Arguably, Lessig stands to the right of most of this generations creative community, but compared to the current legal prohibitions in place around the world, from the DMCA to the EUCD, he’s a leftist loon; and that’s how he’s frequently been portrayed in the media.

In these three video interviews with San Francisco’s ‘Booksmith‘, Lessig briefly outlines the moderate copyright reform position he advocates in his book ‘Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy’ .

More Lawrence Lessig videos..

TED 2007, How creativity is being strangled by the law
Google Lecture

A few weeks ago I travelled to Barcelona, capitol of the Spanish province of Catalonia. On the last day, I cycled through the city and took a few low quality videos with my phone. These were too shoddy to post anywhere, so I had a play with them in final cut. The track is ‘The Weight of My Words’, by King of Convenience. Remixed by Fourtet. Most of these videos were taken in the cities oldest quarter, the Barri Gotic.

The downside of user generated content is that creators, coders, artists, and authors – the ones producing the content – are engaging in a one sided relationship. Their work, once contributed, can become wholly owned and controlled by the company they provide it to. If the creative work becomes part of a larger whole then this non reciprocal relationship means that while the website, book, or games they’ve added to can freely use their contributions, the opposite is not true.

My friends and I experienced the flip side of social media this week. Two years ago we entered a contest to be part of a video by the punk group ‘Yeah Yeah Yeahs’. The collaboration asked fans to dress up like the band and film themselves dancing around to the song ‘Cheated Hearts’, a track from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s second LP ‘Show Your Bones’.

It wasn’t an original idea, the Welsh indie group Feeder had done pretty much the same thing almost five years before, with their fantastic video ‘Just a Day“; but we liked the band, we liked the song, and it looked like fun.

My friends and I duly spent an evening getting dressed up in ludicrous costumes and makeup, and filming ourselves in various states of confusion. Afterwards, we ripped our tapes to computer and sent the originals, along with a release providing the band and their representatives with ownership of “all worldwide rights in the material submitted”. This rather lunatic agreement is pretty standard as far as user generated content goes, and though we didn’t like it, it was required to contribute.

A few months later we received a notice from the band, to the effect that our performance was to be included in the final video, and that we would receive a prize for our contribution. Shortly afterwards the band sent us a token bunch of signed pictures, stickers, patches and the like.

Finally the Cheated Hearts video was released. Rather than being exclusively fan made, it intermixed contributions from fans and a second official band video.

Despite being flattered (and embarrassed!) at be flashed across MTV around the world, we were a little disappointed that our contribution (it’s at the 3.04 mark) was a just 3 seconds long. So we took our footage, synced it to the song and uploaded our own fan edit video, as did a variety of other folks [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. It was something to email our friends about, a bit of humiliating fun to play at parties. Our finished video was no great shakes, but we liked it, as did just under seven thousand other folks on Youtube. However, I can’t show it to you, because apparently someone at Universal didn’t. Here it isn’t..

The video has been removed from Youtube, removed from Youtube listings and cannot be accessed from the site. Last Sunday (October 19th), I received notice from Youtube that one of those dreaded Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) ‘takedown notice‘ had been sent to them – they don’t tell you from whom – claiming ownership of the song included in the video.

All such DMCA copyright notices require is for someone to claim ownership of a video, or of audio or visual elements which appear in a video. There is no defence for ‘fair use‘, for parody or educational purposes. All someone who wants a video – any video – removed from Youtube has to do, is to fill in this form on the Youtube site and email it off. The video will be instantly removed. The individual, group or company claiming ‘infringement’ doesn’t have to demonstrate ownership.

Like I said, they don’t tell you who sent the notice, but it’s not hard to guess. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are signed to Interscope Records, a label owned by the Universal Music Group. According to the (user generated!) encyclopaedia Wikipedia, UMG includes the largest music publishing company in the world, Universal Music Publishing Group, and is one of the ‘Big 4′ record labels controlling much of the music industry.

Legally, what with the release we signed and the screwy DMCA, I figured we didn’t have a leg to stand on. But I sent an email to the Electronic Frontier Foundation anyway. The EFF are an organisation who monitor emerging internet and copyright law, and attempt to redress the misuse of copyright legislation. I asked them if making a so called ‘DMCA Counterclaim‘ (the only way to fight a DMCA take down notice), from outside the US would make me personally liable to legal action. The EFF were kind enough to get back to me this morning.

