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The Global Commons
Duration:
16 minutes and 20 seconds
Country:
South Africa
Language:
English
License:
CC Attribution Share Alike
Genre:
Documentary
Director:
Rehad Desai
Views:
1,214
(264
embedded)
Posted by:
hford on May 17, 2007
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Video Transcription
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- Under CC License Attribution Share Alike 2.5
- ♫ Up-beat music plays ♫
- ♫ It doesn't even seem like it was yesterday...
- ♫ that what happened happened.
- ♫ It doesn't even seem that what was hoped for in those instants appeared.
- ♫It doesn't even seem like it was there.
- ♫ It doesn't even seem to me to be there.
- ♫ But please, don't make me waste my time.
- ♫ At every hour and at every moment that I waste with you.
- [The Beauty of Sharing]
- ♫ I don't know if in the end it will all come back.
- [The Creative Commons]
- The best way to kind of describe I think the conference is a "generosity of spirit."
- There's a real essence of wanting to share.
- While the nation is gripped by World Cup fever, people from across the globe
- have descended on Brazil's Rio de Janeiro to join the iCommon Summit 2006.
- ♫♫
- It's not just free beer, it's good beer. [Laughter]
- This meeting of minds brings together authors, artists, educators, and scientists,
- all hoping to expand the boundaries of modern-day copyright and patenting law
- for the benift of all.
- The host is Brazil's singing minister of culture, Gilberto Gil.
- Before the world was small, because earth was big. Today the world is too big
- because earth is small, of the small of a... camera antenna.
- [Gilberto Gil sings] ♫Eh, turn of the world camera. Eh, world turns camera.
- We're on the verge of a media democracy movement, which I think is very similar to
- the environmental movement we saw years ago.
- [Narrator:] And the vehicle for change is the Creative Commons.
- [Jenny Toomey, Future of Music Coalition] My name is Jenny Toomey.
- I am the executive director of the Future of Music Coalition.
- According to this pew internet report from two years ago,
- 32 million Americans consider themselves artists. 3 times as many of them do some art,
- and 10 million make some money from their art.
- Right now in the United States, you can't sample anything.
- So a lot of musicians were supportive of the idea of creating a license that allowed sampling.
- [Narrator:] But surely, copyright laws protect artists, authors and creators. Don't they?
- The Creative Commons is a non-profit that gives artists and creators free tools
- to enable them to mark their creativity with the freedoms they want it to carry.
- I can mark my creative work with a license that signals clearly,
- you are free to remix this however you want. And the objective here is to make it easy
- for artists and authors to build a platform of freedom for other artists and authors to build upon,
- and to make their work more accessible to people around the world.
- What does it mean to take George W. Bush and twist his words
- [Nathaniel Stern, Artist in Residence] in such a way that they're just pointed right back at him.
- Sattirists have been playing with that for years, and it's nice that there's an encouragement
- to have a more nuanced playfulness to art.
- [Joichi Ito, iCommons Chairperson] Unlike people who are in the extreme free software world
- who think everything should be free, versus people in Hollywood who think everything should be commercial,
- we're saying that everyone should have a choice.
- CC allows then people to comply with copyright ads because it is a type of copyright.
- It's a copy-left where you copy it and give it to others.
- So it allows you to comply with that law, while at the same time, being able to share the information.
- I think that there are many people who couldn't imagine signing with some big record label.
- In a sense, by using Creative Commons, you do have control, but you get to choose how it happens.
- We're trying to build a private movement where authors and creators
- signal that they don't need the full range of protection that copyright law
- automatically gives them. Just take as much as you need. Not more than you need.
- Leave the rest of it into the Commons so that other people can build upon it.
- [Narrator:] But surely, copyright laws protect artists, authors, and creators. Don't they?
- [Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia] Certainly, when we see that schools in Africa
- are using text books that are many years out of date because they afford the contemporary
- text books, which are priced very high under copyright -- this can't be a good thing.
