veteran and media sage Dan Gillmor has a thoughtful op-ed online today about online, "conversational media" response to the Virginia Tech shootings, and what's different this time. Snip:
I didn’t turn on my TV yesterday except in the evening, to watch a national network’s news report. I wanted to see a summary of what a serious journalism organization had to say about what it knew so far.

Instead, during the day, I used the online media — including the major news sites — to get the latest information, sifting it, making judgments about credibility and reliability as I read and watched and listened. That, too, is the future in many cases. It’s also worth noting that the citizen media component of this terrible event is not a new to the digital era. When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas back in 1963, Abraham Zapruder caught the gruesome killing on a home movie camera — footage that became an essential part of the historical record. But the difference between then and tomorrow is this: In 1963, one man with a camera captured the event on film. In a very few years, a similar situation would be captured by thousands of people — all holding high-resolution video cameras — and all of those cameras would be connected to high-speed digital networks.

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Academy Award-winning film released under Creative Commons

A reader writes, In 1997, a Dewey-Obenchain film crew accompanied an Interplast volunteer surgical team to An Giang province in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. The filmmakers donated their services to document the team's experiences and produce "A Story of Healing," which earned the 1997 Academy Award for best documentary, short subject. The 28-minute film is followed by a short epilogue (after the credits) which follows-up on two patients 16 months after their surgeries.

Ten years later, Interplast is proud to announce that "A Story of Healing," has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivatives license (by-nc-nd) and is available for free online.

It should be a no-brainer, especially for mission-driven non-profits, but this is the first time that an Academy Award winning film has been licensed under any Creative Commons license.

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Moo launches notecards

Moo, the killer printers who make custom, kid-sized business-cards from your Flickr stream, Second Life, or Habbo stuff, have just launched a new product: note cards.

Moo Note Cards are little note-sized cardboard sheets, with envelopes, that are printed with your Flickr pix. Just like with Moo Cards, you can pick a different image for every card. I ran out of business cards a couple months ago and switched to my Moo Cards and I've never gotten so many compliments. The print quality is superb, and I love that each one has a little story for the picture I took for it.

Well, to put it bluntly, we miss mail. Not email - we get that by the bucketload - but real post. Post that isn’t a utility bill or something boring. So we dreamed up NoteCards - square prints made from up to 16 of your own photos or designs. They have a magic folding-flap down one side, to make them stand up proudly on your bookshelf or windowsill, and they’re the perfect size to mail to friends...

You can personalise the back of your cards in two different ways. There’s 6 lines of larger text for a main message, and at the bottom of the cards, there’s 4 lines of small text, for things like a photographers credit, the name of the photo, or your website url.

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Google Makes It Easier For Sites To Cut Off Free Publicity

Google's found itself on the end of some lawsuits from people who aren't happy that it links to their web content, usually making the off-base accusation that Google's somehow stealing their content, rather than realizing it makes it more valuable by making it easier to find. While a robots.txt file or the use of meta tags already gave web masters a relatively simple way to keep their content out of Google and other search engines, that apparently wasn't enough, so Google has beefed up its site removal tools, giving webmasters several new ways and options to control how their pages are indexed and displayed in its results. Will this stop the lawsuits and complaints? That's doubtful, since the existing ability for site owners to get themselves taken out of Google's results wasn't enough. Furthermore, it seems like this could open up a new avenue of complaints for Google, since it gives third parties the ability to have pages removed from Google's cache or have pages that contain personal information removed from the index. Anything Google does is unlikely to make much difference, since its power and riches makes it an attractive target for lawsuits. Meanwhile, it would also seem that anything Google does won't make some site owners understand how it and other search engines are their friends, not their foes.

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