IP in a divided digital world

When I was in New York earlier this month I stopped by the nonprofit Acord insurance association's offices and sat down for an interview with CEO Gregory Maciag and fielded a phone call from London from British author Paul May. Here's the video of our conversation.

Cross-posted to Darknet.

Lawrence Lessig on Creative Commons

At Real People Network, I have an 8-minute video interview with Stanford Prof. Lawrence Lessig.

War of the world views

Had a good time this afternoon speaking to a lunch gathering at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. I put together a half-hour slide presentation, which will be released on podcast, titled, "War of the World Views: The clash between big media and citizens media."

I had plenty of material to draw upon, both from Darknet and from Ourmedia. Showed one example of citizen journalism: Trusted Computing, created by Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel and others in Germany. (It's terrific.)

Then I showed three mashups (could have drawn from scores of them) and discussed fair use in the digital age: the Bush-Cheney debate; an anime mashup; and a Charlie Brown mashup that isn't on Ourmedia because United Feature Syndicate won't let it.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig was in the audience and asked a question I hadn't heard raised before: As sites build out licensing capabilities that provide compensation for artists when part of their work is used in a mash-up, does that undercut the claims of fair use by those who don't seek permission and use the works anyway?

Great question. The answer is still unsettled. I suggested that users would welcome a narrowing of the large fuzzy grey area that currently confronts those who want to incorporate cultural works into their own. The trend line toward paying compensation to artists for use of their works online is unmistakable. We hope and believe that a grassroots marketplace can be built in a way that doesn't crimp fair use rights.

YouAreTV's nervy TOS

There's an interesting discussion on the Yahoo! videoblogging list today about the newest player in the video hosting space, YouAre.tv, whose Terms of Service reads:

YouAre.TV a worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid-up, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform and otherwise exploit the User Submissions in connection with the YouAre.TV Website and YouAre.TV's (and its successor's) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouAre.TV Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. ...

You also hereby grant each user of the YouAre.TV Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service.

As Gena writes:

You think it, nurse it, produce it and, if you so choose to, upload to this services you lose all of your rights to your creation? Anyone can come to the site, snag your work, create mash-ups/alterations/what-not and there is no penalty (to them) or compensation (to you) as the creator?

Where is the anal lube? cuz this is nothing but another company setting up folks to get reamed. This is how the blues recording artists got ripped off, this is how modern day musicians are getting ripped off and it makes me angry.

Maybe as part of our videoblogging education process we need to start talking about the assignment of rights and full understanding of what you, I and collectively we are stepping into.

It doesn't matter if the lawyer "made them do it" or there is similar wording on other sites. It is wrong, wrong, wrong to take another's work, use it to generate viewers and income and then not cut the creator in for a slice.

Absolutely. Contrast and compare to Ourmedia's Terms of Service, which begins:

You own your own material. Ourmedia claims no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to our service.

Ode to Flickr

Just came across this wonderful original song and video -- a musical ode to Flickr, using Creative Commons licenses, created by Jonathan Coulton. It's just the sort of mash-up we want to encourage with Ourmedia. And it's yet another reason to support Creative Commons before the year is out.

Creative Commons inducts Jimmy Wales

Just got back from tonight's Creative Commons party, at which Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was brought aboard as a member of the nonprofit's board. It was my first time meeting Jimmy in person, and I was thrilled to give him a copy of "Darknet" and to discuss possible collaboration down the road between the Wikimedia Foundation and Ourmedia.

Lots of other familiar faces in the crowd, such as David Hornick of August Capital, Mary Hodder, John Seeley Brown, Ronna Tannenbaum, Dave McClure, Dave Toole, Mia Garlick, Jeff Ubois, Mitch Kapor, Rick Prelinger and many others.

I was also excited to meet Jennifer Feikin, director of Google Video. We discussed the burgeoning pool of high-quality citizens media video, and how there's plenty of opportunity for numerous sites to become part of the ecosystem supporting the personal media revolution.

Glenn Otis Brown (the former CC exec director who's now with Google and whom I wrote about in "Darknet") announced that Google was contributing $30,000 to Creative Commons' fundraising campaign, and that beginning later tonight, an Advanced Search on Google would allow you to search out Creative Commons-licensed content. Fantastic! (Yahoo! already lets you do this.)

CC founder and chairman Lawrence Lessig (pictured above) did one of his hallmark Keynote presentations and announced two important evolutionary steps for the organization: an embrace of cc.com for the commercial side of creativity, and progress made toward interoperability between "federated free licenses," principally the varying CC licenses and the GPL (GNU Public License) scheme found on Wikipedia and elsewhere. That will be a welcome relief to sites like Ourmedia, which are trying to support both.

Brewster Kahle's fight for open access

Today's San Jose Merc has a two-part package about Internet Archive co-founder and digital librarian visionary Brewster Kahle (I took the above photo of Brewster when the Internet Archive hosted the citizens media summit I organized on May 14, 2005):

He fights for open access to the world's digital library

Dedicating his career to open information. Library of Ancient Egypt inspires a life's work.

It's interesting to compare the Internet Archive's motto:

"Universal access to human knowledge"

to Google's mission statement:

"organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful."

Archiving television -- and books

At Friday's Getting Ready for Prime Time: Online Video and the Future of Television conference in Berkeley, I grabbed Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle for this 7-minute video about the obstacles and opportunities in archiving our television heritage. Brewster's great to listen to, as always. (Saw him Friday in Berkeley, Saturday at the Ourmedia gathering, and Sunday at the EFF party.) It's a 28MB MPEG-4 video. (Ourmedia page | watch video)

Meantime, lots of coverage of today's announcement that a group of edu, org, com and gov organizations are announcing an Open Content system in the tradition of open source software.

Here's the page set up by the Open Content Alliance, including a set of principles.

Here's Brewster's announcement on the Yahoo! Search Blog.

The New York Times, Slashdot and BoingBoing are also all over this.

Tags: Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, citizen journalism

Ourmedia turns 6 months old

Ourmedia.org, the nonprofit citizens media site, turns 6 months old today (we launched March 21). To help celebrate, I made an 11-minute video about mash-ups and fair use in the digital age. More details at Darknet.com. (Ourmedia page | play video)

RU interviews me, I interview him

I just published an 8-minute video interview I conducted with RU Sirius, Sherry Miller and Jeff Diehl at RU's NeoFiles show on the Mondo Globo Network in San Francisco. We discuss their podcasting setup and plans to conquer the media world. (Ourmedia page | MPEG-4 video)

Meantime, RU Sirius conducted a 30-minute interview with me Sunday about Darknet, file sharing, copyright and outdated Hollywood business models. The MP3 conversation just went up on his Mondo Globo Network here. Check one or both of them out.

This is the sort of thing that traditional news organizations frown on, natch: You can't be an interviewer one moment and an interviewee the next. I say, in the new personal media environment, why not?

Technorati tags: podcasting, Darknet, RU Sirius