New Media Site Abandons Copyright
Some artists are fighting hard for changes in copyright laws, but to some students in Maine, those folks are swimming against the current. They'd rather dip into The Pool, a collaborative online environment in which sharing creative works is the norm.

According to a recent news article from WIRED, "As courts continue to review the fine ethical line between sharing and stealing over file-swapping networks, some universities are adding anti-plagiarism software to their budgets and putting limits on the amount of data students can download."

The Still Water new media lab at the University of Maine is demonstrating a countervailing current, "to prove that open sourcing any and all information can help students swim instead of sink… We are training revolutionaries -- not by indoctrinating them with dogma but by exposing them to a process in which sharing culture rather than hoarding it is the norm," said Joline Blais, a professor of new media at the University of Maine and Still Water co-director.

The Still Water built The Pool as a place for creating and sharing images, music, videos, programming code and texts. "It's all about imagining a society where sharing is productive rather than destructive, where cooperation becomes more powerful than competition," Blais said. In the Pool environment, "cheaters can prosper," adds professor Jon Ippolito.

(But it's not really cheating, of course, when all the artists agree up front to share their work.)

Read the WIRED news article about the Pool

Visit Still Water for Network Art and Culture and swim in The Pool