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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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All Your Rights Are Belong to George Lucas
dean (United States) · Jun 17th, 2007 8:33 pm · 32 votes · 2 comments
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| pwned!, by iconic parody |
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Joi Ito introduced us to his friend, the film maker Hiroyuki Nakano, who tells us that he is now working exclusively in High-Definition (HD).
Hiroyuki has a great plan with no ideal solution in sight.
He has stockpiles of unused video, and wants to contribute portions of this footage to the commons, in order to encourage remixing and sharing.
YouTube doesn't work for Hiroyuki's purposes.
Here's the deal: if Hiroyuki shares a video for others to download and remix, initially, folks will have a real rough time saving the video from YouTube (have you ever tried saving one?). Besides that, the video is so small and pixelated to begin with that it will look like utter slop after a person downloads, re-edits, and re-encodes it. Finally, YouTube has a video size/length limit that doesn't allow Hiroyuki to upload anything above 10 minutes or 100 megs (whichever comes first).
To avoid this mess, Hiroyuki has been experimenting with a sharing site, called Eyespot, which allows users to upload clips (with the same time/size limits). Anyone can stream the video, and registered users can download the video in its original format (along with a variety of others).
Eyespot's most interesting feature is that users can perform simple video edits (via a web browser). If I understand correctly, the resulting mix can be re-download in its native format (i.e. you can re-mix and download the HD). So it seems Eyespot has some cool features, but still has that damn file size limit.
As a fun aside, Eyespot does custom 3rd party sites; for example, George Lucas has a fun customized video mashup site that allows anyone to upload and remix their own videos with Star Wars footage. Here's the catch, upon clicking "upload," you surrender all rights of your uploaded media, to Lucas, for all eternity (oh zing!)
So it turns out there is a video sharing site we can upload long form HD video to. It's called Archive.org, and the maintainers have an awesome philosophy regarding licensing and media archiving. The problem is that uploading and sharing is extremely tricky, due to an absolutely archaic user interface.
A site called OurMedia nearly saves the day, by allowing users to upload to Archive.org, via an alternative interface. The hiccup is, their user interface is only marginally easier to use than Archive.org's!
Where can we go from here?!
Here are a few options I came up with myself:
- Wait for YouTube to radically change.
- Wait for Eyespot to lift its file size limits.
- Engineer a new video sharing site that is based around Hiroyuki's needs (and let me use it too).
- Jump in and help OurMedia whip their interface into shape. If they're not into it, you might even consider creating your own Archive.org publishing site.
- Maybe someone knows about a site that exists today (that'll suit Hiroyuki's needs) and they posted a link in the comments?
If you have any good ideas or know of a cool video sharing site, please add them to the comments.
Thanks for dropping by!
tags: dubrovnik croatia media-events video hd joi-ito hiroyuki-nakano sharing uploading star-wars george-lucas your-rights-got-owned summit07
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