The Media Studio team is just back from Sapporo where we joined people from over 60 countries in the iSummit’08. The yearly event is organized by iCommons, an organization at the forefront of an international movement that seeks to develop a united global commons by collaborating in open education, access to knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world.

The event was extremely inspiring for us. For a long time UNU Media Studio has been committed to the ideals of collaborative production and open sharing of content over the Internet. The iSummit’08 gave us the opportunity to get in touch with talented people from all over the world who share these ideals and who are finding creative ways to implement them in practical terms in a wide range of disciplines such as video production, education, publishing, business, law, photography, government, and fashion amongst others.

“Then you win” is a project from a voluntary association based in France called Loin de l’Œil. Using Creative Commons licenses, they are planning to produce three documentaries about Ekta Parishad in India, a mass organization based on Gandhian principles. This is an open content project developed with predominantly open source (libre) software.

It is possible to participate in the project by donating, helping to promote the documentaries, translating from Hindi, Tamil to English/French, and by editing using Cinelerra (a linux based video editing tool). Or you can join in other ways, through partnership, sponsoring and collaboration.

The promotion approach adopted by Loin de l’Œil is very interesting since they provide access to video ads in a variety formats (ogg, Flash) that you can embed in your blog from Dailymotion, Youtube and blip.tv. Here is the ad from YouTube.

Thanks to Creative Commons for introducing this project.

No this post is not about protecting the environment. Instead, I would like to point you to a recent report from the American University Center for Social Media entitled “Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User Generated Video.” Authored by Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jasz, the report shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration.

Fair use is very important for the educational sector and is the part of copyright law that permits new creators, in some situations, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying the owners. The report is focused on experience in the United States and recommends that a special committee be established to develop best-practices principles, similar to those found in the documentary film-makers statement of best practice in fair use.

A 2007 report from the Singapore based Participatory Media Lab indicates that Japan was one of the early adopters of Creative Commons licenses. Within Asia, Japan stands out as having the highest volume of works covered by CC and the most liberal approach to licensing.
The report argues that this trend will gain even greater momentum with support from Japanese Corporations such as Sony (particularly through the new video sharing platform, eyeVio, which has adopted CC) and with the 2008 iCommons Summit planned to take place in Sapporo, Japan from 29 July to 1 August.
The report also indicates that the total size of CC content on the Internet was 60 million by 2007. That is absolutely amazing and a clear indicator that CC is fast becoming the “de facto alternative for any author wishing to license his/her output under more liberal terms.”
The Participatory Media Lab is hosted by the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. They “produce original analyses of media production, distribution and reuse practices, using well-known and new methodological frameworks, borrowing elements from information management, microeconomics, network theory, law and new media theory and practice.”

Lawrence Lessig spoke at the March 2007 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference and explained how creativity is being strangled by the law. This is a very thought provoking presentation and although the focus is on the impact on younger generations and business, there are obvious messages for the global development community. To solve the world’s problems, we need to get creative and we need to be able to share knowledge.

On 1 October 2007, the UNU Media Studio participated via video conference in a meeting organized by the Committee on Culture, Science and Education at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. The title of this event was “Realising the full potential of e-learning at all levels of education.” The UNU proposed measures to transform the world wide web into a Global Learning Space, through the promotion of openness and collaboration in relation to content, software and network infrastructure. Four recommendations were presented.
First, UNU called more overseas aid to be directed at improving Internet connectivity for universities in Africa. The average African university has the same bandwidth capacity as an European household, but pays fifty times more than their educational counterparts in Europe. Second, UNU asked for more support for the notion of an Information Society Open to All. This makes both educational and economic sense, especially for Europe, which has the highest number of open source software developers in the world.
Third, UNU requested the Committee look into the role of educational fair use in the area of intellectual property and copyright, and to consider how best to promote new models of copyright such as Creative Commons. Last but not least, UNU recommended that consideration be given to the merits of transforming the European Credit Transfer Scheme (or something similar) into a global initiative that would further support inter-institutional networking and the emergence of common approaches to online learning amongst universities worldwide.
Videos and written presentations from the meeting can be found at the website of COE Parliamentary Assembly.