Arts Engine‘s annual Media That Matters Festival — now in its 12th year — is accepting new entries for short films! In addition to being a “premier showcase for short films with big messages” Media That Matters will give filmmakers the opportunity to connect with educators, activists, and nonprofits around the globe, helping to move communities towards social change. If selected, your film will be screened at the Fall festival and featured via a “multi-platform campaign combining online streaming with personalized screenings,” and made available under CC BY-NC-ND.

Submission criteria from the announcement:

Short Film: Films must be twelve minutes MAXIMUM; the ideal length is around eight minutes.

All Styles: We accept documentaries, narratives, animations, music videos, public
 service announcements, dramas, comedies, hybrids, or a style of your own creation!
 Creativity is always encouraged. The only guideline is that your project must focus on a 
social issue.

All Issues: Any and all issues will be considered.

All Ages: All ages will be considered!

The early deadline to submit is February 23, regular deadline is April 20, and the late deadline is May 1. Submit your film at http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/submit. Send questions to festival@artsengine.net.

by Antje Taiga Jandrig / CC BY-NC-SA

When Vincent Moon and Efterklang completed “An Island” earlier this year, they launched public-private screenings of the film, encouraging the public to host free screenings under the CC BY-NC-SA license. Over the next two months, 1,200 screenings took place at various locations around the world; this Google map and Flickr stream demonstrate the reach and scope of the film.

To follow the success of their initial distribution, Vincent Moon and Efterklang have announced a limited edition DVD package of “An Island” and a digital download that follows the Pay What You Can model used successfully in the past by bands such as Radiohead. You can pay what you can for the documentary and download it under CC BY-NC-SA at the website, where you can also order one of the limited edition DVD packages with a run of 5,000.

Music and film lovers take note – An Island, a beautiful new film by Vincent Moon featuring Danish band Efterklang, is very quickly nearing public release. A new teaser for the film was released today along with an announcement describing the “Private-Public Screenings” of the film:

Efterklang and Vincent Moon welcome all our listeners and followers to host their own screenings of An Island.

We call these screenings Private-Public Screenings and the rules are very simple.

• The screenings need to have free entrance
• The screenings need to be public.
• The screenings need to have a minimum capacity of 5 people
• The screenings need to be verified by Efterklang & Vincent Moon and only screenings that are featured on www.anisland.cc are official Private-Public Screenings

Moon and Efterkland hope to create “a free and inspiring distribution method for [the] film” – as such, An Island is CC BY-NC-SA licensed (like all of Moon’s current work), allowing the free sharing and reuse of the film for non-commercial purposes.

More info on hosting your own screening is available here.

Last week, we interviewed Ton Roosendaal, head of the Blender Institute, on his new open animated short film called Sintel. (Blender is an awesome open-source 3D creation suite, and the Institute is the studio that creates content like Sintel that employ amazing Blender-enabled techniques like smoke simulation and volumetrics.)

The film was made possible with crowdsourced funding from thousands of online supporters and, since it was released on YouTube a month ago, has gotten over 1.8 million views. If you haven’t seen it already, here’s your chance!

Ton Roosendaal is head of the Blender Institute, leader of Blender development, and producer of the recently released 3d short film Sintel, which is released as Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Sintel is the Blender Institute’s third “open movie”. Could you describe what “open movie” means to the Blender Institute?

Oh… many things. First, I love to work with artists, which goes much easier than working with developers! And making short animation films with teams is an amazing and very rewarding activity. With this large creative community of Blender artists, the financial model enables it even; not many short film makers have this opportunity.

But the practical incentive to do this is because it’s a great development model for Blender. Putting artists together on a major challenge is the ultimate way to drive software like Blender forward. That way we can also ensure it fits ambitious targets weeding out the ‘would be cool features’ for the ‘must need’ ones. And it’s quite easier to design usability with small diverse teams, than have it done online via feedback mechanisms, which easily becomes confusing with the noise of hundreds of different opinions.

It’s also a fact that the Blender Institute was established for open movie projects, so for me (and the Blender Institute) it means our core business.