So where does this leave us? We could re-upload the video to Youtube or another streaming service, potentially leaving us (well, me) exposed to legal action under the DMCA or it’s European equivalent. I’m no lawyer, so I’ve no idea what the potential penalties are in this area. If I’m quick (you only get 14 days, and five have already passed), I could submit a DMCA counterclaim, which as Eva points out above, could theoretically expose me to conviction for perjury in a San Francisco court, and to a lawsuit for damages (sic) from Universal Music. I could on the other hand use Youtube’s internal tools, which became available as a link from my account’s ‘my videos’ page, once the DMCA claim was received. These provide a variety of unhelpful options – I can permanently mute the audio element of the video, replace the audio with content licensed by Youtube (the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s aren’t an option, and even if they were, the audio wouldn’t be correctly synced), or dispute the claim – which again could result in the deletion of my account, if the ‘copyright owner’ upholds their claim, which seems likely. Or I could write this blog post, publicise the issue and perhaps in an ideal world where clouds are made of candy and butterflies whistle sweet music on Summer afternoons, get this unfair claim withdrawn.

My friends and I don’t blame the band. We doubt very much that they, or indeed anyone from their immediate label, contacted Youtube after being shocked and appalled by our ‘misuse’ of their copyright. Likely an automated piece of software, somewhere in the bowels of a Universal subsidiary, scanned the video’s audio track, and spat out a legal notice. What bothers us are a) the unfairness of the situation – the idea that we can’t share something we created because an element of it is ‘owned’ by a megacorporation, and b) the precedent that cases like this set. All creative work (important and monumental, or just plain silly and fun) is built upon the groundwork of existing culture – whether it be the brothers Grim appropriating European mythology, or Led Zeppelin integrating blues riffs into rock and roll music. As the range of instruments we use become virtualised – from the game engines used in Machinima, to level design tools like those of Little Big Planet – they fall under the ownership of vast faceless corporations, and the legal purview of laws written and paid for my US media conglomerates. This can leave creators, remixers and contributors powerless in the face of legal sanctions. My friends and I helped (in however small a way) to create something, which was then used as a promotional tool. It’s only fair that we get to remix and share our efforts in return.

Filmed last weekend in Dun Laoghaire Harbour, with some kooky individuals.

Caveats

You should be aware before you start that posting remixed video online (if you don’t own the copyright to your source video) could theoretically get you into legal trouble.

These instructions are for Windows. Here are some simpler instructions for the Mac. Let’s face it, video stuff is faster and easier with a Mac, if you can afford one.

It’s also important to note before you begin, that uncompressed video files are enormous. You’ll likely need at least 1 free Gigabyte per 5 minutes of video you plan to convert, and much more to do editing later.

If anything goes wrong, I disclaim all responsibility. These instructions are provided as is.

All that said, here’s how to do it..

Download the video

There are lots of ways to download a video from YouTube. Here are a couple.

Throw the address of the video you want into one of these sites
- Keep It Simple, Video Downloader 2.0, KeepVid.

or

Install Firefox, GreaseMonkey, and one of the these scripts.

Once the file has downloaded, you’ll have to convert it before Movie Maker or Adobe Premier Pro 1.5 (haven’t tried this with more recent versions) will open it.

Download Super

The free program ‘Super’ will convert almost any multimedia file to almost any format.

Download Super. The link is difficult to find on the horrendously designed site, but keep looking, it is there!

Convert the File

1. Install and Run Super
2. Find the file you’ve downloaded, and drag it into Super.
3. Along the top of Super, set the settings like so [Image]
   • Output Container: avi
   • Output Video Codec: huffYUV
   • Output Audio Codec: WAV -(pcm U8)
4. Right click anywhere in Super, and click ‘Specify the Output Folder Destination’. [Image]
5. Select the folder where you’d like to put your finished file and click ‘Save Changes’
6. You may wish to increase the size of the output video (by default Youtube’s resolution is 320*240). To do this simply change the Video Scale Size setting (e.g.: 640*480) [Image]
7. Your finished settings should looks something like this [Image]
8. Now click Encode. After a few seconds the video should start to encode [Image].
   In a few minutes (depending on video length), the process will finish.

That’s it!

You should now have a video that most video editors can import and edit without glitches. Happy remixing!

