Open Video is more than just open codecs. It’s the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online. The conference will showcase awesome cultural works, inspiring talks, and cool tech demos.

They have some great speakers like Clay Shirkey and Yochai Benkler and topics span a huge and fascinating spectrum: fair use, human rights and video, mobile journalism, art and technology and giving away films for free (Jamie King will be speaking about Steal This Film II, Brett Gaylor about Rip: A Remix Manifesto). I plan to be there and will report back. There will also be a live webcast.

Find out more about the Open Video Alliance and the ideas behind the Conference in the video below.

Archival Storytelling features roundtable discussions with people like Rick Prelinger, Claire Aguilar, Stanley Nelson and Sam Green and conversations with experts in the field like my personal hero, intellectual property law activist Lawrence Lessig. The inclusion of people from different disciplines – historians, archivists, lawyers and filmmakers – is very useful in conveying the complexity of the subject but there is also lots of good practical advice to help you get your films made. In fact, it may even make you think differently about how you tell your stories. After all, being able to draw on and build upon the creative output of others is a creative act in itself, and can lead to all sorts of delightful possibilities. Just think of the way music is creatively juxtaposed with images, or how archive can bring history to life or give us new perspectives on social issues. Not to mention contemporary mashups and other creative products of digital convergence culture.

Archival Storytelling focuses on American intellectual property law but it does also deal with legal issues in other countries, for instance fair dealing in the United Kingdom. The authors have kindly allowed us to include an excerpt from a conversation with Hubert Best, a partner at the law firm Best & Soames in London and an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property and media law. Best talks about British law and shows why fair dealing in the UK is so different to fair use in the US.

Download the extract here: archival-storytelling-conversation-with-hubert-best

This document is a code of best practices that helps creators, online providers, copyright holders, and others interested in the making of online video interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances.

This is a guide to current acceptable practices, drawing on the actual activities of creators, as discussed among other places in the study Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video and backed by the judgment of a national panel of experts. It also draws, by way of analogy, upon the professional judgment and experience of documentary filmmakers, whose own code of best practices has been recognized throughout the film and television businesses.

I attended a really interesting panel last week at Tribeca called Reuse Remix Renew – covering copyright and digital culture in advance of the release of the Tribeca Institute’s Sample This! licensing toolkit for filmmakers which should be available later this Summer. The panel included DJ Spooky – aka Paul D. Miller, That Subliminal Kid, who has recently released a book he has edited called Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. He said that his 1996 album Songs of a Dead Dreamer would probably not be released today because litigation against sampling has become so much more robust. Spooky thinks of this work as an “invisible sculpture made of fragments of history” and the battles over copyright come down to “who owns memory?” for him. He talked about how the old model of copyright is based on scarcity but now culture is “ubiquitous, downloadable, everywhere, all the time” and smart folk, like Google, are tapping into this new model and making millions. He went on to talk about the bootleg economy that is dominant in many countries in the world and to note that the way that the law is currently written and the way that we actually live are parting ways. We are moving toward a gift economy and people are having to work out how to monetize this in new ways. Digital literacy will be a big deal as we move forward in this new world.

Eric Steuer, creative director of Creative Commons, is one of the people working to increase digital literacy and explore new ways of allowing legal reuse, remixing and sharing of creative work. “People are going to engage with things they love,” he said “so you have to create business models that accept this and work around it. People are not going to stop downloading but they respect the flexibility of Creative Commons.”

Jennifer Urban and Himanshu Singh from the USC Intellectual and Technology Law Clinic are working with the Tribeca Film Insitute to develop the Sample This! toolkit. Clinics like theirs help filmmakers with issues over fair use and the toolkit came out of this work.

Himanshu Singh, Eric Steur, Paul D. Miller, Jennifer Urban and moderator Georg Szalai from The Hollywood Reporter.

While I was thinking about fair use, sampling and copyright I re-discovered this awesome performance by Jamie Lidell so I’m embedding it here for some extra sample-tastic pleasure.

Note: This applies to the US, not the UK.