Liveblogging first panel from DIY 24-7: DIY Tools and platforms. Panelists are Joi Ito, man about the world, Chairman of Creative Commons; Marc Davis, Yahoo’s social media guru; Dean Jansen, outreach coordinator for Participatory Culture Foundation; Angela Wilson Gyetvan, Revver VP.

Angela starts out, appropriately, by showing a toe-tapping video about revver. Notes that Revver shares revenue. Revver focused on producing web shows from the start.

Dean — nonprofit developer with open source platform — Miro, supported by foundations. About 3500 channels — like a combo of a DVR and RSS. Small team of moderators filters out porn and outright copyright violations. “As tv moves on, it can be in a closed fashion, or it can be as open as possible. We have blip.tv, revver, youtube, yahoo — you can add websites as guides. We’re trying to create an open ecosystem that makes patchwork quilt of video on the Internet available through easy interface. You can search and subscribe to, for example, George Bush mashups.” Check it out at getmiro.com.

Marc Davis — I’ve been waiting 20 years for 2008, in which production of video is a daily thing around the planet, in which people create as well as consume. Revolution now happening is that the device you carry with you all the time. Put platforms in place that captures in place that what happens when you make media — place, time, descriptions. Thousands of people are uploading — 63,000 geotagged photos in LA. Tagmaps: Web 2.0 meets DIY Completely automated collective construction of what matters in the world and sharing it. Making it possible for all of us to tell the story of the world together. Building and making accessible collective archive of human activity, and doing it at the point your device is making the media and sharing it with the rest of the planet.

Joi Ito — no single platform. Innovation happens at the edge and startups. Yahoo is a great platform. A lot of people break the law not because they want to, but because they don’t know what is freely available and usable and what is not. Automating access to usable material is essential. Right now it is difficult to attribute Creative Commons licensed material — it ought to be uploaded from your camera phone (building on Marc Davis). Norms are important — although you are allowed to do something, legally, it might be nice to add attribution. While it’s OK to do political satire, maybe it’s not nice to show people in a demeaning way. The normative stuff — what is OK to do, and in what country what is OK –is something we need to have a conversation about.

Dean — both important and inevitable that there be multiple platforms. We are working on ways for people to advertise over their RSS feeds. We don’t think it should be required of everyone, but adding the option is important.

At today’s ACC DIY speaker series, Laura Robinson and François Bar presented research on the ways people integrate technologies with their lives, negotiating power and cultural dynamics in the process. Laura’s paper, “Parallel Systems and Cultural Difference in Art Auctions,” underlined the way cultural characteristics (or stereotypes) manifest in French and American approaches to eBay. Americans, for example, when compared to French eBay users, appear free flowing and effusive in their praise for fellow eBay transacters. The French seem miserly with praise by comparison. Americans also appear to spend lots of money and don’t mind trading with foreigners. The French trade in cheaper reproductions and steer clear of les etrangers.

You can read the rest of Laura’s findings here.

What does this suggest about DIY culture? To me it’s a reminder of the strength of offline dominant cultures and power dynamics. Although the opportunities to re-appropriate media tools and products and to invent our own relationships to technology and to one another can seem limitless in the world of the digital network, the heavy realities of national cultural identity, of the socio-economic, historical and political facts of our lives are at this point still doing a lot of the stage directing that matters.

Check back soon for Howard’s comments on François’s talk on re-appropriation and mobile phone use in Latin America.

Jenkins noted that the success of Youtube as a business owes as much to amateur contributors like the Chinese Backstreet Boys as it does to the founders — the value of a user-generated content business depends precisely on the popularity, if not the production quality, of content generated by users, and the willingness of these prosumers to alert their social networks to new cultural discoveries.

Then he moved on to “the basic premises of convergence culture.”

1. “Convergence culture is a cultural rather than a technological process.”

The flow of stories, ideas, information, communities, brands, intellectual properties across media platforms has created new forms of “transmedia entertainment.” For example, to get all the clues and puzzle pieces to see the whole story and undergo the full Matrix experience, you need to see the Matrix movies, play the game, participate in the online discussions, read the comics.

It is not the “digital revolution” in the sense of a withering away of the mass media regime in the face of grassroots, peer to peer, vernacular media. The concentration of ownership of large media companies is as great as ever. But the media environment has changed radically from the days when mass media was the only choice. Top-down and bottom-up media co-exist in corporate boardrooms and teenagers’ bedrooms. Convergence culture, as Jenkins sees it, is “an ever more complex ecology of media cultures.” Mass media is still the biggest organism, but it is no longer the only species, and as digital media make new forms of cultural production, appropriation, re-interpretation possible, the properties of the system become as interesting as the properties of the biggest organism.

Jenkins cited Ithiel de Sola Pool as an important foundation for his own ideas about “the perpetual process of convergence and divergence, the dynamic churn of culture.” As examples of convergence coexisting with divergence, Jenkins pointed to the video iPod — “a dramatic shift of how television relates to consumers” — and to the mobilization online of fan communities to protest the cancellation of Stargate by the Sci-Fi channel.

