Anderson_Critical_Commons

toc =About the original and the transcript= This page contains a transcript of: Steve Anderson: //Critical Commons at Open Video Alliance conference//, uploaded by ironmanx28, Dec. 23, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F08_3iGk8HM Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/ironman28/critical-commons-at-open-video-alliance For Critical Commons, see http://criticalcommons.org Steve Anderson kindly revised my first draft of this transcript. =Terms of use= From Steve Anderson's Jan 26, 2010 e-mail: > "... My preferred CC license is CCzero, which is Creative Commons' Public Domain license -- i.e., I don't care if it is attributed to me or not. On Critical Commons, the site default for all new content is No Copyright; No Rights Reserved, so that would be all right with me too!" (About CC0, see http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0) =Transcript= 0:00 I was very pleased to be able to follow the session, right before lunch, with Tony Falzone and Corynne McSherry talking about fair use, which is really the perfect lead-in to this project called Critical Commons - probably because one of the things that they staged was this kind of good cop / bad cop debate that exemplifies some of the contradictions that are built into fair use. In fact, the origin of this project grows out of that.

0:22 We had a series of speakers that we brought down in anticipation of the project, among them Larry Lessig, who gave his usual "Fair use sucks" riff; arguing that we should really be going in the direction of tiered licensing through Creative Commons.

0:36 But a few months after Lessig came down, we had Peter Jaszi from American University come out, and he gave very much the opposite position - very much as Tony did - claiming that fair use was actually in a golden age, and getting better and stronger - and that it gets better and stronger - through use. So we really weren't sure what to do about this. I mean on the one hand you can't have EFF on your speed dial at every moment, every time you are making a fair use decision

0:59 But at the same time, it feels very much like we are excluded from that discourse, because we are not specialists: I'm not a DRM hacker, I'm not an actually trained legal professional

1:11 Slide 5 So what really is the place for people like us, educators, makers, librarians, students, fan vidders etc? So I think it is really important to include those voices in the conversation, and not have this be

1:19 subject to this really polarized discourse that makes everything very black and white where either you're pirates or supporting terrorism,

1:29 or you're criminals.

1:31 So, really, the space that we are trying to carve out was, trying to go against this sense of continual immobilization of the maker and the educator, and to try to say: "OK, what would that middle ground look like?" And it looks like Creative Commons; I think it looks like the Organisation for Transformative Works (the Fan vidding organization), and they talked a lot also in the previous session about the Center for Social Media and the Best Practices guides.

1:58 So these were the kinds of models that we were trying to work from. It's not for nothing that educators are particularly cowardly when it comes to fair use, because they really don't get administrative support. There is very little institutional incentive for supporting fair use.

2:10 And so, what's the response? I think that we really, in developing this project, wanted to say, we can't turn to the experts, we can't turn to the lawyers, we can't turn to our administrations. We can really only turn to each other in a horizontal networked mode.

2:23 So, Critical Commons was the project that grew out of that.

2:28 We got some support from the MacArthur Foundation from the Digital Media and Learning initiative in 2008,

2:33 and we modelled our work very much on a kind of mash-up of these altars at which we worship,

2:40 like the CSM (Center for Social Media), the Internet Archive, and some of the Open CourseWare intiatives, or Open Educational Resources (OER), which are very interesting in theory, but in practice, are missing all the things that make media education interesting: they scrub out all the copyrighted material and that's something that we saw as a really significant deficiency of Open CourseWare and we wanted to do something to remedy that.

3:02 And just one other touchpoint: the In Media Res project on Media Commons, which is about adding critical commentaries to media that exist online. The thing that they don't do is host it, so they rely on the stability of sites like YouTube to continue hosting materials, which, very often, as we learned in the previous session, just disappear. So you have commentaries that are pointing to things that no longer exist online.

3:24 So, Critical Commons. We said "First of all, one important thing is that we need to host it" - even though that's the thing that you're *not* supposed to do, if it's all copyrighted material and you try to make a fair use claim, it's much more risky to be hosting yourself.

3:34 That was absolutely necessary. We also wanted to be able to upload and download full resolution projection, theatrical quality video, in addition to online viewable, Flash quality video.

3:45 We also wanted to allow educators to be able to embed the media that they are working with, within critical contexts. So, something that looks like a lecture or a curricular context.

3:55 So, each individual piece of media in the system has its own commentary, or multiple commentaries, and those can be either text or voice over, but then they can also be embedded in a playlist structure as well.

4:07 And then, we wanted to inspire people to, at best, compose their own Best Practices guides, so we have a resource that points to things like the Center for Social Media guides, and tries to encourage people to do that for themselves.

4:20 And the last thing is a showcase for multimedia scholarship, work that can only exist if it's using media in this kind of fair use context.

4:28 And the last thing I'll say is that our developers are indeed upstairs, if they're not here in the room with us. EngageMedia - the whole project was developed in a platform called Plumi, so that's our CMS, it's built on top of Plone. Engage Media delivered the site for our public launch at MacArthur in April, on time and under budget. And I don't know when I've seen a software development project that you can say that of, but these guys are doing an amazing job, so I just want to say a big, big-up to them.

4:57 So that's it. The last thing I want to say is that, it's true: Fair use isn't free and for us, the cost of hosting this stuff and actually putting it out in what would otherwise seem illicit or questionable peer networks, is the commentaries, and actually having the work of transformation be the embedding and the recontextualization of the media that you are working with. Thank you very much.

5:22 applause