- Cultures like the United States which have been enamored of this extremism
- in intellectual property believes that if you're not paying every time you use culture,
- you're a "pirate." We need to recognize that the very narrow form of creative expression
- that Madonna and Britney Spears and, you know, Hollywood films engage in
- is just one slice of culture. We can't have rules that protect that slice of culture while decimating the ecology
- of all sorts of other forms of creativity.
- It's not in the benefit of the guy in Hollywood to credit you because he can come back and get more from you.,
- and exploit you, but if you share your interesting music or your comedy on the internet
- with the Creative Commons attribution license, everybody has to give you credit for your creativity.
- [Narrator:] How many of you out there can honestly say you've never recorded music illegally,
- or bought a bootleg DVD.
- Do we 100% bless it? Do we like it when people take other people's music and throw it up there
- against an artist's will? We don't.
- This community should really, really embrace trying to figure out a way to build
- a better economic and egalitarian structure, and the artists would go with
- whoever would actually build a better structure for them.
- There are a lot of artists that are very excited about the web as a means to promote their music,
- and because of that, they voluntarily put their music files out into the web
- as a means to, you know, seduce and attract and hook people into, you know,
- buying music from them, going to see them play, or commercial people to put that music
- into films or into television. If artists can't get through the traditional media
- because of corruption or they're amatures or access -- these kinds of issues
- that is spectacularly valuable for artists to be able to put their music out there.
- [Narrator:] Creative Commons is not just about sharing art. Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.
- A freely licensed encyclopedia written by thousands of volunteers in many languages
- we could take an out-of-print text book from 1984 and rewrite it, bring it up to date
- and distribute it for free. The problem is, that text book that was written in 1984
- won't be in the public domain until 70 or 95 years after the death of the author,
- and that's unfortunate, because there's no obvious economic reason for it.
- The book is out of print. It was only sold for two years.
- Why should we have the same copyright rules for all types of work?
- It's really as simple as coming to a website and clicking on the edit button
- and adding some information.
- It's a way to get a lot of people involved quickly.
- [Narrator:] What will it take for a continent like Africa to truly benefit from what
- the technological age has to offer?
- [Nhlanhla Mabaso, Open Source, CSIR] Some people refer to the
- digital divide in the South African context as digital apartheid, and...
- because if you take apartheid, it is not popular with a big number of people,
- but it certainly has benefited some.
- [Helen Kin, Shuttleworth Foundation] We in the western world,
- obviously, we work towards an education system that is very common and obvious for us.
- There is less than 1% connectivity in sub-Saharan African, and that prevents
- children, business, getting access to the tools and knowledge that we live our lives by.
- There not appropriate rooms, there are not enough plug points. There's simply not enough
- bits of furniture to make those computer labs become a reality in the short term--
- [Joris Komen, SchoolNet Namibia] And there's not enough expertise on the ground at these schools
- to support that technology once it's there.
- Ubuntu is the world's largest distribution of open source software on the desktop,
- and it can be redistributed and people handout CDs to their friends -- they can pass it on, download it,
- use it anywhere. [Ubuntu, Education Fund]
- [kusasa, analytical education]
- Kusasa is the Zulu word for "tomorrow" and looking towards the future.
- It's peer to peer taught and peer assessed, enabling the teacher to take on
- an every-so-slightly different role in the classroom; they become a facilitator.
- This ensures that none of the intellectual property in the program is lost through a teacher
- going somewhere else. This is obviously going to be done totally under open licenses.
- The reason being is that we will create a central body of knowledge,
- but we will never be able to create different contextual knowledges and different a contextual
- understanding for what needs to be taught in those particular classrooms.
- Kids have never been a problem. Put kids into a classroom with computers,
- and they will use them. They will find a way of getting in to use them, and using them constructively,
- positively. The bottom line is that teachers are simply not using the computers.
- These things are not there just for clickety click, but for actual integrating into their particular subject interests.
- Tools and resources that make biology as a subject or history as a subject more interesting
- and more rewarding, to actually influence positively the educational outcomes of the children
- that they are responsible for.
- In South Africa, they've got a policy for ICT and education that actually
- puts a tax levy on the telecommunications sector in South Africa
- in spite of millions of rands worth of resource available to deploy e-ready
- ICTs to schools all over their country.
