Creative Commons recently offered catalyst grants to help spur awareness and use of Creative Commons.

Two grants have been proposed from Austin, one studying the music scene and one promoting the literature scene.

You can support either of the projects in the dicusssion part of the page describing the full project.

Mapping Austin’s Music Ecosystem

The following proposes the examination of Creative Commons (CC) licensing and its adoption among musicians in the Austin area, often called the live music capital of the world. The study attempts to answer the following question: What considerations determine whether musicians adopt CC licenses for their work? While there are a handful of related works and case studies that bring to light, “how many use CC licenses”, there remains a considerable gap in volume and quality of content. We propose to expand the research and to examine the local music ecosystem in-depth

Full Description and Discussion

Common Quill

This project would produce a web site hosting CC and public domain fiction allowing derivative works. Inpiduals will be able to borrow a character, place, creature, thing or theme from a story and create a derivative work. You will also be able to view the creative DNA of a work, much like CC Mixter, by seeing where a character or work originated and who has remixed it.

Full Description and Discussion

Cory Doctorow at a 2002 EFF-Austin-sponsored talk

EFF-Austin presents WhuffieFest, an evening and encounter with Cory Doctorow.

(Why do we call it WhuffieFest? Check here.)

When: May 20th, 2010, 7pm-midnight
Where: Amelia’s RetroVogue and Relics, 2213 South 1st Street, Austin
Cost: $10 donation to EFF-Austin, a Texas nonprofit

(Why do we call it Whuffiefest? Check here.)

You all know Cory from his science fiction novels, his prolific and wonderful blog posts at bOING bOING, his website at http://craphound.com, and his articles on many subjects for diverse publications. In a past life, Cory was also online activist for the national EFF and former member of the EFF-Austin Board of Directors.

Cory’s in Austin May 20th to sign copies of his latest young adult novel, For the Win, at Book People. In keeping with “support local” ethos, he’s agreed to hang out with and speak to local geeks and makers afterward at the Austin Independent Business Alliance’s South First Biz District anchor store, Amelia’s RetroVogue and Relics, 2213 South 1st Street in the 78704. WhuffieFest is presented by EFF-Austin and Plutopia Productions. Beer provided, also delicious food from Somnio’s Cafe, and coffee and tea from Fair Bean. We’ll also have networking, riotous fun, and music and visuals by Dr. Strangevibe. As this is a fundraiser for EFF-Austin, we are asking for a suggested donation of at least $10. 7pm – Midnight. We’re asking for at least $10 to cover costs and to fill EFF-Austin’s coffers – more gratefully accepted so we can bring you more great events.

Note that Cory will be at Book People from 7pm-9pm, then will be coming to Amelia’s, where Whuffiefest will already be in full swing.

About EFF-Austin

Somnio’s Cafe is a seasonal and local, farm supplied restaurant that also adopts an environmental friendly business practice. We use an eclectic style to showcase sustainable food in fresh and healthy dishes. We are vegetarian friendly while simultaneously serving humanely treated (or non-tortured), locally produced meats. We strive to support other local independent businesses in a community based approach to eating out.

Last week, Lawrence Lessig gave a fantastic presentation on how government policies for broadband, cybersecurity and copyright have been corrupted by special interest lobbying. Lessig does a great job explaining why reclassification caused American broadband to fall so far behind the rest of the developed world. This video is well worth your time.

Matthew Henry is an EFFA board member and a partner at McCollough|Henry, PC

Jon Lebkowsky of EFF-Austin will be covering Fiber Fete in Lafayette, Louisiana via Twitter: http://twitter.com/jonl. Hashtag is #fiberfete.

From the New York Times:

Privacy is central to American law. And in 1986, Congress applied that principle to electronic communications by setting limits on law enforcement access to Internet and wireless technologies. It was a laudable law at the time, but cellphones were still oddities, the Internet was mostly a way for academics and researchers to exchange data and the World Wide Web that is an everyday part of most Americans’ lives did not exist.

The law is no longer comprehensive enough to cover the many kinds of intrusions made possible by the advances of the past 24 years. In the absence of strong federal law, the courts have been adrift on many important Internet privacy issues. The law is not clear on when search warrants are required for the government to read stored e-mail, what legal standards apply to GPS technology that tracks people’s whereabouts in real time and other critical questions.

Digital Due Process — a coalition that includes Google, Microsoft, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the American Civil Liberties Union — recently proposed a good set of principles for addressing those issues. The coalition recommends that all private data not voluntarily made public, such as stored e-mail or private financial data, should be as protected as data in a person’s home. To get it, the government should need a search warrant.

