Blogging at the Forum on Open Content

So this is my second ‘geek’ this week. Which, I am actually pretty buzzed about. Dorkbot was a hoot but this is a little more serious, examining actually issues.

I arrived a little late and Cory was talking. As usual he was both witty and poignant. You can’t stop being copying bits. You should embrace it. As he points out, at least for sci-fi authors, obscurity is a much bigger fear than piracy. He suggests that people stop calling their potential fan base thieves and work harder on engaging them to sell their books. He suggests that mass media has made both the ‘charisma’ and the ‘virtuosity’ of performance easily available. He suggests that people like Joss Weadon actually engage their fan base, ‘having a conversation with 1 million people at once’ and this is what gives them their edge.

Paula LeDieu from iCommons was next. She said that Brazil are very keen on Creative Commons (CC) and Open Source Software (OSS). She also had some surprising stuff that is considered legitimate for politicians to say regarding copyrights. She suggests we should look to eastern europe for interesting use of CC.

Tom Chance from RemixReading was up next. He suggested CC &c is mostly used by techies, geek and so on. Joe Public finds CC licenses bit confusing, especially with the different types. Tom doesn’t think that having cross-over licenses re:GNU documentation licenses helps any. We need to educate Joe Public on what is available. Even high profile open content sources and providers like Flickr &c aren’t widely known.

Jennifer Rigby, from the BBC Creative Archive was the last speaker. She said the public is less familiar with open content, and that the archive was a response to public desire to have on demand content, and to let them use their content as they wish. The Creative Archive (CA) license differs in that the license specific to UK usage, and is specific to the editorial guidelines controlling how the content can be used. This includes no defamatory or derogatory uses. They are starting with small pieces of content and scaling up. They are proving public value by taking pilots targeted at specific audiences. They invited remixes of content and got 400 responses in 2 weeks. The level of response were nice but they are more interested in the discussions around the licenses and usage; what people want to do with the content and how they want to use it.

Now into the discussion panel. (Even more) flakey blogging from now on.