DailyTech reports that US President Obama gave UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown a DVD as a gift. However, Brown was unable to play it due to region lockout.

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister, paid President Obama a visit, and as a gracious gesture, President Obama gave him a gift set of 25 classic American movies, including the timeless thriller “Psycho.”

Arriving back home, PM Brown settled in to watch “Psycho” only to receive a far greater horror than the movie itself could bring — none of his DVDs would play, due to zone restrictions. While saddened and shocked, the PM maintains that American and Britain still have a “special partnership”.

Here’s hoping a new law gets passed allowing region-free DVD players to be marketed and sold in the US. I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to market a player as region-free at the moment, although I can’t find any sources to back that up.

• DailyTech
• Digg

Rip: Credit opensourcecinema

opensourcecinema.org, with the help of Kaltura, has released RiP: A Remix Manifesto under CC BY-NC-SA.

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.

A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.

Which side of the ideas war are you on?

Why can’t I figure out how to download this?  Is it seriously not downloadable?  How are people remixing it?  Does someone who wants to create an account want to tell me how?  Thanks, Kaltura people for emailing me about this, I didn’t post for a while because there was no downloadable version, and I wasn’t completely sure it really was released.  I’ve watched 2 chapters so far.  It’s pretty well done, but because the sides are called the copyRIGHT and the copyLEFT, I feel like we are saying that free licensing is a liberal standpoint and otherwise is conservative.  I really don’t think that’s the case, but maybe that’s just me.  I think it’s better that we don’t scare away conservatives by acting like this movement is some sort of hippy thing, when it’s really something that both sides can embrace (in my opinion, conservatives even more so, but that’s another rant).

Looks like YouTube is testing allowing users to post their work to their site under a Creative Commons license. Only official registered partners can participate in the pilot. They are also working on downloadable content, both gratis and for a fee paid with Google Checkout. It looks like the videos won’t be encumbered with digital restrictions management. I can certainly imagine the awful irony of CC’d works being put under the lock and key of DRM when you download them.

Will the downloads be subject to digital rights restrictions management (DRM)?
- For this pilot test, all videos will be downloaded in MP4 format, which is not DRM-managed.  Users will be subject to certain legal restrictions, dependent on the license a partner has chosen for their downloads.

They are offering four licensing options:

1. BY-NC-ND
2. BY-NC-SA
3. BY
4. PD

In an effort to promote the sharing of information, we are testing free downloads of YouTube videos from Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV (broadcasting programs from throughout the UC system). YouTube users who are traveling or teachers who want to show these videos in classrooms with limited or no connectivity should find this particularly useful.

I’ve always been annoyed when teachers show us grainy YouTube videos in class, and sometimes when the network is congested buffering can take a while. Maybe the downloadable videos will fix this.

• YouTube blog post
• Creative Commons blog post
• Information about becoming part of the pilot program

Free - Credit: alicepopkorn on Flickr (CC BY)

January 1st was Public Domain Day.  Many works from authors who have died a long time ago have just entered the public domain.

Australian politician (and sheep breeder) James Guthrie (“A world history of sheep and wool”)
American film composer Edward H. Plumb (“Bambi” and many other Disney films)
American hymnist George Bennard (“The Old Rugged Cross”)
British painter and illustrator Lucy Kemp-Welch (the original edition of “Black Beauty”)
American screenwriter Jack Henley (“Bonzo Goes to College”)
American writer J. P. McEvoy (“Dixie Dugan”)
American author Betty MacDonald (“Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle”)
British poet Robert Service (“The Cremation of Sam McGee”, etc.)
English poet Alfred Noyes (“The Highwayman”)
English music scholar Percy Scholes (“The Oxford Companion to Music”)
American artist and author Marjorie Flack (“The Story About Ping”)
American writer Johnston McCulley (creator of “Zorro”)
British aircraft manufacturer Alliott Verdon Roe (as in Avro, as in the Arrow)
Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milanković (early proponent of ice ages)
British author and translator Lionel Giles (translator of the most widely-published English edition of Sun-Tzu’s “Art of War”)
Romanian-British rabbi and scholar Shulem Moshkovitz (the Shotzer Rebbe)
American financial analyst John Moody (of Wall Street fame)

…

Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram (of Gram staining fame)
British-Canadian author, conservationist, and literary fraud Archie Belaney (Grey Owl)
Latvian-born ethnologist and musicologist Abraham Zevi Idelsohn (to whom the lyrics to “Hava Nagila” are attributed)
American cartoonist E. C. Segar (creator of “Popeye”)
American illustrator Johnny Gruelle (creator of “Raggedy Ann”)
American lawyer Clarence Darrow (of “Scopes Monkey Trial” fame)
American songwriter James Thornton (“When You Were Sweet Sixteen”, written in 1898)
Japanese martial artist Kano Jigoro (founder of judo)
American industrialist Harvey Samuel Firestone (of tire fame)

Sorry that this is late and that there has been no activity lately.  Remember, all the posters here are currently students, so when break rolls around, a lot of us lose touch with our computers.

