2007 Jan 25

MIT Free Culture

Present: price, quentin, dsheets, jansel, deaner, Ben Weeks, mako, kenta


YouTomb.

- Dean: We should set feature goals for a public launch.
  Ken: But Keith's experience with LAMP is that for a service
    that's going to make some people very unhappy, a sudden big
    launch is worse than a gradual spread.
  Dean: The latter's not going to happen for this -- if it's ready,
    it'll get wide publicity fast.
  David: What's our goal for users to do with this?
    Some websites sell stuff... what's our notion of "conversion"?
  Dean: We could go for two rounds on BoingBoing etc if the first
    round is good; the second could be for the interactive features.
  Jason: In particular, if we have some outrageous takedown and
    publicize that, then we can be a place people go to find
    outrageous takedowns.

- Jason: I think all these takedowns are wrong.  But some people don't
    see how it can be right even to take a tiny part of a work.
    We have to figure out what to say to them somehow.
  Dean: Yeah.  That will take some thought -- it's not easy.

- David: We've been looking at the negative side -- the fair use
    that's taken down.  There's a positive side too -- creative videos
    that somebody could have some claim to but doesn't exercise it.
    Maybe we should try to identify those.
  Mako: Gee, that sounds a lot like Blex's Page of Good MP3 in the '90s.
    It was really useful for about eight or nine months, then the
    RIAA started going after music-sharers, and the very first were
    just going down Blex's page.  He had to take it down.



RIAA suits.  Some discussion.



STF II.

Mako: I got money from the Center for Future Civic Media.
  They have a sizable grant -- it's worth presenting other
  funding needs to them.  The creators of STF and STF II,
  who are now making another film, will probably be coming
  to the US in Feb or Mar.  The center says they'd be happy
  to pay domestic airfare for them; I can host them at my
  house.  So then we can have a screening with them, lunch
  at Berkman, etc.
(several): Hmm.  We could use some hard disks...