Titel pagina - De Balie

Background

The greatest promise of the internet as a public knowledge repository is to create seamless access for anyone, anywhere, to all knowledge and cultural products ever produced by mankind. Such an enormous promise is obviously very hard to fulfil. Nonetheless many people, initiatives, and organisations strive towards the creation of a knowledge and cultural commons that realises as much as possible of this grand vision. Doing this presents in-numerous technical, organisational, and economic challenges. Still a surprising array of knowledge, texts, images, sounds and tools have been made publicly available on the internet. Many analysts, theorists, practitioners, and policy makers attest that there is great (public) value in creating and maintaining these public resources of knowledge and culture; cultural, social, as well as commercial value.

One of the main issues of the creation of this digital commons is connected to the sustainability and the economies of these emerging structures. The question is, what kind of strategies are available to facilitate the growth of these emerging public knowledge resources, to make them more comprehensive, systematic, and enduring? How is value created here, in the context of digital networks, and how can this value be capitalised on for the public good?

The maturing of audio-visual technologies on the internet has produced an entirely new set of opportunities and challenges how to create enduring public archives and resources of audiovisual culture on-line. If it is already a mind-boggling challenge to create a textual global knowledge commons, doing the same for audiovisual production means testing the limits of the achievable...

Still, many initiatives exist today to make audiovisual materials publicly available on-line. These range from national audiovisual archives exploring how to make (parts of) their rich assets accessible via the internet, cultural organisations making their archives and collections available to a wider audience via the world wide web, right down to peer production networks and non-legal forms of exchange of media files and documents. The recurring questions for all of these projects are: What is their horizon of operation and sustainability? What are the models they use to sustain their practice? What are the economies, the modes of value creation, at work in such radically different contexts? And finally, what can these initiatives learn or adopt from each other?

De Balie - Centre for Culture and Politics, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and Kennisland | Knowledgeland jointly organise a two day international working conference to explore the new forms of digital knowledge and cultural commons created around the internet, the new economic models and forms of value creation that emerge out of these practices, and the operational models used by them.

The conference will comprise different formats, such as public keynote lectures, interdisciplinary workshops for the exchange of ideas, experiences and the formulation of strategies, as well as targeted workshops addressing very specific problems relevant to specialists, cultural and media producers, policy makers, and decision makers in public and private organisations.


Principal stakeholders of the conference:

We distinguish at least five different principal ‘stakeholders’ in the field that are of crucial importance to the conference, and who can expect relevant insights and useable outcomes coming out of this event:

• National (audiovisual) archives & national broadcasters

• Museums, Libraries and other established (public) repositories

• New forms of bounded organisations (a.o. archive.org, open access publishers, cultural organisations and producers

• New forms of open organisations (a.o. wikipedia, open source software projects)

• p2p file sharing and semi- or non-legal open networks


Main themes of the conference:

The conference will focus specifically on the creation of public audiovisual archives and their sustainability, analysing and comparing across different domains where they emerge. Specific legal and technological questions involved in the creation of these new type of digital repositories will also be addressed (among others Intellectual Property Rights and the problems of the structuring of data collections, retrieval and metadata, new approaches in social tagging, and more) while attempts will be made to bridge between different disciplinary discourses and social contexts.

The program is structured around 5 key-themes:

• National Audiovisual Archives

• Commons-based Peer Production

• Professional Cultural Producers

• Intangible Cultural Heritage Archives

• European Digital Library


Key-note:

Peter B. Kaufman, president and CEO of Intelligent Television and associate director of Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning


Themes:


National Audiovisual Archives

Audiovisual archives are at the beginning of a profound change in the way that they have traditionally operated for the last fifty years. The traditional role of the archives was to maintain the integrity of the collection above all other activities. The dissemination of the content held in the archives was restricted by the high cost of the technology, the limited opportunities to present the material to potential audiences and the limits placed upon any reuse by rights issues.

Broadcast archives in particular were focused on serving the programme needs of their parent organisation for repeat or clip reuse, and on selling programme material (and clips) to the commercial sector. Publicly funded audiovisual archives were more focused on providing a service to the wider public, and in particular to the education sector, but they still faced the difficulties of expensive technology with very limited methods of making the content available. In the last five years, this working scenario for audiovisual libraries has changed beyond all recognition. Two developments primarily have driven this change.

In the last ten years strong emphasis has been put worldwide on the fate of analogue Audiovisual Content and the inherent high risk of loss if strong measures are not undertaken in order to bring them into the digital world. The technical cost of making archive audiovisual material available is falling dramatically. This began with the advent of domestic videotape (and later DVDs), but the cost of supplying a digital file copy online is far less than that of supplying a hard copy on videotape or DVD. As a result, collection owners are planning to make thousands of hours of material available to the public -- or already doing it. The initial cost of digitisation from analogue formats is relatively high, but it provides enormous potential for the future use of the collection. Additionally, the existing archives are now being added to every day by material which is ‘born digital’ and for which the overhead of digitisation does not exist.

