With Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices. Global Voices showcases news and opinions from citizen media in over 150 nations and thirty languages, publishing editions in twenty languages. Through Global Voices, Ethan is active in efforts to promote freedom of expression and fight censorship in online spaces.

In 2000, Ethan founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer corps that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. Previously Ethan helped found Tripod.com, one of the web’s first “personal publishing” sites. He blogs at http://ethanzuckerman.com/blog.

Register today for the Open Video Conference, October 1-2 in New York City!

Photo: dweinberger

At this year’s OVC, pop culture hacker and video artist Jonathan McIntosh demonstrates how video remixing can be used as a critical media literacy tool for school kids.

Embedded in the 25,000 TV commercials children are subjected to every year are a set of specific social norms and values about gender roles. Behind the colorful pieces of plastic and sugar coated cereal on sale are deeply restricting attitudes about gender. Gradually, they teach kids of all genders what is expected, what is desirable and what is possible in their lives as adults.

So how can kids be empowered to not only understand their media spaces, but also talk back—responding to a hundred million dollar marketing machine in audiovisual terms? In his presentation, Jonathan will show how simple remix video tools can be used in classroom settings to deconstruct and creatively re-frame gendered TV commercials. Jonathan has been running educational remix workshops for students for several months. He’ll share how his students learned new media technology, video editing, fair-use rights and critical media literacy.

At last year’s OVC, Jonathan McIntosh premiered his video remix, Buffy vs. Edward, to a filled auditorium at NYU. Minutes after his 15 minute session finished, the remix went viral on YouTube and hasn’t let up since. It’s been viewed 3 million times, featured on NPR, Jezebel, Slate, the LA Times, Vanity Fair and the NY Post. The remix quickly reached cult status and was subtitled into 30 languages by fans from all over the world.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the first Open Video Conference, the Webby nominated remix is being re-released in a special BitTorrent edition that includes all 30 subs, higher res video, better sound quality and deleted scenes that did not make the final cut. Here’s the torrent link and come to this year’s OVC (October 1-2) for the world-premiere of Jonathan’s next remix!

Vincent Moon is an guerrilla filmmaker from Paris whose obsessive love for music takes him around the world in pursuit of new sounds and images. He’s worked with many notable mainstream artists like Tom Jones, R.E.M. and Arcade Fire, and is best known for his Takeaway Shows—single-take field recordings of indie rock musicians for the French music community La Blogotheque. The direct and honest simplicity of these videos has since been imitated by a legion of copycats, but Moon’s style remains his own.

Moon has long been a believer in artistic freedom and sharing, and has employed Creative Commons licensing on his works for years. He’s also an expert at skipping the middle men—record labels, producers, and others who get between an artist and his art. At OVC, we’ll explore with Moon how far artists should go for “openness”—when can openness actually compromise artistic integrity? How can artists balance a respect for open technologies with a desire to present the best possible work? What challenges do filmmakers and others have in embracing open video?

Besides making music videos, Moon also makes experimental films and documentaries. He’ll share some of his work with us at the event. For a beautiful example, see Moon’s takeaway show with the Seattle folk quintet Fleet Foxes.

Join OVC this October 1-2 in New York City to engage in conversations about openness, sharing, and the connected artist.

]]> http://openvideoalliance.org/2010/08/vincent-moon-of-la-blogotheque-at-open-video-conference/feed/?l=en 0 http://openvideoalliance.org/2010/08/ovc-volunteers-meeting-in-new-york/?l=en http://openvideoalliance.org/2010/08/ovc-volunteers-meeting-in-new-york/?l=en#comments Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:59:43 +0000 openvideoalliance http://openvideoalliance.org/?p=4953&l=en For those in the NYC area, OVA will be hosting an informational meeting next Tuesday, August 10th from 7-8pm . We’ll share details on conference volunteer opportunities, take t-shirt sizes, and chat with NYU net scholar Gabriella Coleman. Plus, free pizza.

For more information, get in touch using our volunteer sign-up form. We’ll send exact details to everyone who signs up.

