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Cory Doctorow Talks About Fighting the DMCA (2 Videos)
Wikipedia says, 'Cory Efram Doctorow (/kri dktro/; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.' Timothy Lord sat down with Cory at the O'Reilly Solid Conference and asked him about the DMCA and how the fight against it is going. Due to management-imposed restraints on video lengths, we broke the ~10 minute interview into two parts, both attached to this paragraph. The transcript covers both videos, so it's your choice: view, read or listen to as much of this interview as you like.
The honest version of the answer to that would be very short. "We lost."
Tim just put the "let's have the ability to attach two or more HTML5 video to one text block" on the developers' work request list. It'll happen. When? Um.... "Soon." This is yet another case where the people who actually work on the site agree with readers -- which we do 90% of the time. Believe it or not, our management is gradually learning that the people who work on the site know a thing or two. The Beta debacle was great training for them. Gawd, that thing was awful...
As for video length restrictions: A spreadsheet manager looks at video costs and sees that a majority of people jump off of a video within 3 minutes. So, asks the spreadsheet manager, why would we ever want to have longer videos? Reality = people not interested in that video or topic watch 3 minutes, while people interested in the topic or interviewee stick around for 10, 15, 30, even 60 minutes. What Tim and I want is 3-minute (or so) summary videos for the uninterested, followed by full-length ones for those who are interested. At least, when the topic is interesting to at least some readers, we now can (and generally do) provide a transcript that covers the full, uncut video interview for you.
Believe me, we appreciate questions and criticism. We read what you have to say. Like about the cartoon-balloon m,ain page comment counts. I can't say that I personally care much about them one way or another, but I think Tim or one of the other guys brought them up in a meeting to which I was not invited -- because I rarely am since I'm retired and I just work part-time editing /. videos for hourly pay to supplement my Social Security. Thinking of which, I have some howto videos to edit for another site, so I'd better break off here and go do that.