Update - Thanks for all the great submissions! I’m still sifting through my email but it looks like we’re out of the free pins, if you want to buy one they can be purchased at Wm Spear Designs. If you have a particularly clever rebus submission or image mashup that you’ve been working on all morning I might be able to find an extra pin for you.

Back in January Bill Gates made the following comment in a C|net interview:

“There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises.�

This stirred a short flurry of ridicule and clever propaganda. People made T-shirts, posters, and had all kinds of creative comments. According to Ken Mickles of Giant Robot Printing, they sold over a 1000 Creative Commies T-shirts within a couple weeks. I thought this whole Creative Commies thing was a great way to bring awareness to the issues surrounding copyright and intellectual property laws so I decided to talk to Wm. Spear Design and see if they would make a pin. Bill thought it was a bad idea to try chasing fads but he supported my interest in copyleft and the creative commons so he went ahead and made up some pins using Xeni Jardin and Matt Bradley’s creative commies flag design.

Bill’s pins are top notch and he’s done commissioned work for the Smithsonian, National Audubon Society, and National Geographic so I was excited that he picked up this project. The day the pins came in I was the first to get one and I proudly strutted it around town like I was part of some secret underground revolution. That was over a month ago and to this day I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who has purchased one. Being part of a secret underground revolution is cool but it gets lonely if no one else knows about it. After a while I started slinking around feeling guilty for having talked Bill into making the pins. I finally called him today and meekly suggested that he give some away rather than let them sit on the shelf. He gave me the thumbs up so I’ll be sending a few to the some of my favorite creative commies and giving the rest away right here.

I should have put the word “free” in quotation marks since you have do more than click a button to get your pin. Here are the three ways to get your “free” pin, choose what suits you best:

1. Create a rebus using pin images from the wmspear.com website. Here’s an example:
   
2. Visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation and fill out an Action Center form. For this one I’ll need a screenshot or something to prove you didn’t just write “bananabananabanana” and hit submit.
3. Create an “All Your Base” style creative commies mashup like my Bill Gates picture at the bottom of this post. Send me a link or attach it to an email if the file is smallish. For this you might need the Creative Commies Logos.

For the purposes of this contest you can reach me at ccpins@patrace.com and we’ll say the expiration date is April 2nd, 2005.

If you’re one of the first 30 responses to this post I’ll let you know and we’ll get your pin in the mail.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 11th, 2005 at 12:03 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.