The range of new services being created by audiovisual archive owners, primarily as broadband services. These include, for example, seven-day catch up TV and Radio, pay-as-you-use video-on-demand (VoD) services, VoD services funded by advertising, specialist services to the education sector, free access to parts of the archive, ability to download, own and manipulate parts of the archive and more.. The common theme is that broadcast audiovisual collections are becoming outward-facing services, rather than an internal resource to be mediated by TV or Radio channel controllers before reaching the public.

These developments raise new issues for audiovisual archives. Technical issues, the scale of investments required, national and international legislations, design issues (how to create engaging and easy access to various user groups), the rapidity of technical change abound etc. This conference will compare different technical and economic models and the most innovative and effective solutions to chart better trajectories into the future


Commons-based Peer Production

In December 2006 Time Magazine denominated 'You' as person of the year. It was an almost inescapable choice in a year that witnessed a massive growth in user-generated content and web 2.0 platforms. Peer-to-peer networks, the photo family at Flickr, video-sharing at YouTube, meeting new friends at MySpace – never before has such a large amount of content become available to such a large audience. We are now starting to think of the digital world of internet as an expanding universe of content that not just sits there to be looked at, but that also can be re-used to create even more content. Much research has already been devoted to user-generated content and the processes through which that content is produced. New terms and concepts have rapidly conquered ground: peer production, crowd-sourcing, prosumer culture, generation-C, We Think, creative class.

However, the pace of developments in the internet still seems to outpace our growing understanding of what is actually happening. We are only beginning to discover the dynamics and opportunities associated with user-generated content, exchange networks and peer production. Many questions are still unanswered or even unasked. What are the economies of peer production? What are the implications for conventional practices with respect to copyright regulation? How do new developments compare to firm production and market-based production? Which new business models be developed? It is not hard to extend the list of questions. In the conference we will take up these questions, focusing on the content that is generated, the ways in which it is generated, distributed and re-used.


Professional Cultural Producers

The enormous proliferation of publication resources on the internet, the wave of so-called “user-generated content” on-line and other forms of non-professional self-mediation could see the traditional professional cultural producers (cultural institutions, artists, filmmakers, professional musicians, writers, (book-) publishers) lagging behind the new tidal waves of cultural production. This tendency is reinforced by a general reluctance amongst established cultural institutions to engage with these new forms of cultural mediation.

Still, there are a growing number of cultural institutions and individual cultural producers who do take on the challenge of creating on-line resources, using the new distribution channels and facilities to engage in new ways with their potential audiences. For many of these the audiovisual dimension of the internet provides a variety of opportunities to find new audiences and cultural markets. At the same time all of these institutions and producers invariably run into massive challenges as well; technological knowledge, investment in equipment and connectivity (servers, high-bandwidth connections), increasing running costs with increased success (extra visitors also means extra costs), but also vexing legal issues, and the question how to get attention for whatever cultural product has been made available on-line.

Broadly then, two avenues present themselves along which to make cultural content available on-line. On the one hand professional cultural producers and institutions can simply use the same resources, video websites, community portals, weblogs, and more - that individual users use to make their texts, images, movies and sound available. The draw-back is clear, such generic environments lack articulated distinctions and an identifiable identity of context, i.e. the product is associated in the users mind more with the portal site or software system than with the producer / institution that made the product available. The second option is for producers and institutions to follow the laborious and resource-intensive route of establishing their own on-line multimedia publication resources (sound and video archives,m webzines, CMS-driven multimedia websites, etc.). Meanwhile, in both models a multitude of technical, economic, and legal questions remain currently unresolved.


Intangible Cultural Heritage Archives

In our age of increasing global connectivity, cultural mobility and digital reproduction, intangible cultural heritage is increasingly being appreciated, appropriated and exploited. Traditional music styles from various parts of the world have enchanted numerous musicians, scholars and admirers all over the world. However, the preservation and dissemination of intangible cultural heritage faces an abundance of challenges and difficulties in developing countries, where audiovisual archives are of relatively recent date. On a practical level it is difficult to maintain an audiovisual archive in a climate with extremes of temperature and humidity. Highly technical operations are often run in circumstances where local availability of equipment can be close to non-existent. Levels of funding are uncertain, such as in countries in transition from state support to a market economy. What's more, many collections of traditional music are vanishing or deteriorating beyond recovery, resulting in the disappearance of irreplacable parts of mankind's memory.

A particular problem for immaterial heritage, especially traditional knowledge and folklore, is found in the mechanisms of globally harmonized intellectual property law. Copyright, an author-centric concept originating from the Western art tradition, is almost entirely inadequate when faced with expressions of culture which are the result of a slow collective process of creative activity exercized in a given community by continuous imitation. Developing countries deal with proprietary issues in diverse ways. For instance, the Canto Livre project, suggested by Brazil's minister of culture Gilberto Gil, aims at building an open internet environment for Brazilian music, relying on a certified P2P infrastructure and a Creative Commons licensing model. Yet an opposite direction can be perceived in Ghana. Due to the combined effects of recommendations by the WIPO and royalty payments to Ghana by American musician Paul Simon, governmental organizations attempt to apply a rigid folkloric royalty-tax to Ghanaian musicians for the commercial use of their own indigenous folklore.

