COMM 209: Copyright, Creative Commons, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksers' bus

Merry Pranksters' bus ( Creative Commons photo)

Even as university students, you will be concerned with copyright issues when you publish material. And remember, in mass communications law to "publish" something means to write it down for a third party. In class Wednesday, we'll demonstrate something called Creative Commons. I used it to illustrate this blog post.

Here's how I did it.

I wanted to post something about a novelist named Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, a group of hippies who were written up in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And I wanted to use a picture of the bus they used for some of their most famous pranks. You see it in the picture above.

Here's the basic background, from a University of Virginia website about the 60s:

THE PUBLICATION OF Kesey's second novel Sometimes a Great Notion demanded his presence in New York, so Kesey bought a 1939 International Harvester school bus that he and the Merry Pranksters painted in day-glo colors, and outfitted it for a cross-country trip. With Neal Cassady at the wheel, they left La Honda in June 1964 and began their now legendary journey across the country, smoking marijuana, and dropping acid along the way. The top of the bus was made into a musical stage and when it detoured through some cities, the Pranksters blasted a combination of crude homemade music and running commentary to all the astonished onlookers. They arrived in New York in July after an arduous journey, whereupon Neal Cassady introduced them to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg embraced the new legends immediately and arranged for them to drive to Millbrook to meet the other psychedelic pioneer, Timothy Leary. Jack Kerouac was not impressed and had little to say to either Kesey or the Merry Pranksters. ...

Kesey and the Pranksters said if you were grooving, or tripping, with them, you were "on the bus." And if you weren't, you were "off the bus." I can't believe we used to talk like that. (And, no, I wasn't on the bus.) On the a website called wild-bohemian.com, webmaster Colin Pringle explains how it started:

On the Great Bus Trip of 1964, Ken Kesey had a problem. Every time they had to stop for gas or something, some of the Pranksters would wander off and whenever it was time to leave, at least one Prankster could not be found. Hence the metaphor, "You're either on the bus or off the bus." Of course, no outsider had any idea what Kesey was talking about when he said that, because you had to have been on the bus that summer to get it.

In short, it was all about the bus. So I wanted a picture I could post to the blog. And I can get one from Creative Commons.

First: I went to the Google start page and did an image search on keywords: Merry + Pranksters + bus + Creative + Commons. I clicked on the first picture in the directory, and it took me to a Flickr photo page put up by a guy from Canada whose screen name is "Larry He's So Fine." His photos are available for reuse for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons license.

In the lower right of the Flickr page, there's a link that says "Some rights reserved." I clicked on it, and it took me to an explanation of how Creative Commons works. By copying the HTML code from the browser for that page , I embedded it when I wrote my cutlines for this page -- the caption under the photo -- and thus created a link to the original Flickr page and credited it at the same time.