Free Film to Remix
Inspired by the success of Open Source many are thinking about how other areas of creative work could change. One of the most inspiring projects is ‘Modfilms’ by Michela Ledwidge. She not only collaborates with hundreds of indviduals on the making of sanctuary, including innovative ways to collaborate via the net to work on making a film. She also is developing platform for remixable films and interactive storytelling. She will write about why she started modfilms and how she sees the film industry developing. Here a short intro to her very inspiring vitae:
Michela Ledwidge is a film director and entrepreneur with a background in systems architecture. As a child she wanted to be a zoologist, and then a funk superstar. Michela accepts that she may be also considered a geek. She has been involved in ‘new’ media since writing casual games for the Commodore 64 in the 1980s. In January 1993 she set up the first web site in Sydney, Australia and later that year founded thequality.com, her consultancy. In 1996 she received an Australia Day award for building the National Library of Australia’s first Internet service. In 2001 she wrote, directed and produced the multi-lingual interactive short film Horses for Courses which was awarded the web3d art prize at SIGGRAPH 2001.
In 2004, Michela founded MOD Films with an Invention and Innovations award from NESTA to develop a new film-making paradigm that incorporates user-generated content and the Sematic Web.
9 Responses to “Free Film to Remix”
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I don’t understand the fascination with NC for people who otherwise seem to believe in remixing. Why don’t you want people further down the line to be able to earn a living from their efforts? Can you perhaps explain your thinking on that?
all the best,
drew
You can make money. You just have have to speak to the copyright holder of an NC licensed work first, like you would with any other work covered only by traditional copyright. The (license-agnostic) platform will create new opportunities both for earning a living and for creativity without money needing to be spent.
Cheers
.M.
License agnosticism is a useful approach, fundamentalism or iconoclasm
being two sides of the same coin. Most of the time it doesn’t really
matter how people license their material as so few have access to
litigation anyway.
I think it really depends on how we view the future of ‘user generated
content’.
An interesting scenario is the one in which film making continues it’s
transformation into a way people can communicate with each other -
rather than only a refined and economically intensive artform.
There will still be the need to produce high quality, high budget films
on a commercial basis, but they’ll disseminate themselves through these
fluent networks, letting go of copy protection in order to benefit from
‘free seeding’ of their product.
Creative Commons and other reformist legal structures are attempting to
describe a much more fluid and granular approach to IPR, although still
far too crude to model existing flows of meaning, reproduction and
cultural value that have existed in the way that creative producers
quote, steal and disseminate each other’s ideas.
“You can make money. You just have have to speak to the copyright holder of an NC licensed work first, like you would with any other work covered only by traditional copyright.”
Sure, but in that case, NC-ND would work just as well for the remix culture where we want artists to be able to earn a living.
Plus, asking permission is an expensive process. And finding all of the rights holders in an NC licensed film might be a big problem, no?
all the best,
drew
saul said>An interesting scenario is the one in which film making continues it’s
transformation into a way people can communicate with each other -
That is why the old film saying “No one knows anything” still applies here. My gut feeling is that if my Mum is happily using Skype on a weekly basis then within our lifetime, there will be a transformation in how film processes are used that blows all us old timers away.
drew said> Plus, asking permission is an expensive process.
Film-making is a very expensive business. Making it more accessible a process is one of the goals of the service. I think you will find that blanket agreements and the wider availabilty of services like modfilms.net will help reduce the cost over time.
>And finding all of the rights holders in an NC licensed film might be a big problem, no?
It is a big problem right now but that is because there is no business and technology framework in place to support it. Once all the information required for transactions to occur is online and machine-readable, things will move along quickly. Have a read up on “the Semantic Web” for more background.
Take a video like The Grey Video, made as an “experiment”, totally illegal as far as the music video publishing and distribution business is concerned, and yet incredibly popular and arguably a seminal work. However no one is legally allowed to host or re-mix this online… forget about commercial re-use.. you can’t even buy the re-used Beatles tracks on iTunes…yet… But as a user of the service, anyone can record the meta-data related to who you would need to contact for permission on this specific title and it is only a matter of time before we can provide bulk data from big media companies and semi-automate the process. As each media company becomes more and more au fait with open content syndication and data feeds, it becomes more and more feasible for modfilms.net to provide re-mixers with also to complete the transaction, involving money or otherwise. Don’t forget it is not just consumers who will benefit from streamlining sampling protocols. Look at how much money music labels make from sampling.
A follow-on question – what do you all think the first phase of a film web service should contain in order to be most useful to most people?
