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Web service: Creative Commons
THIS WEEK NetSpeak examines a web-based service designed to facilitate the creation of products in the free public domain.
A major chunk of the present technology press space is occupied by various news items that are related to some violation or other of the copyright laws by content providers and netizens. News stories like, "a music file sharing service that encouraged copying of tens of thousands of songs was taken to court by music publishers/recording industry" have become quite commonplace.
All of us know that new innovations, discoveries, inventions and creations do not happen just from vacuum. We create new things from the knowledge base created by our forefathers. Some people think that copyright law, created to protect the interests of both the creator and the people who use the work is being misused and has become a major development decelerating force. While allowing the creator to take his/her due share of the work, we should also have some mechanism that lets others use and build further on it. To get around the restrictions imposed by the present copyright controls, a few Net entrepreneurs have started a service that lets people publish their products with less restrictive copyright controls.
Creative commons (http://www.creativecommons.org/) is a non-profit initiative by a group of people from such diverse backgrounds as cyberlaw, journalism and computer science. A resource that is universally used is called commons — public parks and products in the public domain are examples. As mentioned in its site, Creative Commons aims to develop tools that let people publish their products in the "public domain or license them to the public on generous terms". The objective of the service is to provide the owner of creative work tools to license his product with a different set of copyright restrictions. The service intends to provide a copyright wizard, which presents the owner different types of licence options that include licence to distribute the work in public domain and other different types of licences with varying restrictions.
Apart from providing the tools that let authors publish their work with legally enforceable customised licences, the service will also store these licence details with necessary machine-readable tags that properly describe the licence. Any program, file sharing service, search engines and so on, can use these tags or metadata.
On-line file conversion service
In our digital life, we come across files of different formats such as Word, PDF, RTF, Postscript, TAR, TXT and so on. We often land up in many situations where we need to convert a file from one format to the other. Of course, many programs are available that let us convert files from a particular format to some other format. Here is a web-based document conversion service that converts files in various formats to a format of your choice on the fly. The service supports a wide range of formats that include PDF, PS, DOC, XLS and TXT. To use the service access the link: http://wheel.compose.cs.cmu.edu:8001/cgi-bin/browse/objweb and you will get the service's interface that contains two forms — one for converting a file on your local disk and the other one to convert a file from a web site.
To convert a file from your local disk, enter the file name, its format and target file's format in the appropriate boxes and press the `Convert this File' button. The conversion server immediately gets activated, scans the input file and starts the conversion process. After a while you will get a web page with link to the converted file. Right-click on this link and save the file in your local disk. Though the service is an innovative one, it is still in the testing phase and you may not always get accurate results.
DotCHM file creator
It is quite likely that many of you have come across files with extension `CHM'. DotCHM files or Compiled HTML Help files is a file format introduced by Microsoft with Windows 98. This format is designed to help developers and content creators produce easily navigable help files. Generally, these files consist of two panes: a navigation pane on the left and a topic pane on the right. If you have created a web-based tutorial on a particular subject and want to send it to others, one easy method is to convert the whole site files into a single CHM file. There are many programs that help you do this task rather easily. We will have a look at one such software.
Visual CHM is a simple software that helps you generate CHM files with a few mouse clicks. Suppose you have structured the content properly with multiple topics and have created content files related to these topics in HTML or simple text format. To convert the content into a CHM file, invoke the program, which will show an interface with two windows.
Now, just right-click at the `Contents' button on the left window and immediately a menu pops up. Using the various options, you can add a title, sub-title, file, and sub-file and so on. After bringing all the required files and organising them properly, click at the `Compile' option to generate the CHM file. Now, to retrieve this newly created `CHM' file, access the file through Windows Explorer and click on its icon. A trial version of visual CHM can be downloaded from: http://www.vchm.com
J. Murali
(The author can be contacted at:murali27@satyam.net.in)
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