An Interview with Ourmedia.org's J.D. Lasica
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4
Koman: So you feel comfortable with any kind of legal risk that might expose you to?
Lasica: We have drawn some lines. There's something on the site called Neighborhood Watch, and we have a team of 30 moderators around the world in 10 different countries who look at every single work that's uploaded to the site, after the fact. There's no gatekeeper; you publish something to Ourmedia and its live within hours, so we've removed about 30 to 40 media items since launch.
People who just take a piece of copyrighted music and decide they'd like to see that online or they videotape a television program and decide that's fair use, but it really isn't. They do need to have some kind of rights or they need to create some new transformative work in the progress. If they do take 15 seconds of a copyrighted song for an original movie they've created ... again, if it's done for creative purposes, we don't see that that's going to be a big problem. But we do draw the line against copyright infringement. The Star Wars III trailer was the first thing somebody uploaded and the first thing we took down.
Koman: As a nonprofit, this has to be a huge volunteer effort, right?
Lasica: We've been calling this, from the beginning, an open source media project. We basically modeled ourselves after the open source software movement in a lot of ways. Every single piece of code that people write for our site is GPL'd; it's open source. We started on the DRUPL open source platform. All the new stuff we've been building on top of that we're releasing on SourceForge. About 90 percent of the project has been done on a voluntary basis, so the entire design has been done that way; all the moderation has been done and continues to be done on a voluntary basis. A lot of the coding that went into it was done by volunteers.
Finally, though, to push us over the goal line, we had to hire a small team of programmers in New Delhi that my partner Marc Canter is paying for out of his pocket. They're doing a lot of the work of the upgrades to the site and looking into what's wrong when someone uploads content but it doesn't appear on the site.
The Archive really wasn't built to handle this kind of instantaneous hosting of media files; they're a long-term storage repository. So we've had to work with them to sort of reconfigure their servers. The Archive in some sense is taking on a new mission here; they're reinventing themselves. We need to have people who are working with them constantly ... there are a thousand things that could go wrong in any kind of upload of process. When you're handling any kind of media from anybody anywhere in the world and then saying we're going to store your stuff forever and give you free bandwidth, there's a lot that goes into that.
Author's note: Brewster Kahle, director of the Archive adds: "The Internet Archive has recently revamped its upload system to accommodate the video blogging and citizen journalist communities. Working with the developers of the Creative Commons Publisher and Ourmedia, which has adapted CC's technology, the Archive is testing this new system, which has a smoother experience. With the rapid growth in this area, we expect all the open technologies to mature a great deal in the next year."
Koman: When I talked to Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Flickr, he said there are lots of surprising applications that come out of the community building. Where you might have thought that people would only share photos for friends and family, most people actually just share publicly. And there's an effect that comes out of that; you have this huge database of stuff that you can program against. There's some interesting social collections that come out of the groups. People are starting to create content with the forethought of it going on Flickr in one group or another. How do you think social behavior is being impacted by online sharing of media?