Are tools for the business side of things (e.g. licensing, permission requesting mechanisms) what people want, more of a development-orientated service… what do you need? Specific examples would be great.
>zotz: Sure, but in that case, NC-ND would work just as well for the remix culture where we want artists to be able to earn a living.
>Plus, asking permission is an expensive process. And finding all of the rights holders in an NC licensed film might be a big problem, no?
@zotz: nc without nd opens up the film to remixing for art/personal use/non commercial uses. artists who want to use parts commercially such as VJs (or documentary/filmmakers using clips in their own work) could take advantage of this if the work is also licensed under Sampling Plus. This is the approach we’re taking at A Swarm of Angels, after a long discussion with our members.
@Michela: >what do you all think the first phase of a film web service should contain in order to be most useful to most people?
This is a HUGE question, and one totally underexplored. There’s so many me-too videosharing sites popping up but very few have value-add mechanisms for filmmakers etc. I don’t class metacafe style views=rewards revenue sharing as value-add by the way.
What is your focus for film web service, as I think there’s a whole webapp ecology to be built for this for various needs? Personally I think the way to go is through niche services/communities that can be mashed up in some way rather than one big uber-site with feature creep. i like what splashcast are starting to do…
mlh
michela:
“Film-making is a very expensive business.”
Does it have to be by definition? This guy doesn’t seem to think so:
http://www.freecinema.org/about/index.html
There is even a link there from modfilms.
“I think you will find that blanket agreements and the wider availabilty of
services like modfilms.net will help reduce the cost over time.”
Free licenses like the licenses used in Free Software and most (all) Open
Source Software would reduce the cost even more.
“Have a read up on \u201cthe Semantic Web\u201d for more background.”
is it anywhere near Ted Nelson’s ideas? Project Xanadu?
“As each media company becomes more and more au fait with open content
syndication and data feeds, it becomes more and more feasible for
modfilms.net to provide re-mixers with also to complete the transaction,
involving money or otherwise.”
While that may be true, it is to my ming a mis-use of the word free in the
context it seems to be offered in.
Simply put, Free software and Open Source Software do not permit NC type
licenses to be certified. Trying to ride on the buzz of Free or Open Source
Software while not being Free is not the most above the board move to be
made. (I find this happening all over. Even copyleft is being misused.)
“A follow-on question – what do you all think the first phase of a film web
service should contain in order to be most useful to most people?”
I can’t pretend to answer for most people. For it to interest me, the films
would have to have a reliable path to Freedom if not being Free from the
start.
“Are tools for the business side of things (e.g. licensing, permission
requesting mechanisms) what people want, more of a development-orientated
service\u2026 what do you need? Specific examples would be great.”
If you could figure out a plan for letting people earn a living while
producing Free works, this would interest me greatly. With that in place, the
income side of thigs would be great but the creative side would be great as
well.
If the works end up not Free, I am not much interested in the game.
all the best,
drew
matthanson:
You say: nc without nd opens up the film to remixing for art/personal use/non commercial uses.”
I know but –
From my original post on this topic:
“I don’t understand the fascination with NC for people who otherwise seem to believe in remixing. Why don’t you want people further down the line to be able to earn a living from their efforts?”
That leads right back to not wanting a remix culture where people can make money from derivatives of your work. A non-commercial remix culture for everyone. I find this to be a bit elitist perhaps.
“could take advantage of this if the work is also licensed under Sampling Plus.”
Certainly a dual license NC/Sampling Plus enables much more than a pure NC.
Do you believe that it pretty much allows all commercial use except sale and public performance of the work itself? Do you see it limiting anything else? Did CC drop it after 1.0?
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
It seems it might not only have been dropped, but might be being hidden. It is not even shown as a 1.0 possibility. It is there though:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/
all the best,
drew
Matt>I don’t class metacafe style views=rewards revenue sharing as value-add by the way.
Nor do I…
>What is your focus for film web service, as I think there’s a whole webapp ecology to be built for this for various needs?
Sure, that’s been the challenge really, no way to introduce the model in a business sense without a whole new framework.
If I read you rightly, you think the first phase should be more about mash-ups… well, I agree with that to. Distributed asset management is my focus atm because I think that one of the things holding everything back is not being able to maintain any kind of business context to stuff, especially media files, you release out into the wild. Isn’t Splashcast just a cuter implementation of IFRAME? Lots of ideas floating around but still looking for tiny defined pieces of the puzzle that are really useful to more than one production, more than one organisation.