New blog post

[Colby Hoke]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 10/07/2009 09:52 PM, Colby Hoke wrote:
>
>   
>> Put yourself in the shoes of legal - someone takes this video, cuts it
>> up to make us look bad or misrepresent us in some way- let your
>> imagination run free... That video gets uploaded, blogged about, people
>> assume it's from us and someone takes exception. The one hard part about
>> Creative Commons is the Attribution. On one hand, we want people to know
>> who originally made the video, on the other hand we don't want our name
>> associated with a derivative that is malicious.
>>     
>
> I always as a rule put myself in the shoes of a community member rather
> than Legal because I understand the community requirements better than
> the legal requirements. My interest in the legal details are only
> because they help the community.
>
>   
Reasonably so!

> I can't pretend to be a lawyer but I would have thought a deliberately
> malicious alteration would have other legal resources compared to simply
> denying the freedom to remix the video. 
AFAIK, not really.
> It is not just translations.
> What If I want to take a few minutes of the clip and weave it into a
> different story? 
I understand all of that. I'm saying what if someone else cuts it up and 
each time he mentions developers, he suddenly says Nazis. (Yeah I went 
there, I'm just saying...)

> What about a different local language voice over? I am
> sure you can understand why allowing this creative freedom to flourish
> by providing the source material under a liberal license is useful.
>
>   
As I said, I absolutely agree. But, IANAL and, as such, I'm certainly 
not one for Red Hat, so I can't make videos that go against what I'm 
told to do. It's unfortunate, but from conversations with legal, this 
seems to be the only way to protect us as it is.

For example, there was a remix of the Truth Happens video that was put 
in with some very questionable material. It was offensive. Due to the 
copyright (back then we used copyright), we were able to go after that 
video and, I assume, have it taken it down.

By having a license on certain things that we do, we give ourselves 
legal maneuverability in case some situation does arise.

Now, I would love to have all videos out there for anyone to do anything 
with and the people that saw them would be smart enough to know what's 
legit and what's not. I would love to trust all people to act civil and 
respectful of my work and out work as a video team. Wouldn't that be nice?

I would love to see everything we did spread all over and be remixed, 
translated, and shown in a different light. That's progress. But, I can't.

>> It's tough to do, but we're getting closer. We don't default to
>> CC-BY-NC-ND anymore- the default drops the NC from that. It's a step in
>> the right direction and we have it as a goal to do more SA videos. Yes,
>> we've only done one, to date, but I want our team to do it whenever
>> possible.
>>     
>
> Yes, I have been pushing for the NC clause to be dropped for a long
> time, too. Happy to see progress on that front.
>
>   
Meeeee too.

>> It's a very good idea for the future Fedora videos to be CC-BY-SA. I'll
>> see what I can do as far as that goes, but we have to follow the advice
>> of legal counsel.
>>     
>
> Sure. Copying fedora-legal list.  One more thing to consider: We have
> been doing Flash streaming and using for downloads. Now that Firefox
> (Epiphany, Opera, Chrome as well) has built-in Ogg support, I think we
> can stream Ogg Theora videos directly using simple flash fallbacks for
> browsers that don't support it.  In case, you haven't seen Nicu's mail,
> refer to
>
> http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
>
> Rahul
>   
I wish I was on the web team at Red Hat and could do this stuff. I wish 
we had more people on the web team that had time to work on all of this. 
It's very exciting and I'm glad it's coming to fruition now. That said, 
they're swamped and I know there's some redesign work happening on the 
site. Stuff I don't even know all of the details about. I'm happy to 
ping them and see about the HTML5 stuff and having flash as a fallback.

That would be tremendous. I just have no concept of whether it's doable 
for them right now. I'll see what I can find out.

-- 

Colby A. Hoke

[ Producer ]
Brand Communications + Design
Raleigh, NC
-----------------------------

choke at redhat.com
P: 919.621.8802