Jamie and his friends at FAT and Graffiti Research Labs are pushing the boundaries of pop-culture and open technology with projects like Laser TAG , LED Throwies, and Grafitti Markup Language (GML). GML (“The new digital standard for tomorrow’s vandals”) is a file format for archiving motion-captured graffiti tags. In other words, a specific piece of graffiti can be captured in real time, stored as a file, and played back as a video visualization or even reproduced physically (with the help of a robot arm holding a marker). GML is an open format, so graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data. The project aims to bring together two seemingly disparate communities that share an interest hacking systems, whether found in code or in the city.

Recent GRL projects are listed here. Check out Open Video Conference, this October 1-2, for a look into some cool new video projects.

What’s perhaps more interesting is that she represents Piratpartiet, a political movement for freedom of information, transparent government, and intellectual property reform. Piratpartiet (“Pirate Party”) has a full legislative platform, but to many concerned copyright holders it’s just a platform to legitimize file sharing. Perhaps that’s because Piratpartiet recently announced its intent to host the Pirate Bay servers from inside the Swedish parliament, invoking parliamentary immunity.

Boosters of the Pirate Party insist that it’s not simply a political stunt. Instead, it’s a fork in the road: “New technology has brought us to a crossroads,” reads the party platform. Either we find new ways of compensating artists, and ask the market to adapt—they say—or we embrace ever more extensive government control and surveillance of what citizens do on the internet.

Copying and sharing are essential parts of the success formula for the web. And though the web has long been a wild west, with frontier zones of varying danger, it’s now an essential part of everyone’s lives.

There are fundamental questions we must be asking: how deeply should governments be involved in policing and protecting information? What expectation of privacy should web users expect? And how will creators be compensated in a thoroughly media saturated world?

Piratpartiet is the third largest political party in Sweden, and Amelia is its leading spokeswoman. Whether you agree with her or think she is destroying the creative economy, her perspective is pressingly relevant and interesting.

Join us this October 1-2 and join the conversation with Amelia—and many others—about the future of video on the web.

Barbara’s research focuses on the economic, regulatory, and strategic implications of communication networks. In particular, she explores how changes in the architecture of computer networks affect the economic environment for innovation and competition on the Internet, and how the law should react to these changes. This work has made her a leading expert on the issue of network neutrality.

Professor van Schewick is the Faculty Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society and an assistant professor of electrical engineering (by courtesy) at Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering.

Join us this October 1-2 in New York City to hear from Barbara and many others about innovation and the web.

Lance is internationally recognized as a pioneer in indie film production and distribution. WIRED magazine named him one of twenty-five people helping re-invent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood.

In addition to his work as a writer and director, Lance is behind some downright amazing transmedia storytelling, incorporating augmented reality, social interaction, and gaming elements.

In 2006, Lance founded the WorkBook Project, an open creative network that connects filmmakers, musicians, game designers and software developers. Lance is definitely a resource, and we look forward to his talk at this year’s Open Video Conference.

Early bird registration has been extended through August 4th, so register today for discounted rates!

Photo: Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara, CC-BY-SA

This week GUADEC, the important meeting of the open source GNOME community, becomes the first event worldwide to be streamed live in WebM.

WebM is a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone. It replaces Theora as the preferred free format for HTML5 video. Flumotion, a leading company in online video streaming technology and services, is streaming the GUADEC conference from July 28—30th live in the new WebM video format.

Flumotion is on the cutting edge of open video streaming, and frequently demonstrates the agility of open source development. Within 20 hours of VP8’s release, Fluendo integrated the new codec into its streaming software. 28 hours later, Flumotion provided the first demo of a live stream in WebM.

OVA has partnered with Flumotion on the Filmmaker Summit at Slamdance and the Wireside Chat with Lawrence Lessig. We’re pleased to announce that we will be working with Flumotion to offer a WebM stream of the upcoming Open Video Conference, this October 1-2 in New York City.