Retitled in mid January to ‘Joost‘, TVP is an IPTV application. That is, a program designed to carry high resolution video direct to consumers via the internet, rather than through satellite, cable or terrestrial broadcasts.

On the technical end, Joost uses both the UDP (to stream video direct to viewers) and TCP/IP (to share shows between users) protocols to create a hybrid Peer-to-Peer and Streaming, MPEG 4 H.264, (currently) free, on-demand TV network.

While Joost does live up to its promise to deliver full screen, uninterrupted streaming video at a watchable quality, a variety of potentially insurmountable challenges stand between the company and its goal of subverting broadcast television.

1. No Premium Content

Whilst Joost’s founders perhaps aim to ultimately provide licensed ‘A Plus’ broadcast content, current offerings are thin indeed, and there is little to suggest that the company has the industry connections or necessary expertise to lure rights holders into making such content available.

“Watch for sci-fi shows, rock videos, sports, comedy — anything with a testosterone angle. Deals are in the works with the three music majors, plus top US broadcasters and cable channels. For the rest of the world, there’s a modified PBS strategy: classic reruns, documentaries, and independent dramas.”

- Wired Magazine

While there’s clearly a market for cheap, low quality television, creating a new distribution channel for low value content is unlikely to bring about the paradigm shift in multi-hour-a-day TV watching articulated by Joost’s founders in the latest issue of Wired Magazine.

As Zennström points out..

“You have to put together a whole consumer offering, a great instantaneous experience. A simple service that fills an obvious need and can be offered for free.”

Right now there’s no compelling reason to think that Joost can deliver on the ‘obvious need’ element of such aspirations. Kazaa and Skype were technological and infrastructural achievements, not content deals.

2. No User Content

It may be too early to tell, but early indications are that Joost, like the iPhone, will be a closed platform. Although the developers, unlike Mr. Jobs, welcome independent extension development, it appears they will avoid distribution of user uploaded content entirely. With online only content, and content production companies, from the Revision 3, TWIT, and Podshow networks to Channel101, growing in quality and diversity all the time, this has become the golden age of high quality, short format, web friendly media. At the other end of the scale, YouTube’s survival in the wake of massive takedown notices and competition from far more piracy friendly alternatives, signifies a huge unanticipated interest in the lower end of ‘user’ generated media; from inventive indy band videos, to post modern soap operas, to emerging comedians. According to Wired, the Swedes have no desire to tap this particular well spring of talent.

“Content that few people want to see — what Leiden engineers call “the too-long tail” — crimps a P2P network’s advantage.”

Whether you accept the sincerity of this reasoning or not (in fact, shows like ‘Diggnation‘ and ‘This Week in Tech‘ regularly beat the viewership of much cable television), if Joost’s founders follow their stated plan, they will fail to do for syndicated internet video what apple managed for the podcast, and in the process potentially waste their biggest advantage over ‘content providers’ like Apple, Microsoft and the major vertically integrated media corporations – rich, freely generated ‘sticky’ media.

3. Computers don’t deliver the TV experience

In contrast to active clip grazing or movie watching, computers are ill suited to the casual background parsing of TV. Theres a missing piece of the IPTV puzzle that Joost cannot in its current form solve. A link between the expanding, thinning, television and the computer. The key here is that connectivity must be bidirectional. It’s no use connecting your laptop to your Plasma via a composite cable (and in the process distracting your computer from any useful task), if changing channels necessitates a return to the keyboard. Technical solutions to this problem abound these days, with devices from companies like Slingmedia and Cisco prepared to carry high resolution audio and video to next generation HDTV’s. These are however, likely to be niche products when compared to the omnipresence of media centers in the form of the Microsofts Xbox 360, and Apple TV, both of which offer the potential to bring pay (and pay per view) programming to the television; in the form of all important big media licensed content. Arguably these players are in a far better position to ‘migrate broadcast television’s mass audience to the Web‘.

4. User Bandwidth

With grave doubts proliferating, as to the ability of the internet as it now exists to manage the load created by the growth curve of streaming video, and considering the effective and explicit bandwidth limits placed by ISP’s on their customers, it is by no means obvious that Joost can succeed in the mass market.

According to Joost’s detailed FAQ (beta customers only), in one hour’s use of the service “approximately 320Mb data will be downloaded and 105Mb uploaded”.

