Events this June in New York and Turin

This summer of 2009 we have been involved in various events. The first one has been the Open Video Conference, sponsored by Safe Creative, held in New York June 19th to 21st. During three very intense days, much has been said abut the future of video in the new digital Internet era. We have been analyzing the risks, challenges and opportunities creators and end users of video are facing.

Video is every day more present in daily life and what used to be just a dream, because of the high costs it meant to use it to communicate; today we’ve learned that anybody can use the minimal technologies to communicate in such way. Many have talked about Iran’s example as the most highlighted and recent amateur video creators irruption in the media.

However this new capacity of expression is at high risk by many external elements. New business models having to find their way out of old models, patent systems that complicate the foster of new ways of creation, the correct content and author identification are some of the challenges we still need to face.

In this context Safe Creative talked about the need to create more and better identification policies to ease the use of online contents. It is very difficult to have a stable and reliable matadata for contents. Also the basic and most important information beeing author and rights involved is not something always easy to keep along with contents. We believe that developing ways to identify contents based on the very own patterns of works is the best thing registries can do to keep end users and authors linked. The general idea was that online registries might develop a central role in the future of content identification.

This way metadata will be always available at least at the registration page, not beeing necessary to keep them always in the very content itself for this is not always possible or at least not with the necessary standardization.

We also talked about this ideas at the Third Technology Creative Commons Summit at Turin on June 26th where some examples about ccREL based on RDFa where shown. Creative Commons explained their proposal around CC Network to collect links with CC licensed works so that users can get all the advantages of RDFa on an automated base. Registered Commons proposed a discussion about if it is necessary to somehow develop and ontology to manage rights with a NC clause in them or to leave each author and end user to negotiate it individually. Safe Creative explained how it works the system to keep track of content identification around creator and rights when metadata is not available in the content itself so that there is a good possibility to link the work to the register page with standardized metadata, such as ccREL.

It was stated that this system would really close the circle to identify works, but faces a special challenge; it should be used massively by users. Safe Creative commented that the important thing to do is to start doing something useful and easy to understand now, not to wait years to create the ideal tool. Instead we need to proof the concept to correct and build upon it. The open API that will go online for registering and queries will be a great way to achieve this new revolution. By all means we have to give users friendly tools leaving the complex processes to us. Any interaction and standardization has to be understood as useful tools for end users.

Finally Safe Creative has been also at the Second Communia Conference in Turin from June 28th to 30th. The conference has dealt about the challenges today’s science is facing as the amount of data available increases and the digital era takes the lead on the way contents have to be shared. There is a special need to understand how to share those contents according with the copyright laws.

One of the main conclusions is that the only way science, and therefore humanity, will develop is buy unlimited and free sharing of knowledge. Copyright laws then must evolve to make up the rights of rights holders and users taking special care of the public interest and the exceptions that must apply specially in developing countries. Also we need to keep in mind that public founded research should mean public access to those investigations and gathered data.

Considering the different interests of publishers, scientists and general public, good practices need to be clear and coherent with the days we are living.

Safe Creative has participated in several private encounters having the opportunity to explain our project and detect possible collaborations around the different ways to understand copyrights. Also we participated on an OSCRI meeting from which will be informing in coming posts.