One of my pending projects is what I want to call "Expired Copyright Theatre". If I had actually become a teacher I probably would have done this with students in conjunction with the English or drama teacher. The idea is to take material whose copyright has expired and make audio books out of them. I was going to do some Brothers Grimm stuff to test the equipment and then get into more serious stuff. I wanted to start with "Allan Quatermain" and if I liked it work through the series. But when I went out to Gutenberg.org to download the text I found that someone had already recorded that one. This led me to Librivox.org. They're already doing this sort of thing. I'm gonna listen to it so I can see if the reader was any good. If not then I'll still do it but with voices and sound effects.
Why Allan Quatermain? Have you seen "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"? I love that movie. I've read every book and story referenced in the movie except Allan Quatermain. I knew the reference, but I hadn't read them. I figure I'll start through the series and see if they're any good.
The Gutenberg Project is an effort to make old texts where the copyright has expired available for anyone to download. I've dropped several of their books on my Palm Pilot over the years. They've got a few audio books, but last time I looked even most of those were computers reading them. Which is part of why I wanted to do this.
Librivox is an effort to make those same texts available for listening. The big difference between Librivox and my proposed Expired Copyright Theatre is the copyright on the audio. I want to use the Creative Commons license. Specifically, we use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 license. Briefly, this means that the entire world has permission to distribute the podcast for free, provided they give credit for it, don’t try to make money off of it, and don’t change it in any way1. Librivox on the other hand has all recordings donated into the public domain.
Anyway, watch this space. If I do start recording I'll start a separate blog and post the links there as half hour shows.
1Credit: Pseudopod
1 comment:
As one who enjoys creating and using Creative Commons sounds for remixing, I always enjoy seeing work posted BY or BY Nc rather than BY NC ND. An open-ness to sampling and change is, in my view, a great way to participate in a sharing culture.
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