New job at Socialsquare, swedish / norwegian news and bloprupcy update.

New job at Socialsquare, swedish / norwegian news and bloprupcy update.

Sorry for not updating my blog lately - I have been bitten by the the microblogging bug, and slowly let my old blog go blogrupt. If you have no idea what I am talking about, don't worry. If you do, here´s my twitter feed. Chances are I will find more time and motivation to maintain both this blog and creativecommons.dk in the near future.

So, I got a new job with Socialsquare. Socialsquare helps companies and organizations understand social media - ie. wikis, blogs and other collaborative / particatory tools and processes. I will continue to volunteer as public project lead for Creative Commons Denmark. At Socialsquare, part of my job will be to offer advice on how to use Creative Commons and other forms of open licensing: business models, strategy, general consultancy. I will also probably take more speaking jobs and organize mini-workshops, public meetings etc. on top of Socialsquare's "normal" products aimed at creating participation.
Obviously, I am happy that Socialsquare allows me to continue my work in this direction. There aren't many companies in Denmark that "get" the NEW in new media better (and see the business potential in openness), and I am proud to join their team. This also means I stop working as a freelance journalist at DR (Danish Broadcasting), at least for now. I will, however, still be playing around with cameras and microphones at 23 Video, a new video platform for companies and organisations.

Why the Stockholm image? I have been following the Pirate Bay Case ("spectrial") closely and found the whole thing amusing, not least the whole mud slinging part that played out in swedish media and on various social networks. Even though painful at times, I miss a similar focus and discussion on the role of copyright law in Denmark. I was offered to comment on the case live on danish TV news and my main message was: whether or not the founders of Pirate Bay are convicted, their platform and view on technology are winning in the long run.


Few days later NRK launched their bittorrent tracker which is basically a clone of The Pirate Bay, aimed at spreading NRK content efficiently. The technology is *very* similar. I am sure DR will do the same 5-10 years from now, when they have stopped focusing on "pirates" and understand the necessary transition from broadcast to participation.

Danish institutions are very conservative in this respect. Of course, the main author of danish copyright law for the last 5 year, Peter Schønning, recently left his job at the Ministry of Culture to join the anti-piracy thugs at Johan Schlüter law firm ("Antipiratgruppen"). Just in time to lead the precedence-setting case that resulted in danish ISPs to block the Pirate Bay. Cosy.

In general, the recent push towards digitizing the danish cultural heritage has not, to my knowledge, been very conducive of a more relaxed copyright regime in Denmark, but rather to retrofit the cultural heritage to "web 1.0". This means that hundreds of millions of kroner will be spent on digitizing and making available danish culture in a "read-only" manner. On could fear this would lead to our cultural heritage becoming irrelevant to danes (and the rest of the world) for a number of years, while others countries make theirs available in more open ways that allow users more liberties. The image at the beginning of this blogpost is an example of this. It's from Swedish National Heritage Board, the part of the swedish government responsible for cultural heritage and historic environment issues. This week the board joined the Flickr Commons, adding 121 photos from the Carl Curman collection as a first wave of "liberated" images.

"The Swedish National Heritage Board has become a member of The Commons on Flickr in order to increase public access to our photos and provide a way for the general public to contribute with information and knowledge. New photos will be added regularly. You are welcome to share, to comment, tag or just enjoy!"

As one on my first projetcs, I will look at how danish institutions can participate in the conversation that is culture today. While we wait for them, you can browse Curmans photos tagged with "Denmark" here and find this great example of old and new meeting, thanks to the power of social media: flickr user dreadyboy has shot the same image as
Curman, and added in the comments: