Report from iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia

I’m in Dubrovnik for the week-long love-fest and networking bazaar that is the annual iCommons Summit.

Some highlights:

- during legal day, a representative of CISAC made the argument that CC and in general, the “open movement” lowers the value of music by making so much of it available for free. Lessig countered with a great example: sex. “Would you suggest that the value of sex with your spouse is increased by other people who have paid sex with a prostitute?” Certainly, no-cost sex with a loved one is worth more in most people’s minds than sex that is paid for, and it’s a great example of the occasional opposite trend: in some cases paying for something actually cheapens it. A gift is sometimes worth more than something you paid for.

- Lessig made a presentation announcing that he would be stepping aside as spokesman of this movement and shifting his own academic and activism focus. He later blogged about this presentation and I recommend Lessig’s blog entry as it makes clear what Lessig is saying. There’s also a Youtube video of Lessig’s presentation available, with his statement at the end, around the 25 minute mark.

- James Boyle (also on the CC board) announced that a new project, called “CC Learn”, has been launched, to work on lobbying all the open education projects to use open licenses, and to be interoperable and reusable. Hewlett has now funded this project, and a Director has been hired. I’ve got some inside information I can’t disclose (sigh) but I can say that there are really big things happening inside CC Learn and that they’re getting a huge amount of traction (much like Science Commons has, which is succeeding way beyond our expectations, though much of that can be credited to the leadership of John Wilbanks)

- Emperor Pirk and Stephen Lee talked about Star Wrek, which is the most successful Internet Feature Film of all time (over 5 million downloads). I’ve been advising them on their new project entitled Star Wreck Studios, which they announced here at the Summit. Star Wreck Studios aims to create a platform to help independent films get made through crowd sourcing (the original Star Wreck was produced with over 300 people in the credits). Think of it as SourceForge for internet-based film projects. Disclosure: I’m about to become Chairman of Star Wrek Studios.

- I was really impressed by Chiaki Hayashi’s presentation (pictured at right above) about Loftwork, a collaborative web site for graphic artists and other creative people that is deploying a CC license on all community created works. The quality of the artwork, the beauty of the powerpoint, and the well-organized points meant that despite her struggling a little bit with presenting in English, I was entranced. Loftwork is essentially a fun community for creators, that also contracts its community out for commercial projects, to apparent great success.

- the keynotes are all simulcast in Second Life, with an in Real World representative taking questions from SL and asking in RL, and the area in SL where people met both had a video screen of the live feed, as well as permanent videos that give background to CC and other open projects. My wife blogged my presentation and her blog has lots of screen captures from the event. At right is a picture of me waving in RL to my wife in SL. This is the most impressive RL/SL integration I’ve seen so far.

I spent half a day with Antonio from Milano, someone I accidentally met on tuesday, who turned out to be both a lot of fun and a really creative legal mind. He has an idea for an infrastructure of law and courts for Second Life that I really liked. I pitched Antonio’s idea to Cory, CTO from Second Life, who also thought it was great and wanted to start an email correspondence with Antonio. That sort of happenstance meeting is commonplace at the Summit, and one of the things I love about it is how people without any connections, can come and quickly explain their idea to a number of key people and get it started, as well as building a contact network that will ensure its success.