The Global Commons

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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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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