• publicdomain

DRM. Source: http://flickr.com/photos/71715246@N00/ License: CC-BY 2.0

Engadget HD reports that new Blu-Ray discs from 20th Century Fox have updated the BD+ DRM scheme.

The latest BD+ application has already successfully locked down 16 new Fox releases (not all in the US) and according to a SlySoft developer, it’ll probably be February before the latest version is defeated. Of course by then Fox will probably have a new version and it will all just start over again. Really sheds some light on why SlySoft’s new subscription model was a necessity.

Sooner or later either the movie studios or the DRM hackers will not be able to go on anymore. With AACS it was the movie studios. Not sure who it’s going to be with BD+.

• Engadget HD

Old Movie Camera - Credit: thomasclaveirole on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

In an effort to make Internet Archive videos more accessible to XO users, the internet archive will be converting all their videos to OGG Theora.

The other day John Gilmore pointed me towards a very interesting initiative: the Internet Archive is currently working on making all its videos accessible to OLPC XO users by converting them to Ogg Theora. And in this case “all its videos” means 185,000 moving images, including many cartoons and full-length movies that have fallen into the public domain.

Now that’s quite an impressive number I dare say! I’m also pleasantly surprised by the speed – up to a maximum of 1000 videos per hour (!) – with which the Internet Archive is converting its content. To date almost 50% of their videos have been made available as .ogg.

Sweetness!  Go Brewster.

• OLPC News

Kaltura - Credit: kaltura.com

Kaltura is an online video platform that uses free licensing and encourages remixes.

Kaltura, an “open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration”, boasts a robust platform uncommon among web-apps that includes the ability to annotate, remix, edit, and share video collaboratively over the web.  Of particular interest to the CC-community is Kaltura’s decision to require that all user-submitted media be licensed under a CC BY-SA license, creating a community of true sharing and remixing that is in line with our Free Cultural Works guidelines.

And the quality is great too.  This is fantastic.

• Creative Commons
• Kaltura

Copyright MPAA 2008, All rights reserved.

The Movie Producer’s Association of America, who represents most of Hollywood, has already started breathing down Obama’s neck for copyright “reform.”

The Motion Picture Association of America has wasted no time when it comes to cozying up with Sen. Barack Obama.

… MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman applauded the Illinois senator’s victory. In a statement, Glickman said Hollywood “stands ready to work constructively with the Obama administration and the new Congress to revitalize our economy and American’s place in the world.”

Glickman, a former congressman, wants to get an early foot in the door to help the new administration choose the nation’s first copyright czar. Or Glickman might be cuddling up to the next president because Obama has said he wants (.pdf) to reform the nation’s intellectual property laws…

Source: Wired

RiP - Credit: OpenSourceCinema.org

The Open Source Cinema project has finally released a trailer for their movie entitled RiP.

RiP: A remix manifesto is an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. Created over a period of six years, the film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to this website, helping to create the world’s first open source documentary. You can take part by joining one of our calls to action.. Or, find out more.

Wasn’t this movie supposed to be called Basement Tapes?  The masturbation analogy that Doctorow makes is a little weird.

• Open Source Cinema
• Boing Boing

Slacker Uprising - Credit: slackeruprising.com

After Michael Moore offered Slacker Uprising for free online, his lawyers have sent DMCA takedown requests to bittorrent sites, because that rule only applied to the US and Canada.

It didn’t take long. In a letter dated September 25th, lawyers representing Westside Productions LLC, owner of the Slacker Uprising copyright sprang into action, demanding the removal of a torrent linking to the movie. However, they managed to make a novice error. Instead of contacting the host of the torrent site in question, the Swedish-hosted BTJunkie, they actually sent the US copyright takedown request (email & fedex) to their DNS provider, easyDNS

…

Mark Jeftovic, a co-founder of easyDNS wrote: “But really, come on folks, please tell us that isn’t the basis for this take down request. Anybody with half a clue knows the net doesn’t work like that. In any case, I’ve sent them our standard ‘we’re not the web host, we’re just the lowly DNS service’, but I did point out this seeming contradiction in Michael Moore’s message vs his lawyer’s actions.”

Oh no, we won’t be able to watch MM’s movie.  What will we ever do?

• TorrentFreak