Google Fiber for Communities Project Nomination of EFF-Austin

We at EFF-Austin have submitted our Google Fiber for Communities nomination. Our letter will be included in the City of Austin’s official nomination package. We think Austin, as a community and a broadband market, is the perfect place for a FTTH network and we hope that Google agrees.

Matthew Henry is an EFFA board member and a partner at McCollough|Henry, PC

The SXSW Film Festival is screening a documentary about the open Internet and Net Neutrality called Barbershop Punk at the Austin Convention Center on March 15th and 18th. The title refers to Robb Topolski’s 2007 investigation of Comcast’s network management practices after having trouble sharing public domain barbershop quartet music files. Topolski discovered that the company was secretly throttling P2P applications, which he made public on a dslreports bulletin board. With this discovery, Net Neutrality exploded into the mainstream political discourse and Topolski became a reluctant public figure. The power of the network providers to become the gatekeepers to the Internet became frighteningly clear and Net Neutrality was no longer “a solution in search of a problem.” In response, the FCC forced Comcast to stop throttling P2P, which Comcast is appealing in federal court, and began the process of establishing concrete network management rules to prevent similar practices in the future (with some major loopholes).

From the preview, it looks like the film includes interviews with some of the most prominent actors in the Net Neutrality debate and questions the wisdom of the government’s policy of trusting the duopoly Internet access market to function without any oversight.

Matthew Henry is an EFFA board member and a partner at McCollough|Henry, PC

The University of Texas’ student newspaper, The Daily Texan, covered last night’s panel on the 20th anniversary of the Secret Service raid at Steve Jackson Games.

“I got a phone call one morning saying, ‘Steve, the office is full of Secret Service agents, and they’re not letting anyone in,” Jackson said. “They were chasing a demon that wasn’t there. They were on the trail on the notorious 911 document. The whole thing was a comedy of errors.”

Video of the event will be online soon; we’ll post the link when it’s available.

NOTE: Live streaming at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/effaustin!

Austin was a hotbed of pioneering Internet activity in the early 1990s, and one event that put us on the Internet map was the March 1, 1990 Secret Service raid at Steve Jackson Games, an Austin company that produced role playing games with science fiction themes. All the company’s computers were confiscated, and as a result Steve Jackson sued the U.S. Secret Service, and won. The raid and court case made Steve a focus of the nascent cyber liberties movement – it was the first major case for the national Electronic Frontier Foundation, and subject of a bestselling book by Bruce Sterling, called _Hacker Crackdown_.

Why did the Secret Service raid Steve Jackson Games? Why did Steve retaliate with a law suit, and how did he win a case against the U.S. government? On this 20th anniversary of the raid, EFF-Austin invites you to gather at Independence Brewing in Austin to get the answers. We’ll have a rousing panel discussion of the case, and its place in history, featuring Steve Jackson, Bruce Sterling, and attorney Pete Kennedy. You can also sample locally-brewed Independence beer!

Please consider making a donation to EFF-Austin when you attend (or via the Paypal link on this site).

Sponsored by EFF-Austin and Plutopia Productions. This event is FREE (as in beer), but we strongly encourage donations to EFF-Austin.

Google just announced that they plan on rolling out a 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) Internet access service in a number of trial locations. To give some perspective, a 1Gbps Internet access service would be over 65 times faster than Time Warner Cable’s fastest Road Runner tier available in Austin and over 165 times faster than AT&T’s fastest available DSL tier. According to the company’s policy blog, Google wants to build out the super high-speed fiber network for between 50,000 and 500,000 people and to operate it as an open access network, open to all competitors that want to offer FTTH service. Now, Google is trying to figure out where to build this network and is looking for city nominations.

Austin, as a tech hub and an Internet-savvy community, would be a fantastic test bed for this FTTH experiment. Austinites are highly connected and sophisticated Internet users and would perfect beta testers for super high-speed service. Also, with the city’s two major Internet Access Providers (AT&T and Time Warner Cable) experimenting with usage caps and metered service, the city may soon need just such an uncapped high-speed alternative service.

Google is asking for community nominations from individual users, community groups, and local governments. The company will be accepting nominations until March 26, 2010. We urge Austinites to let Google know that they think Austin would be a perfect test site and to send in their nominations for Austin early and often.

Matthew Henry is an EFFA board member and a partner at McCollough|Henry, PC