Every three years, the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress meets to determine exceptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. What’s anti-circumvention? It’s the part of the US digital copyright law that prohibits breaking digital locks on content, such as DRM and content scrambling. Typically, breaking these locks is a federal offense—even if the locks are being broken in the service of a perfectly legal creative process, like video remix.

Yesterday morning, the Librarian of Congress issued its ruling to announce several important (and broad) exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The Register of Copyrights and Librarian of Congress designated six particular exemptions, though the first has the most direct effect on video creators:

(1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos

In other words, college professors, film and media studies students, documentarians, and noncommercial artists can now legally use technology like Handbrake to bypass DVD encryption systems and capture sample video clips.

Though this is a huge and welcome step in the right direction, the ruling limits the excerpts to “short portions”—a purposely undefined term that implies fairly short clips—and is a sort of last resort exception; users can rip DVDs if utilizing another method, such as filming a screen, is reasonably out of the question (MPAA argued against this ripping in its presentation to the copyright office last year, claiming that educators should instead record clips off a TV screen with a videocamera). The ruling also only covers “criticism or comment,” just two of the factors that tend to characterize fair use (news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research are a bit more attenuated). Though the noncommercial exemption tends to cover most instances related to online and educational video, many people were left out of this group of exempted users.

Other major exemptions announced this week permit the jailbreaking of smartphones (such as the iPhone) to allow for external applications and the connection to other wireless networks; bypassing video game DRM for security research; bypassing encryption on computer programs protected by obsolete dongles; and circumvention of ebook DRM for text-to-speech purposes when no other text-to-speech alternative is available.

Requests that were considered but not approved included bypassing DRM on streaming video, bypassing CSS on DVDs in order to play on Linux machines, and bypassing DRM on media and software that depends on an authentication server that has been disabled.

These changes are great news, though their limitations are evident. And Linux users are still treated as second-class consumers of media. Still, it will be interesting to see how these rules play out until the next DMCA review three years from now.

For further reading, this quick piece by Nick Bramble, fellow at the Yale ISP, brings up further questions and calls for explanations regarding many of the changes. Read EFF’s press release here.

Check out the official, longer description (pdf) for explanations behind the ruling.

Photo by 37Hz on flickr

“America’s Got Net” is a nationwide YouTube-based competition asking a burning question—why do you love the Internet? How has it empowered you, helped you start a business, serve your community, find a job (or a spouse!), connect with others, participate in society and democracy? With net neutrality on the line, everything you love about the Internet is at risk. Make a video for America’s Got Net so Public Knowledge (and other net-neutrality defenders on the hill) can carry your message directly to lawmakers.

It’s easy to join in—just make a video that’s under 2 minutes explaining why you love the internet, upload it onto YouTube, and tag it “#AGN2010”. That’s it! Submissions will be accepted until midnight PST on July 31, 2010. Winners will be judged based on the power of their story as well as creativity, coherence of message, and potential impact of message. For further details about submission, please refer to AGN’s info page.

Videos that are 720p or higher will be automatically transcoded to WebM!

Part of pad.ma’s mission is to provide an opportunity to view material that lives “outside the edits.” The available footage isn’t necessarily what you would see in films or other video sites, and is densely annotated with text and transcripts.

Pad.ma is a leader in contemporary digital archiving practices, and is currently at work on a new software framework and interface for the summer of 2010. According to the site architects, “the focus here is on annotation, cross-linking, downloading and the reuse of video material for pedagogy, research and reference.” This makes it a valuable resource not only as a free and open source video site, but as a developing library of unique and educational content.

We sat down with the folks behind pad.ma to discuss the site’s development, and the relationship between video, art, technology, and viewership online. In the process, we learned more about the conceptual background for their design, online video as it relates previous generations of the moving image, and what to expect from pad.ma in the future.

Open archives are an important topic at the upcoming Open Video Conference, and a number of developers and archivists from Pad.ma will be represented. By promoting free and open access, publishing content that may otherwise go unnoticed, and seeking new meanings and uses for material in a digital format, they are actively engaging with the process of building an archive for the 21st century. Read on for the interview.