During this conference we will investigate specific problems underpinning the preservation of intangible cultural heritage. We will particularly attempt to identify sustainable models and living practices in this field dealing with availability and accessibility issues, proprietary and practical issues surrounding the preservation of the cultural memory of mankind.


European Digital Library

Leading audiovisual archives have made considerable investments in building new technological infrastructures over the past years; developing high-end systems to support the digital production environment and setting up digitisation workflows that also meet requirements for digital durability. But these individual efforts cannot meet the overarching requirements leading to ubiquitous access on a pan-European scale and do not accumulate to the critical mass needed to steer the research and development roadmap advocated by the industry. This gap is acknowledged by policy makers; by both the European Commission as well as national governments take responsibility. They offer support to the audiovisual archives in various ways.

The European Commission (EC) has stimulated the development of the knowledge in the audiovisual archives domain by providing support for targeted projects in the IST priority of their Framework Programmes. Furthermore, “the i2010: Digital Libraries" strategic policy framework was launched by the EC in 2005. It aims at making European information resources easier and more interesting to use in an online environment. The European Digital Library (EDL), a common multilingual access point to Europe's cultural heritage, is one of the key manifestations of the i2010 policy.

Currently, support from the EC in the Framework Programme 7 and eContentPlus Programme focuses on research in the areas of digitisation, access to digital cultural content (including interoperability) and digital preservation. Furthermore, the Dynamic Action Plan coordinates digitisation efforts on a pan-European scale.


Seminar on Audio-visual Archives and Intellectual Property Rights

The conference is preceded by an in-depth high-level seminar on the question how intellectual property rights, in particular copyrights and related rights, influence (professional) audiovisual production, and investigates how they affect the construction of national audiovisual archives. Particularly the seminar will focus on the question how current IPR regimes affect the space and freedom to make works available on-line, and the role that these IPR arrangements play in defining sustainable economic models that mediate between the public interest in broad access to audiovisual resources and the material interests of producers, mediators and the archiving organisations themselves.

With the digitisation and reutilisation of existing content copyrights and related rights are concerned. Digitisation of content means a process of copying content. Also when content is distributed or otherwise communicated to the public, permission from the right holder is required. This permission is not always necessary. The term of protection can be expired or under some circumstances the reproduction and communication rights are covered by a copyright limitation. An example of such a limitation is described in art. 5 (2)(c) of the EC Directive on Copyright in the Information Society, also called the Copyright Directive. This article provides for an exception in favour of archives or publicly access- sable libraries, educational institutions or museums, to make specific acts of reproduction for non-commercial purposes. This exception, like most exceptions in the Copyright Directive, is optional, but most European countries have implemented a provision like this in their Copyright Act. If the content is in the public domain or the rights are covered by another exception, no permission of right owners is needed, but in other circumstances rights clearance is necessary.


Expected outcomes:

While the conference as a whole explores both broader conceptual as well as more targeted issues, the seminar sessions will deal with in-depth practice oriented problem solving methodologies. Both will be documented in comprehensive, yet concise documents providing quick references to outcomes as well as links to further reading and documentation.

The conference will be streamed live and recorded in its entirety by the live-streaming team of De Balie. These recordings will be made publicly available at shortest possible notice after the event and remain available afterwards.

A reader will be prepared in advance of the project, which will also be made available on-line. While the outcomes of the conference will be published shortly after the conclusion of the event, possibly as a high quality print-on-demand publication.

We expect a lively, high-level, multi-disciplinary and unconventional exchange of new ideas, visions and practical as well as intellectually stimulating contributions to an important emerging field of cultural practice.

Resulting from this we aim to arrive at a set of clear policy recommendations, both for smaller scale and relatively autonomous initiatives and cultural organisations with an interest in making their cultural products digitally accessible, as well as large-scale (national) audio-visual archiving organisations.

We also aim at providing policy makers at cultural foundations and relevant government levels with clear recommendations how they can more appropriately and efficiently promote, support, and enhance innovative initiatives to create access and secure preservation in this important emerging area of (audio-visual) cultural heritage building.


Dates:

Seminar(s): Thursday April 10, 2007
Conference; Friday April 11 & Saturday April 12, 2008

Venues:

De Balie - Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam (Conference)
Kleine Gartmanplantsoen 10
1017 RR Amsterdam
www.debalie.nl

Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (seminar)
Visit:
Media Park, Sumatralaan 45, Hilversum
Postal:
Postbus 1060
1200 BB Hilversum
www.beeldengeluid.nl


Editorial Committee

Martijn Arnoldus - Stichting Kennisland
Sem Bakker - IPR / Copyright Law specialist
Richard de Boer - Researcher / De Balie (infopolitics)
Adam Hyde - Floss Manuals
Eric Kluitenberg - De Balie (media)
Johan Oomen - Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision
Felix Stalder - Independent researcher / Hochschule für Gestalltung, Zürich
Leonieke Verhoog - Virtual Platform

Contact:

Eric Kluitenberg (De Balie, Amsterdam)
erick AT balie.nl


tekst uitklappen [ + ]