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Free Culture Foundation is the host and sponsor of the CNUK Project.
Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to create a complete body of works called CNUK (for CNUK's New Ubiquitous Kulture) and give them away under an Attribution ShareAlike license to everyone who can use them. Contributions of time, money, contributions and equipment are greatly needed.
To begin with, CNUK will be a book plus a collection of images and other creative works I have created: photographs, music and a few other things. After this we will add a film, a TV show, a video game and hundreds of other things. I hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally qualifies as a culture, and anything else useful, including a community, software and hardcopies of works.
CNUK will be similar to cultural works but will not be identical to existing culture. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other creative outputs. In particular, we plan to have funnier shows, better licensing, prettier photos, nicer shapes, rounded corners and, eventually a Lisp-based editor for creative works through which several Lisp programs and ordinary creative works can share a screen. We will have internet based discussion mailing lists. We may also have something akin to a forum.
I am Matt Lee, creator of the much-imitated Attitude Cat comic strip, now kind of hanging around near the former Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on screenplays, albums, parodies, sitcoms, the book 'Exploring Freedom' and work for the GNU operating system. I pioneered comedy on the web in 1996. In addition I have implemented one palindromic short story and two freely licensed albums with my band, furny.
I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a creative work I must be able to share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a restrictive license agreement.
So that I can continue to be creative without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free culture so that I will be able to get along without any creative works that are not free.
I am asking artists and creative people for donations of works and money. I'm asking non-creative people for donations of time.
One artist has already offered to provide a body of freely licensed editable artwork. But I could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate creative work is that CNUK will use them at an early date. The artwork should be editable by anyone using free software tools, and not require proprietary software or plugins.
Individual artists can contribute by producing a useful alternative of some existing creative work and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-created parts would not fit together. But for the particular task of creating cultural works, this problem is absent.
If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few artists part time to create specific works. The money won't be high, but I'm looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money. I view this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to working on CNUK by sparing them the need to make a living in another way.
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