<videovortex> A short OVC note

[Andreas Treske]

To confess, I visited OVC. And to confess, I had a presentation, and  
to confess I skipped some of the talks. My free choice moved towards  
the city of New York and a bicycle ride to Williamsburg during  
Gabriellas talk, thanks it was streamed online to catch up later. What  
was I missing?

"Democracy and Innovation, anyone, anywhere, everyone, everywhere ..."  
- Yes, this was actually one of the first statements of Yochai Benkler  
in his keynote, and so he continued - "networked information economy -  
radically decentralized, physical capital and human capabilitiies ...  
distributed action, solutions, experimentation, adaptation ... from  
mountain bikes to free software, millions of people trying to find a  
solution, ... innovation comes from a network of conntected people,  
anyone is allowed to say I have an idea, a project, ... faster  
learning and innovation ... distributed learning means that someone  
with the right skills will look at the problem ... cultural  
democracy ..."
In this wonderful dream the commons will take "control over the  
physical pipes, control over logical platforms and tools [that] can  
constrain creativity, control over existing cultural materials".

MOZILLA in the following session was answering the question what  
happens to video when it gets connected to the web, when it gets in  
the structure the web is used to, yes, in the "spirit of the web".   
What happens is clear, when it is written in the open source with the  
right technology, the video will be open for remix without permission.

Of course, the next session had to be on fair use. To be honest this  
was one of the sessions where I was most curious about. I had my  
doubts and I still have my doubts about the understanding of "fair  
use", which just might come from my background as a filmmaker as well  
as my latest experience with the documentary "Mustafa". OVC seems to  
be the right place for an answer and actually here I listened to one  
of the best sessions (I confess again): It was Corynne McSherry -  
Staff Lawyer, Electronic Frontier Foundation - who made it very clear  
how easy it is to get a work down from the Internet. It is just a  
simple email referring to copyright or trademark infringements. Just a  
simple complain.  ...

Yes, there was lots of interesting things going on at the OVC - a hype  
industry, a hype "open" model, announcements of "openness" in  
software, codecs, very excited and engaged speeches and the look to  
far away and distant countries.

My session went well, cut a little bit short by very polite "metadata"  
people, reminding that OVC was really more about an industry meeting  
and their tools and gadgets. (And by the way it was the release of the  
iPhone 3G S that day). There were 4 or 5 monitors with video works  
running in loops in front of the information desk. Perry's work,  
announced, but did not appear.

Andreas


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