In Ireland, the broadband penetration poor man of Europe, common download and upload ‘allowances’ start out at around 10 GB download / 1 GB upload per month. That’s less than 10 possible hours of Joost watching, hardly enough for the program to replace broadcast television. Whilst this represents the worst peak of corporate bilking (leading to one of the worst broadband takeups in the EU), bandwidth limits are an uncomfortable reality throughout Europe and daytime and application targeted bandwidth throttling common in the US and UK.

5. Too Complicated

The Joost interface itself is a model of parsimony and slickness. It is also however, neither familiar nor obvious. Control of the program is via a video recorder / PVR interface metaphor, but in it’s current form more complex and ‘mystery meat‘ than either. Elements of the interface, like the channel library, used to manage channel subscriptions, and the ‘mychannel’ link used to open specific program items, remain unintuitive. A higher level interface design may prove necessary to ease the public into a world of fullscreen online television.

6. Advertising Specificity

Whilst Joost will offer advertisers a variety of viewer demographics – geographic, temporal, and viewing profile – this is not the kind of information which is necessarily most valuable to mass market advertisers. Whilst broadcast television ratings provided by companies like Nielson are deduced from representative samples rather than IP headcounts, they provide rich demographic information that includes income, employment and interests, for each data point. The difference, crudely put, is between ‘what kind of person’, an ‘what time and place’. Additionally, while Joost may allow advertisers to know which programming is viewed when, and which ads are ‘flicked’, this is a capability shared by existing PVRs, and one Zennström and Friis may well choose to leave disabled.

7. Visual Quality

Thanks to James Corbett, I’ve had a chance to sample the Venice Project over the past few weeks, and I can report that under XP at least, the visual quality is not up to the DVD standard claimed. Whilst the resolution may be as high, some channels have a washed out muddy look, more often associated with Flash video.

Check out a screen shot here (NOTE: This is a 2meg uncompressed BMP file!), a static camera, full resolution shot from the Green Day documentary ‘Bullet in a Bible’, you’ll notice it’s much lower quality than the reference images provided by Joost (check out a second screen grab here, from a different video, exhibiting higher quality). While this may be a function of the low end laptop I’m using, its a noticeable reduction in quality compared to watching a DVD or other H.264 content on the same machine.

For comparison purposes here’s another screenshot, a frame from an apple trailer played fullscreen in 480p, roughly equivalent to DVD resolution (again 2meg!). Perhaps image quality is increased on a higher speed connection? Our home machine is connected to Digiweb DSL XTRA (theoretical 3 meg down, 384k up), and about two miles from our exchange.

In summary, picture quality is certainly more impressive than rival streaming web formats, but not quite up to DVD. Does this matter? Well that depends a lot on point three. Sitting two feet from the screen its O.K., but I wouldn’t want to see a movie this way.

8. Not a Magic Bullet

Much like Zennström and Friis’s previous projects, Joost is not a radical advance in the state of the art, but rather a more reliable implementation. The technology to distribute high quality video via IP already exists, but is currently poorly implimented. What governs future uptake in this area is likely a mixture of legal (IP and regional distribution restrictions), economic (distribution costs), and psychological (ownership preference, tolerance of DRM) issues, rather than a best of breed technological race.

All in all there are many things to like about Joost, it’s interface, while likely too complex for casual users, is efficient and geek friendly; its expandability and image quality, almost instantaneous channel streaming, and the promise of ads as short as ‘one minute per hour’, are all commendable. However it’s ability to compete against free, burnable downloadable content, and branded services with a hook to the television, remains to be seen. There do exist however, at least two scenarios which could spell huge success for the upstart company.

1. Pay per view

If Joost can snag studio support, their service could provide a terrific (if lower resolution) alternative to ‘legal’ movie downloads, which if marketed correctly (read rented cheaply) could create a whole new market for lower resolution video – or cannibalize existing DVD sales.

2. Selling Out

The rapid skipless streaming technology, and piracy resistant (sic) encryption behind Joost, could make it an attractive purchase for use by a worried major TV network, suffering media giant, or net enabled set top box maker. Perhaps licenses to ala carte device or service tailored versions of the software and the backend network which supports it could be sold to multiple providers?

In the absence of either circumstance, Joost may well end up the Betamax of streaming video.