How did Pad.ma come together?

Pad.ma: At present Pad.ma is cared for by 0×2620.org (0il21.org) from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore and CAMP, based in Mumbai. ALF had been doing significant research around IP and Piracy, including authoring for example the Guide to Open Content Licenses (2004), prior to pad.ma‘s inception. Oil21.org, as it was known then, had been working with digital distribution and its effects: textz.com, v2v.cc and Pirate Cinema etc. for a while. When we all met again in Berlin during the G-8, in the summer of 2007, they had just finished the first version of 0xdb.org. In Bombay, CAMP’s (earlier chitrakarkhana.net) own autonomous video projects had emerged from a critique of conventional documentary form and politics, including looking at art more generally, as a “distributive” practice.

Another starting point came via Majlis, an established NGO working in Bombay in the cultural field, who had an on-going video archiving project, Godaam (Godown). Over many months of conversation with the NGO, with documentary filmmakers and other cultural practitioners, the idea of making the footage available in the public domain (which was not without resistance) was pushed forward. ALF and Oil21.org entered the conversation at this stage, and a formal collaboration towards an online video archive was born. Point of View, another NGO based in Mumbai also came on board.

In the winter of 2007 we all began working intensely on the code, on the content and on the licensing framework in Bombay. Pad.ma emerged from this process and its beta version was launched in February 2008, with over 100 hours of content, fully under the GPL (with a specific PGPL, pad.ma general public license for the content).

Can you talk a little bit about the use of text on your site? How does it fit in to the overall project for people who may be less familiar with interacting with video in this way, or contributing to it?

Pad.ma: In the days of silent cinema, there would often be a person, a ‘Banshee’, who would play the role of providing the sound/commentary/annotation to what was happening on screen. His version of course sometimes elaborated the image, sometimes it was in contradiction, but often brought to notice things that would sometimes be missing. We can also see a similar approach in the work of thinkers like Benjamin who saw their task as an excavation of the debris of modernity to bring to light the simultaneously enchanted and quotidian aspect of a proliferating commodity culture. In the era of the hyper image, one of the challenges is to think through what a banshee technology would consist of, of what writing practices could bring to light a different relation to the image and the idea of the archive. The challenge for us is how to intervene in an environment where the image is collapsed into an economy of information. I don’t think we have an answer yet, but Pad.ma is an experiment at trying to look at the practices of reading and writing as existing simultaneously with the image, and not merely as a supplement to the image.

What are the uses for this author or user generated text?

Pad.ma: The user on Pad.ma can locate precise moments in the video either through transcripts, description, keywords or annotations by academics, historians, filmmakers on the video, and also download this specific clip. The user can display, re-use and remix the videos. Multiple users can annotate on all the videos – and these annotations act as separate layers on the video, and explain, refute, contextualize the video. This allows space for many meanings to be remixed and altered, rather than only a singular, factually verified account. Pad.ma is a response to many of the anxieties around visual cultures and image politics as well; that if our experience of the media saturated world is not any longer about only seeing images, but constantly reading and seeing visuals, where reading becomes a process that is compliant to procedures of hegemonic power (technological, political, advertising and corporations). In the Indian context, Pad.ma is also a response to censorship or blocking (and to over-saturation of images that fills the void).

The text on pad.ma is of two primary types, apart from the basic metadata and clip descriptions that are provided on the info pages.

There is usually one layer of transcripts, where the motivation is to provide a transcript or translation (into English, or now other languages) of what is being said in the video. This is meant to provide deep text-based searchability across the archive, and an account of the video that is asubjective, or “true” to the video material. We are starting to experiment with voice-based transcription and other ways to speed up this process.