(to be continued…)

With this post, David Bollier beat me to the honor of introducing this important new book to the blogosphere. He’s one of the authors, so he deserves the honor. My copy of this important new work just arrived. If you are interested enough in the overarching economic and political changes that both enable and are enabled by DIY media to have read Benkler and Jenkins, you need to read this book. I was reminded of the importance of commons discourse to DIY media when I read this in Bollier’s chapter:

As the Internet and various digital technologies have become pervasive in American life, enabling robust new forms of social communication and collaboration, the cornucopia of t he commons has become a widespread phenomenon. We are migrating from a print culture of scarce supplies of fixed, canonical works to a digital culture of constantly evolving works that can be reproduced and distributed easily at virtually no cost. Our mass-media system of centralized production and one-to-many distribution is being eclipsed by a multimedia network of decentralized production and many-to-many distribution.

Here is a brief excerpt from Bollier’s blog post, introducing the book.

Two leading scholars on the commons, Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, have just published a great anthology of essays, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (MIT Press). The book brings together some varied perspectives on knowledge as a “shared social-ecological system.” I highly recommend it.

The idea that knowledge is incubated and maintained through social communities is hardly revolutionary, of course. But the rise of the Internet has suddenly made it more imperative to understand the structure and norms of “knowledge communities,” which can vary widely. This book helps sort through this variety with chapters on open access scholarly publishing (Peter Suber), research libraries (Wendy Pradt Lougee), science as a commons (James Boyle), open source software (Charles Schweik), preserving the knowledge commons (Donald J. Waters) and civic engagement and knowledge commons (Peter Levine), among others. I am pleased to be among this illustrious company with a chapter on “The Growth of the Commons Paradigm.”

Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow spoke in tandem at the December 14 DIY Media seminar. I will post separate entries, although their presentations were closely related.

“DRM is broken,” Urban declared, at the beginning of her talk about “Bits will never get harder to copy: the limits of copyright online.” (Apparently, according to a separate report, Bill Gates agrees) The problem, as the graphic below illustrates, is that until DRM started building legal restrictions on the use of cultural products into the hardware used to access those products, the relationship between technological capabilities, laws, and social changes was flexible enough to allow copyright laws to evolve with the times. When radio came along and enabled the broadcast of music that had previously been accessed through live performance or sheet music, the legal remedy of compulsory licensing enabled rights owners to be compensated and for a new medium for musical performance to grow. DRM, together with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes circumvention of DRM measures, puts an end to that flexibility by instantiating in technology a social agreement that used to be mediated by courts: “DRM stops the change process” that been evolving since the establishment of copyright laws.

“Fair use,” fundamental to education, scholarship, and the arts, is broken because the rights holder, not a legal process, determines the boundaries, and “DMCA makes breaking DRM to enable fair use illegal.”

In addition to the social damage caused by cutting the legal system out of the process of determining the limits of licenses for cultural products, Urban pointed out that DRM leads to disasters like the Sony rootkit fiasco, in which hundreds of thousands of Sony CDs were distributed with DRM protections that installed malware on the computers of people who simply wanted to listen to music — compounded later by the exploitation of the malware by hackers.

Jennifer Urban is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at USC. She teaches Intellectual Property and classes related to Technology Law and Policy. She also is the Director of the USC Intellectual Property Clinic, where students learn intellectual property law through hands-on work with cutting-edge, real-world projects. She is a faculty member of the USC Center for Communication Law and Policy.

Firefighters battle the wildfire in Moorpark, CA on Dec. 3. (You Witness News/Bradley Laurent)

This week, Yahoo News and Reuters announced a strategic alliance to display and distribute DIY videos and images of news events. You Witness News invites DIY contributors to upload newsworthy pictures and videos to the Yahoo website http://news.yahoo.com/you-witness or email them to pics@reuters.com, where they will be reviewed by Yahoo and Reuters editors. Selected images will be placed on Reuters and Yahoo News pages.

Starting next year, Reuters also plans to distribute “the very highest quality pictures” to its print, broadcast and online media subcribers. Reuters and Yahoo expect to pay contributors when their images are distributed commercially, but details of the compensation plan have not yet been made public.

Almost exactly a year ago, Jeff Jarvis asked “Who owns the wisdom of the crowd?” in regard to the “user generated content” sites like del.icio.us and flickr (both of which had been purchased by Yahoo). If volunteers create value for DIY Media sites, and the owners of the sites reap significant profits, do the volunteers deserve a cut of the action? I was reminded of this issue when I read this long post from Henry Jenkins and his colleagues about the Youtube acquisition, raising similar questions:

This is an issue I raised here a few weeks ago. At the heart of the Web 2.0 movement is this idea that there is real value created by tapping the shared wisdom of grassroots communities, composed mostly of fans, hobbyists, and other amateur media makers. I have often celebrated these efforts as helping to pave the way for a more participatory culture — one that will be more diverse and innovative because it expands the range of content we can access. Yet, as I suggested here a few weeks ago, there is a nagging question — if these grassroots efforts are generating value (and in fact, wealth) and their creative power is being tapped by major corporations, at what point should they start receiving a share of revenue for their work?

We have all seen major media companies telling us that file-sharing is bad because it takes other people’s intellectual property without just compensation. So, why are these same companies now taking their audience’s intellectual property for free? Do we understand their profits primarily as a tax to support the infrastructure that enables their distribution?

What do YOU think?