FrostClick Shows How to Avoid Copyright Infringement By Offering Legal Alternatives
Copyright infringement is one of the biggest issues on the Internet today. Artists and companies alike have risen in arms against the free and mostly unregulated sharing of content. On the other hand, another group has a different, more revolutionary mindset. Free content is the future, they say. And so, Frostclick was born.
Frostclick is a blog that aggregates all the good, free, and legal content all over the Internet. It gives attention to the truly indie artists who do what they do out of pure passion and aren’t that focused on earning as much money as possible. I interviewed Kademlia, Frostclick content manager, about the mission and vision of this amazing blog.
For those who haven’t heard yet – what is Frostwire? Frostclick?
FrostWire is a P2P open source file sharing application. It was created by many developers around the world as a LimeWire fork to protect the developmental source code and to foster community involvement in further improving the Gnutella & BitTorrent protocols.
FrostClick is blog/directory of all cool and legal things you can download with FrostWire and beyond. We scan the web and pick the best of free and legal online content online. We support Creative Commons licensing model and whenever possible try to educate content owners on their licensing choices. We also use our relationship with FrostWire to promote the very best of the content we write about substantially increasing the exposure of our content creators. Some of our recent releases have been receiving more than 100,000 downloads!
What is your role in Frostclick?
I am the content editor and community outreach person. On an everyday basis I work with our contributors and make sure the content we feature is indeed legal to download free. I also schedule and prepare the promotions we do with FrostWire and communicate with our media partners to give the releases the most exposure possible.
Frostclick has got amazing content! There are tons of surprising great finds that are free and legal to download. Where do you usually find them?
Aside from the obvious ones for music (jamendo.com, freemusicarchive.org, archive.org) there is really no one place. Some of our best finds were very accidental. Sometimes I just scan the news, creative commons blogs, netlabels…once you immerse yourself in the independent contnet world, things just tend to pop out. Recently we’ve also been getting many submissions – both for Frostclick reviews and Frostwire promotions.
Since Frostclick is a blog with several writers, what are the obstacles that you had to surmount in order to find the best ones and coordinate among yourselves? What app/s do you rely on?
Well – that part we haven’t figured out entirely yet. The biggest obstacle is not having a steady stream of content coming in. FrostClick is a side gig for all of us and we write whenever we have time and find something worth sharing. I am still looking for contributors and found some great writers from around the world already. Hopefully as time comes, we will build up a bigger of a team to be able to release more than one post a day.
There are really no coordination issues. We all have log ins into the blog’s WordPress and create at our own phase. Once somebody is ready with an article, they save it as Pending and I look it over – generally for layout things. When it’s all done, I forward to a pile of posts ready for publishing. It seems to work well. We also communicate via Skype and email if anything needs to be discussed, but that doesn’t happen too often any more. We have our drill figured out already.
How did you build the Frostclick community? What social networking sites do you currently use?
The majority of the FrostClick community is composed of FrostWire users and in that respect we’ve been very lucky. I personally don’t really use any networking sites to foster community development simply because I have no time for it during the day. There are several FrostWire developers and other community members that take care of our Facebook & MySpace… I guess we are pretty active on Twitter if I would have to choose one.
What made you take up the Creative Commons cause?
There was a point in college where I produced a little feature with a group of my classmates. We have written, shot and edited eveything ourselves and really stumbled when it came to the soundtrack for the movie. At that point we did not know about Creative Commons and Jamendo did not exist so we tried to pick the most obsucre soundtrack possible and pay for the licensing ourselves. The agencies quoted us $10k – only to be able to show the movie in festivals… and our movie couldn’t see the light of day beyond the college scene.
I thought then that there must be artists out there that would want to share their creativity with others, that don’t care about the licensing fees because they do what they do out of pure love. I just didn’t know any of them personally. When I learned about CC it was a big AHA moment for me – somebody really understood what this whole content creation business is all about – at least on the independent side. Another AHA moment came when I learned how much of CC licensed and free and legal content is out there online and how little people know about.
This is my goal with FrostClick – to bring the independent, CC licensed/free content closer to the mainstream public and to legitimize file-sharing plainely as means of exchanging files – not just a tool to break copyrights as many in the record labels and government have perceived it in the past…
What has blogs like Frostclick and software like Frostwire contributed to the Internet?
I think sharing is the keyword for both. FrostWire enables you to freely and easily share your files with others, no servers and websites necessary. FrostClick recommends what we think is the best of the best in free and legal content out there from the content producers that want their creativity to be viewed/listened to and shared by as many people as possible. Community is always at the center of content creation and content distribution – no middle man involved.
What do you think is the future of content sharing online?
That’s the questions everybody close to us is trying to answer… and it’s a difficult one. Unfortunately a lot depends on how successful the big record labels and movie studios will be in influencing our governments to fight file sharing in the name of copyright protection. In general we all share more and more information online – voluntarily. We all upload pictures to flickr, videos to youtube, share our thoughs on Facebook and Twitter and most of that information is public! As the costs of content creation go down, more people will participate in the creative process and share the results free with the public.
I think that in time more and more content will be shared online. New business models and opportunities will develop and everybody will figure out a way to do their thing – whether it’s making money or simpy sharing their talent with the general public.
This Interview was published on January 20, 2010 at 4:17 am • Did you like it? Subscribe!
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