The second type, annotations, have a completely different function. The first layer of annotations is done by the original contributor, who may or may not be the author of the video. There are many cases for example of “found” materials, or materials such as film clips that are being annotated by scholars or enthusiasts. At the moment the bulk of textual annotation is done, as part of the archival process, by the original contributors. There is not much of a “comment” culture on pad.ma, and this is perhaps a factor of the interface, which requires you to mark a section of video, and be logged in, before you can annotate it. This is partial to more engaged, longer text pieces that the kinds of comments you might find on youtube or nico nico douga.

The most interesting types of user-contributions to the archive so far are text-pieces that span several, say a dozen, video clips. These are either invited contributions from people writing about a particular issue within the archive, or people writing elsewhere who can reference sections of video on pad.ma, by giving a link with timecode in-out, such as: http://pad.ma/Vfrbgdjr/00:09:19.320-00:09:58.919

Pad.ma “layers” all annotations and transcripts, so that when you play a video you come across a number of different textual entries. This means that we are not moving towards a canonical ‘description’ of the video material through text, but a multitude of voices speaking about and through it.

Recently, you conducted a workshop in Beirut to share your work with archival groups there. What do you see as Pad.ma’s role with these kinds of workshops, and how is it expanding?

Pad.ma: It has been a fascinating experience working with groups and archives in India over the past two or so years, and to get people’s perspectives on the possibilities they see for a text-annotated video archive. Workshops such as the one in Beirut are vital to bringing in more perspectives, as well as enlivening the debate around online archives in general, including issues of property and privacy. Going forward, we’re doing a workshop in Bangalore later this month that aims to work with content-makers, but for the first time we’re also having an intensive workshop sessions with coders to explore uses of the Pad.ma API and also re-imagine use-cases for a heavily annotated archive such as pad.ma. So, I think in some cases we provide a valuable service to people with content that may otherwise be lost due to years of sitting in cupboards, and on the other hand, we also hope to open up the possibilities of usage of this material. Some of the most interesting possibilities of the archive will emerge once people really get into using the website to do what they want – whether that means using the API to create a mash-up on their own site, or write new kinds of stories across video materials, or things we haven’t thought of yet.

What’s to come? Are you looking for any help, contributions, sources, technical work?

Pad.ma: From the onset, the software has been built as an open source project, and as such we’re extremely happy to have people use it, fork it, write patches, etc. The current code-base and bug-tracker lives at http://wiki.pad.ma/. The upcoming release is a complete re-write, being developed using the Django frame-work. You can follow development and get access to all the source at https://wiki.0×2620.org/wiki/pandora. If you are interested in development, please join the mailing list @ https://mailb.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev and you can generally find us on IRC @ #pad.ma on irc.freenode.net.

The second Kaltura Developer Meetup in NYC is coming up next Tuesday evening, July 27 at Kaltura HQ.

Grab some pizza and drinks and learn about the new Kaltura CE 2.0—a self-hosted open source video platform. The Kaltura developer community will also prepare towards the Open Video Conference hackathon this October 3rd.

Please register at the Meetup page. See you there!

Registration for OVC is now open—sign up before August 1st for lower early bird rates!

OVC is heating up. Keep an eye out for some big speaker announcements, and a preliminary list of accepted sessions, starting next week.

Damian Kulash, lead singer and guitarist of the rock band OK Go, will give a talk at this year’s Open Video Conference.

OK Go is perhaps best known on the web for its mega-viral “Here it Goes Again,” the famous music video of the band dancing on treadmills. OK Go choreographed and shot the video themselves, and posted it to YouTube in 2006 without the record label’s permission. A legion of bloggers and positive word of mouth helped popularize the video and launched the band into the stratosphere. “Here it Goes Again” has been transmitted over 200 million times and counting.

Since then, OK Go has produced a number of other massively viral videos, each more creative than the last (be sure to check out the amazing video for “This Too Shall Pass,” for which the band built an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine). The videos have been an effective promotional tool and have continued to earn the band exposure. But earlier this year, a decision by the band’s record label to forbid embedding videos on blogs and other social media created a small controversy. The move frustrated fans and followers, and views dropped precipitously. “When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000,” Kulash explains in a recent New York Times op-ed.

