I'm no fan of YouTube or flash video, but it has brought video to the mainstream internet (and I would argue that some of the video on YouTube should be considered "Free Culture").
There is a balance between free (how you can access and use something) and culture (shared information, knowledge, art, whatever). If something is confined to a tiny sub-sub-culture, it's still culture, but it's not very powerful or far reaching. That's why I think making a hard definition of what is and isn't considered "Free Culture" may be draconian. As an artist, I dislike Theora -- it has poor compression ratio, the playback on many platforms looks flawed (visual artifacting), and not that many people can watch it very easily. It doesn't spread well from either an authoring or consuming point of view, and the cultural impact of what I produce this way is likely to be minimal (at this point). As a Free Culture/Software advocate, I love Theora -- it's royalty free, it has the potential to work really well in open source editors (maybe some day!), and it works on totally free platforms. It's awesome. Those things said, I think we should be working towards dual pronged solutions that work with the mainstream de-facto standards and also satisfy our Free Culture values... so in the case of video, offering both flash and ogg (with functional embedding/platform detection, etc). I'll stop rambling, but my point is that the balance between free and culture should be considered. --Dean On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 5:02 PM, Ryan Prior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 3:50 PM, Dean Jansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> > My argument is against the idea of people distributing things where >> > there is a dependency on proprietary software, whether that's Flash or >> > GarageBand, it cannot be in my mind be considered free culture, >> > because it subjugates the audience. >> >> So you're saying that nothing on YouTube should be considered free >> culture? Only videos encoded as ogg theora (or a handful of other free >> codecs) can be considered free culture? > > I would say that. If a video exists only on YouTube, it cannot be said to be > free because it could be yanked at any time and cannot easily be downloaded > and shared except within the confines of YouTube. > >> >> Is it only ok if there have been free software workarounds (as in the >> case of many video codecs)? What if we find a way to use garageband >> files in audacity? What about a text file saved as a .pdf? a .doc? > > If the workarounds are illegal, it's not okay. If there is a legal, feasible > workaround, then why not just publish the work in the more compatible format > in the first place? > >> >> I agree that we should shoot for open and royalty free platforms, >> standards and technologies, but if I understand you correctly, your >> idea seems downright draconian. > > The way that we shoot for open and royalty free platforms is by doing all we > can to encourage people to use, and to demand, those platforms. Encouraging > people to rely more heavily on the likes of YouTube may be good for > creativity in the present - as YouTube is currently a partly decent platform > for free speech - but in the long term it cannot be relied upon as a free > speech platform, whereas a free and open service could be. I do not see this > to be draconian - I see it to be realistic and far-sighted. > >> --Dean >> >> > _______________________________________________ >> > Discuss mailing list >> > [email protected] >> > http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss >> > >> _______________________________________________ >> Discuss mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
