I would like innovators to come up with a way for creative people to make more money from their work. I do not care all that much if giant conglomerates suffer in the meantime. They should not be permitted to force even more corporate welfare down our throats in the form of legislation that benefits a very narrow group of powerful companies. They have fed someone the line that their protection benefits artists, when that is almost never the case. The vast majority of artists benefit far more from innovative sites like Etsy or Vimeo whose very existence is threatened by this type of legislation.

I have been worried about various threats to innovation on the internet, for example in the broadband monopoly in the US. But that nearly every internet company has come out against this type of legislation has not been able to stop the force of the MPAA and their lobbyists. Even a bipartisan effort in the Judiciary Committee seems to be yielding little return.

I saw a tweet yesterday that said “If SOPA passes, I’m moving to Canada.” It does sound tempting, but if SOPA passes, the internet will be affected everywhere. The U.S. is still leading the way in web innovation. But if you make obvious activity illegal, we’ll all be criminals.

Call your Congressperson today.

On Saturday, Pratt hosts Copy/Right(?) a symposium about copyright, creative commons, fair use and library science. Good Times!

For the first time, it is possible for a filmmaker to make a film on a very small budget, use promotion and distribution methods that are low-cost or free, and find enough revenue to break even and possibly to support themselves in a basic fashion. It means you probably won’t become a millionaire, but in return your chances of being able to support yourself through your work go up, and they go up more the better your work is.

Making Your Media Matter- DC, February 11-12 “Cutting-edge practices for making your media matter”

Free Culture X- DC, February 13-14 “Free software and open standards, open access scholarship, open educational resources, network neutrality, and university patent policy”

South By Southwest- Austin, March 12-18 (Presenting a panel about event screenings and attracting audiences)

The Conversation NY- March 27 “New business and creative opportunities” in film and media

For most docs, this can be extremely onerous since the opportunity for revenue is small whereas the cost of the licenses is often significant.

I’m on the committee for the Women’s Film Preservation Committee through NY Women in Film and we worry about preserving the negatives of films that are decaying, fading, or otherwise in danger of being lost. But Lessig’s point is well-taken that without adjusting the issues around copyright, many of these films are effectively vanishing regardless of the quality of available prints.

Digital distribution has changed the meaning of copyright, and in some ways it’s made the original copyright holders more avaricious. They feel like they need to get all they can from television clips and music placed in films, as it’s one of the few reliable revenue sources left for content.

But Lessig’s essay prompts an interesting solution. What if, for example, there were some kind of limitation placed on the initial license period, after which all usage reverted to a straight royalty system based on percentage of the work? For example, if you used a clip of the Kennedy assassination in your film, you would have to pay whatever the market rate was for a 20-year license.

But after that time, you would have to pay a royalty to the rightsholder based on how long the clip was versus how long your film was against whatever revenue you received from the film, unless you got a deferral or consideration from the rightsholder. This could be used for music rights for fiction films as well, in theory.

For some reason they want to kill off the DVR… Do you not realize that the DVR is the one device that can save all things traditional and holy to your business and stock price?… Let me ask a simple question, if everyone had a DVR that could record any and every series they liked, enabling them to watch the shows they missed immediately, why would they go to Hulu ever again?

When new technologies come along and change the marketplace, the gut reaction of most established companies seems to be, “How can we block this new idea?” As I heard at a panel last night, “water is wet.”

For indie film companies with few resources, the challenge is to see the DVRs, the customer-friendly opportunities that are already emerging. A few companiesare innovating with VOD but have any really taken advantage of the new ways people are watching things from a marketing perspective? What about the technology that is already emerging is worth embracing rather than trying to send takedown after takedown to rapidshare sites? Will there be a technology, like satellite distribution, that makes theatrical super cheap? Or will there be a way to find out about and schedule the films, like theatrical TiVO?

One potential solution might be digital watermarking. Instead of DRM, which tried to determine where the content can be used, watermarking just tries to track where the content is going and what is its source. The watermark, which is invisible, can be embedded with other useful information like film title, cast list, synopsis, etc. so that it is desirable to retain for those exchanging the file. It’s a way for the filmmaker, distributor, or content provider to mark otherwise anonymous files as having a maker. The Digital Watermarking Alliance, an advocacy group for watermarking technology, commissioned a study that claimed that using a digital serial number rather than DRM would cause “Active sharing via file-sharing applications [to] decline by one-half overall, a little less among
BitTorrent users, a little more among P2P network users.”

Watermarks have their problems. They are relatively easy to break or “attack” though some argue that there is less reason to destroy a watermark than DRM since it doesn’t impede the user experience and in fact can enhance it. But once a file with a broken watermark is released to the downloading stream, it will propogate.

The ideal watermark would not ever prevent the viewer from watching the file. If a user attempted to remove the watermark, the file might become degraded. The same thing might happen if the file were altered. Of course, anything you can do to something digitally can be cracked. But if there wasn’t a motive for the average user to get rid of the watermark, it seems like it could gain traction.

In the future, it seems likely that the per-user costs really will be free or subscription-based. But commercial uses, i.e. the content providers, cable companies, Netflix, etc. who are making money from having the content, should still be on the hook. Watermarks might be a way to preserve authorship while keeping the files flowing.

Are the days of artists owning their work over, when work can be infinitely replicated? Should content producers just look for new revenue sources?

It’s a pretty interesting concept, and though the film does paint the issue in overly black and white terms (the CopyRIGHT vs. the Copy LEFT), by the end, Gaylor has raised some interesting issues about the state of copyright, though I’m not sure many of them are answered. Hope to have a discussion with one of the producers which will be here soon.

It’s definitely worth seeing especially if you enjoy the Girl Talk phenomenon- I met him a few weeks ago at a show and was impressed- he’s totally into giving a great performance- which is all the more remarkable given that his performance is pushing some buttons. And, in keeping with the mashup philosophy, if you don’t like the film (or especially if you do) you can make your own version at OpenSourceCinema.

One issue that emerged is the challenge to actually get proper licences for works that because of digital duplication are now often difficult to trace to a legal source. USC School of Law Professor Jack Lerner suggested that a more streamlined version of copyright law that treated film and music in a unified way might be more effective for digital media.

Digital media could be an amazing resource tool if there were a way to digitize the many obscure, orphan, or rare film prints to create a kind of super media library. In a way, this seems like a natural project for the ever-expanding internet. However, as panelist Mark Lemmons of Thought Equity Motion suggested, it is unclear how it could be financed, given that the current paradigm seems to be internet=free (or at least, hard to monetize).