- You're still talking about, what, 35% of 28,000 schools in South Africa not having e-ready
- science, not having electricity. In a place like Nimibia, you've got some 17,000
- teachers there, 75% are women. They're obligated to go through some
- regurgitated, spoon fed process of getting these children to pass some set of exams
- that were developed by clowns in Cambridge. Now how relevant is that stuff if it doesn't actually
- get a localized flavor and is actually designed in such a way that it encourages
- constructivism -- that people allow these children to take a greater responsibility and greater sense of ownership
- of their own education.
- The challenge and indeed the opportunity in this specific case
- is to be able to make our cities relevant, indeed even to use them, to address these problems,
- and not hope that you can address these problems and then, when everything's okay,
- then go to i-cities. They're just supposed to be a tool, and if you can't use the tool,
- the process of addressing the problem can't be done.
- [Narrator:] Michael Smolens is the founder of dotSUB, an internet site that's opening up film
- to people across the world.
- [Michael Smolens, Founder of dotSUB:] A couple of years ago,
- after coming out of the movie, Fahrenheit 911, I sort of had an epiphany.
- I said, "Wow. Here's one documentary film in the United States that maybe has a chance
- to change the course of the US presidential election. What would happen to the world
- if everyone in all cultures could watch, see and enjoy documentary and independent film made
- in every culture. The idea was to make it very, very simple, elegant and easy to use
- so that any human being, anywhere in the world who was bilingual could,
- with the permission of the film maker, videographer or rights holder,
- subtitle that film or video--
- You can go to our website, dotSUB.com. It would take you about 2 minutes to just subtitle it,
- hit the submit button, and then you'll see the film in your native language,
- and we're working with 200 languages.
- I think what's important is for policy makers to actually look at what's happening
- and to recognize that the assumptions of the 20th century, which is that perfect control,
- produces profitability, are false.
- [Narrator:] The logic of patents and copyright are that they protect people's interests,
- particularly that of big business. How will anybody make any money under open license?
- Many businesses are demonstrating that a looser system of control, a more balanced system of control,
- is actually much more profitable. Giving people more freedom is actually a great way to produce more
- wealth and sucess and prosperity in this society.
- IBM built its business on proprietary control of software and hardware. And now they've gone to the other side,
- so that they are embracing the new Linux as an operating system,
- and pushing open source software like Apache as the core elements to their business.
- They now make more money off of revenues generated by these free software products
- than they do from their patented porfolio. And that's the biggest growth in their revenue.
- Similarly, I think, just like we have the internet protocol, just like we have the web,
- to me, Creative Commons is a whole other layer of allowing cultural and content communication
- that will open up a completely new business, which we call "the sharing economy."
- [Narrator:] The Commons is about rethinking how we live and work with art and knowledge.
- It's about using technology, not to restrict human development, but to take it forward.
- For some reason, people think professional is better.
- But amateur, like the original Latin or French word of doing it for a passion,
- or doing it because you love it -- that's almost more pure to me than a professional.
- I mean, at least in sex, you realize that professional sex isn't as sincere as amateur sex.
- And I think what Creative Commons is, is really not only, but in many ways,
- celebrating the amateur.
- We're trying to talk about increased cooperation between the different projects.
- Many times, you know, lots of us are working for the same goals and in the same way,
- but we're working side-by-side without ever even seeing each other.
- And so the idea of this organization is to bring together the whole larger community.
- I imagine a world in which everyone has access to the sum of all human knowledge.
- Thank you
- The Meyer and Betlle animation Pete Foley
- Gamer BR
- Oil for Food
- The Market Studio Pangolin
- Vegas
- Bliss Tan Chee Hui
- Disappearance Pange and Gary and Belgian Chocolate
- Ling Gong and i/o Soundlab @ CC Party
- Hold my sampler while i kiss your girlfriend Nudark by Mtkidu and Team Uncool
- Produced by Uhuru Productions
- Rough cut of TV Hour Documentary
- Supported by
- OSISA Open Society Foundation SA Open Society Institute UK
- September 2006


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