Flumotion and the Open Video Alliance provide live streaming of a speech on copyright, fair use, politics and online video—using 100% open technology
Flumotion and the Open Video Alliance will be streaming a live event on Thursday, February 25th featuring Lawrence Lessig, the foundational voice of the free culture movement. The 45-minute speech will be delivered live from Harvard Law School via Flumotion’s Streaming Platform, and will explore the relationship between copyright, fair use, politics and online video. The speech takes place at 6:00 PM local time (23:00 GMT) and will be available on demand via the Flumotion Streaming Blog.
Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, is a founding member of Creative Commons and serves on the board of directors of the Software Freedom Law Center.
The live event will address the role copyright plays in the governance of the online video medium. The video web contains hundreds of millions of original new videos and mashups, but the ownership of this space is disputed. A doctrine like fair use allows unauthorized use of copyrighted works for commentary, criticism, news reporting, remix, research, teaching and scholarship with video. Lessig will explore when unauthorized use of copyrighted material is not only fair, but essential for the functioning of free societies.
In addition to the web broadcast, the Open Video Alliance has arranged nearly 40 screening events around the world, where academics and professionals will watch live and continue the discussion after the event.
“Our society is undergoing a shift from ‘read–only’ to ‘read/write’, with consequences for culture, business, and politics,” says Lessig. “As more and more people are creating video, it’s becoming an everyday language—video tools are now essential tools of speech.”
Lessig’s talk is the first event of its kind to be broadcast using only open technology and open standards. The event will be broadcast with the 100% free and open Theora codec into an HTML5 <video> element. The Open Video Alliance selected Flumotion as its streaming partner because it is the only advanced streaming platform that fully supports the open source Theora codec. The best way to tune in is using the latest version of Firefox.
“This event brings three ‘open use’ philosophies together—using open source technology to stream in an open format while promoting the idea of open media,” explains Thomas Vander Stichele, CTO of Flumotion. “The combination of these ‘open philosophies’ results in more transparency and innovation, creating new opportunities for education, communications and culture.”
Flumotion started as a Free Software project, combining an innovative open source software package on top of GStreamer, the de facto multimedia framework on Linux. Thanks to its flexible and distributed design and its choice of Python as the high-level language for development, it is now the world’s easiest and most powerful streaming software and platform for open formats.
Virtual events like Lessig’s talk, and January’s Filmmakers Summit at Slamdance, are great opportunities for conversation and debate on the web. Flumotion and the Open Video Alliance recognise this opportunity and encourage participants to interact in real-time. Lessig’s lecture will be followed by an interactive Q&A session. By using the hashtag ‘#wireside’ viewers will be able to participate and ask questions via their Twitter profiles.
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The students really do not seem to care. Sitting behind their macbooks, doing stuff. Those are the future decision makers there at Harvard. It makes me sad that those do not seem interested.
Thanks for hosting the stream.
How about links that go somewhere – not to a 404 error page no matter how humorous the 404 page is.
Thanks for letting us know about the two broken links, although the link to the live stream was correct and functioning.
If you didn’t manage to catch the speech we will be providing it on demand here ASAP.