As one of the bands to most successfully leverage the web, OK Go are at the center of a discussion of how artists can reap success from sharing and open networks. In addition to being a major creative force, Kulash and company are also outspoken advocates for an open internet—in 2008, Kulash served as a lead witness for a House judiciary committee hearing on net neutrality.

Join us this Fall to hear from Kulash about the relationship between artists, their fans, and the new distribution channels. And keep an eye out for more information about Open Video Conference. Registration begins next week!

Firefogg 1.2, has just released, adding WebM support and a host of other features. There are now three easy options for users to endcode to WebM—VLC, Miro Video Converter, and Firefogg. With Chrome, Firefox and Opera browsers all shipping WebM in the near future, the project is demonstrating how agile open source development can be.

Each year, Nevada’s Black Rock desert plays host to the Burning Man festival. Tens of thousands of people make the pilgrimage to celebrate self-reliance, creativity and freedom. It’s a week of fire art, bad techno, art cars, combat boots, and more.

For some time, the organization behind the event has enforced a highly restrictive set of policies around photography in Black Rock. Through its ticket sales and online terms of use, the Burning Man Organization claims ownership over all photos and videos created at the festival.

Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Corynne McSherry criticized these rules in a post at EFF’s Deep Links:

Those Terms and Conditions include a remarkable bit of legal sleight-of-hand: as soon as “any third party displays or disseminates” your photos or videos in a manner that the Burning Man Organization (BMO) doesn’t like, those photos or videos become the property of the BMO.

The BMO also limits your own rights to use your own photos and videos on any public websites, (1) obliging you to take down any photos to which BMO objects, for any reason; and (2) forbidding you from allowing anyone else to reuse your photos (i.e., no licensing your work no matter what is depicted, including Creative Commons licensing, and no option to donate your work to the public domain).

Burning Man argues these restrictions protect attendees’ privacy. People do wacky stuff out there—in various states of undress and sobriety—and they need to be protected. But EFF thinks attendees’ freedom of expression, and their copyrights, must be respected. How do you balance both concerns?

In a interesting turn of events, Burning Man, the EFF and Creative Commons have entered into negotiations to transform the largest counter cultural art gathering in the world into a legal platform for human readable language and free culture.  Will it work? Will it crash? What will they as a team decide?

Join us for a real world ethics question, with insights into the governance of online video platforms, privacy, autonomy, and freedom of expression. Throw in panelists from Burning Man, EFF, and Creative Commons—and giant burning wicker man—and you have one interesting discussion.

The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. This mission encompasses a comprehensive strategy of policy analysis and reporting, public campaigns, investigative research, grantmaking support, and open source technology. Together, these efforts improve the quality of public discourse, empower citizens through access to information, and hold political figures and institutions more accountable. Sunlight shares our passion for free expression and healthy public discourse on the web, and we’re very excited to have their support for this year’s Open Video Conference.

Join us this October 1-2 in NYC.

The Open Video Alliance is looking for volunteers for the Open Video Conference 2010. Volunteering gets you free conference registration, an Open Video Alliance t-shirt, and a warm feeling inside.

There’s lots of ways to help out. There will be an informational meeting in July for New York-based volunteers, but we welcome volunteers from all over. If you’re interested, let’s get in touch.

The VLC player, by the non-profit VideoLAN project, is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files. It’s also some of the best software around.  With nearly half a billion (!) downloads, it’s among the most ubiquitous and indispensable open source projects in history. VLC will play anything you throw at it, and it is continually embracing the cutting edge.

Version 1.0.0 of VLC media player was released on July 7, 2009, culminating 13 years of development (in fact, Jean-Baptiste announced the release of 1.0 at last year’s Open Video Conference!). At this year’s OVC, he will talk about the genesis of VideoLAN, the difficulties in creating award-winning software in a non-profit setting, and the future of the project—which includes an ambitious video editing suite.

Join Jean-Baptise in others in exploring the future of online video, this Fall in New York City. Visit http://openvideoconference.org for more.