[Foundation-l] more thoughts on openness and collaborative media

[geni]

On 19/01/2008, Shay David <shay.david at kaltura.com> wrote:

> First let's start with the understanding the problem space. Video collaboration
> is hard. Text collaboration is hard enough, audio harder, but video is really
> the 'black sheep' (for reasons I discuss below). Despite some promising early
> attempts, to date there simply is no open system for online video editing let
> alone one that supports collaboration in the wiki-spirit. Now you can look at
> this situation and say 'so what? who needs it anyway' but I think that anyone
> that has been paying attention to recent trends on the web knows that in  a
> YouTube era, rich-media is an essential part of the web and of culture, and that
> its share is only growing. if wikipedia aims to share with every human being the
> sum of ALL human knowledge, then we can't really dismiss the need to include
> video in that spectrum.
>


We do for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank#History

> Kaltura is a small startup with big ambitions. It's mission is to build the
> first global and open network of legally remixable video and rich-media content,
> to be licensed under CC licenses.

second:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video



> I want to refer to a few specific points below.
>
> 1. The use of ogg/vorbis/theora. As you can read on Wikipedia and elsewhere,
> these formats are not magical. They are simply the older generation of ON2's
> technology, freed from their patent claims.

That simply isn't the case with Vorbis

>Right now they are the best option
> for an open format, but we cannot and should not design the system to rely only
> on them.


Well if you want a more modern video codec you could always try and
help finish Dirac.


> The system needs to be open enough to work with any available format
> that is free. One would hope that one day Flash will be free. Adobe is seeking
> its way in this regard. Perhaps with sufficient pressure from projects such as
> this, Flash will be free one day. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but if we
> don't try, we'll never know.

That is a bit like arguing the MS might one day release windows under
a free license.



> in the meantime, for anybody that wants to test it, we provide a hosted back-end
> solution that grants FREE access to developers and non commercial use. it
> requires a 30 second registration process after which each developers gets a
> key, as is customary on every web-service.

The wikimedia mailing list was really the wrong place to make that claim.

> 4. on the point of free formats and fair use, and some claims that the
> collaborative video technology will encourage copyright infringement. It's
> important to understand that fair use does NOT exist in the abstract. For
> anybody interested in it, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use  actually gives
> quite a good overview of how the courts have been swinging on the issue. Fair
> use can only be interpreted within the context of specific uses (for example, in
> past cases, making thumbnail image copies for the purpose of indexing, was
> upheld as fair use, whereas reusing short music clips was not). There are
> various factors to determine when use is fair. I strongly believe that for its
> clear transformative value, the collaborative video technology represents an
> opportunity to push the envelope on what uses are considered fair.

Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films would be closer than Perfect
10 v. Google, Inc. to what we are talking about. Then of course there
is the situation outside the US. At present there are maybe 3
countries with fair use and I'm still not sure exactly how that is
going to be applied by Israels new copyright laws.


-- 
geni