An Interview with Ourmedia.org's J.D. Lasica
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4
Koman: It's interesting that it's mostly video.
Lasica: Yeah, I was expecting more photographs. I think most people are uploading video because there's no other place for them to do that. We offer free storage and free bandwidth and we archive your work forever, so presumably your grandkids will be able to see your great video works.
Koman: That's the connection with the Internet Archive. Can you talk about your relationship with them?
Lasica: We have a couple of major partners. One is Creative Commons and one is the Internet Archive. The media items our members upload are actually being served on the Internet Archive servers, either in San Francisco or Amsterdam. Until recently, it's been largely a text affair; they've been wanting to get more into multimedia, since that's where the entire Web is heading. We decided to work with them and open up their mandate by encompassing the new video works, so it's not just stuff that's in the public domain, stuff that's from before 1921, but also contemporary stuff that people are interested in today.
That's why we're working with Creative Commons. Whenever someone uploads a piece to Ourmedia, they have to assign rights to it, and we encourage them to take out a Creative Commons license so other people know exactly what they can do with it.
Koman: Licensing gets kind of complicated when it gets past personal use. I was reading on the wiki that--it seems like there are concerns that Creative Commons licenses don't cover enough uses, such as commercial applications. Can you talk about your thoughts on licensing?
Lasica: First of all, we allow a full range of rights. You can donate your work to the public domain, you can retain full copyright, you can choose a GPL license, or one of eight Creative Commons licenses. They cover most of the things that people want to do with their media. Our default is a Creative Commons noncommercial, attribution, share-alike license, so that people can download a piece of video and share it with their friends, and not sell it but rework it in some way and then share it on the Web.
The majority of people do assign Creative Commons licenses. So that's an encouraging thing, and very soon people will be able to search and sort by licenses so they'll know exactly which movies on the site they can download and rework and create a new work from. So that's really exciting.
There are a few cases where we're trying to extend the capabilities of Creative Commons licenses. For example, what if somebody wants to retain the rights to the work, put a Creative Commons license on it, but also say, if you use it for commercial purposes, if you want to put it on a cable network or on a mobile device, then you're free to do that but I want some compensation for that. Right now, there isn't a Creative Commons compensation-to-the-artist license. So I'm talking to some folks about creating something like that and it might fall outside of Creative Commons.
We're really right at the beginning of this whole thing. Probably a couple of years ago nobody was interested in grassroots media, but now the whole field seems to be exploding. There's a lot of interest from mobile device makers and some of the new IP-TV networks.
Koman: Tell me more about this.
Lasica: Without getting to much into specifics, there are a number of tech startups who are getting involved with interactive television, and what they need is content. Where are they going to get that from? They're not going to get it from Hollywood studios, because they're locked into long-term contracts with other networks.
So they have to look outside, and they're looking at sites like Ourmedia and seeing the sort of short-term video that's being created. Current TV is launching in August and we're talking with them about putting some stuff on their network. They're interested in short-form, youth-oriented video works.
One concern is that anybody who puts something up on the network like Current, they have to own all the rights to work. If you have some home video and you mixed in some music, you have to clear those rights. That's going to be a problem if you have any kind of copyrighted material in your work. Ourmedia is in a little bit of a different game, because we allow a liberal definition of fair use and we're letting people decide where that line ought to be drawn. Since we're a nonprofit and nobody's making any money on the site, we're letting people experiment a little bit.