Blender Institute projects have a rare but heavily developed intersection between free and open source software (Blender the software and its developer community) and free culture (the films the Blender Institute produces). How related and similar are these worlds?

I don’t consider myself much related to “free culture” really, and certainly not in the political sense. For Blender projects it’s just a natural way to deliver it in open license like with [the licenses provided by] CC. We want our users to learn from them, to dissect our tricks and technology, or use them for other works. And not least: to allow everyone who works on a project to freely take it with them; as a portfolio, or companies who sponsor us who need demos or research material. So in that sense we are free culture!

But each time I meet people who work in this field, it’s mostly theorists, not practicists. so I’m a bit biased [...] people who talk about free culture don’t seem to make it (at least here in the Netherlands, at conferences or meetings). I get regular invitations to talk on this topic. I do it sometimes, but the blah-blah level disturbs me a bit. Free culture is about doing it.

So at the Blender Institute, you have artists working on these works, and you have programmers working on this code. How similar are those worlds?

For Blender, I think we have a great mix, with a lot of cross-overs. Several of our coders started as users, and we involve artists closely in design for tools or features.

This doesn’t always go perfectly, especially when it’s highly technical, like simulation code. But if you visit our IRC channel, or mailing list, or conferences… it’s always a great mix. Maybe this is because 3d art creation is quite technical too? I dunno… not many users will understand how to construct bsp trees, yet they use it all the time.

In general compared to other open source projects, I think we’re quite un-technical and accessible. A big reason for that is because I’m not even a trained programmer. I did art and industrial design. When coders go too deep in abstract constructions I can’t follow it either and can simply counter it with an “Okay, but what’s the benefit for using this?” And when the answer is “It makes coders’ lives easier” I usually ignore it. In my simple world, coders suffer and artists benefit! But one coder can also do some stuff — taking a few hours — that saves hundreds of thousands of people a few seconds in a day. And that’s always good.

What’s the development of a film like Sintel like as in terms of internal development vs community involvement in production? Has that dynamic changed at all from work to work? I partly ask this because some people think “Oh, open movie, they must have their SVN repository open the whole time and just get random contributions from everywhere,” but Blender Institute films don’t tend to work that way.

Right, we keep most of our content closed until release. I’m a firm believer in establishing protective creative processes. In contrast to developers — who can function well individually online — an artist really needs daily and in-person feedback and stimulation.

We’ve done this now four times (three films and one game) and it’s amazing how teams grow in due time. But during this process they’re very vulnerable too. If you followed the blog you may have seen that we had quite harsh criticism on posting our progress work. If you’re in the middle of a process, you see the improvements. Online you only see the failures.

The cool thing is that a lot of tests and progress can be followed now perfectly and it suddenly makes more sense I think. Another complex factor for opening up a creative process is that people are also quite inexperienced when they join a project. You want to give them a learning curve and not hear all the time from our audience that it sucks. Not that it was that bad! But one bad criticism can ruin a day.

One last thing on the “open svn” point: in theory it could work, if we would open up everything 100% from scratch. That then will give an audience a better picture of progress and growth. We did that for our game project and it was suited quite well for it. For film… most of our audience wants to get surprised more, not know the script, the dialogs, the twists. Film is more ‘art’ than games, in that respect.

Ton Roosendaal by Kennisland / CC BY-SA

You also did the sprints this time, which pulled in some more community involvement than in previous projects. Do you think that model went well? Would you do it again?

The modeling sprint was great! We needed a lot of props, and for that an online project works perfectly. The animation sprint (for animated characters) was less of a success. Character animation doesn’t lend itself well for it, I think. There’s no history for it… ehh. Like, for design and modeling, we have a vocabulary. Most people understand when you explain visual design, style, proportions. But for animation… only a few (trained) animators know how to discuss this. It’s more specialist too.

How has the choice of the Creative Commons Attribution license affected your works?

How would it affect our works? Do you mean, why not choose ND (no-derivatives) or NC (noncommercial)? Both restrictions won’t suit well for our work. And without attribution it’s not a CC license.

I did get some complaints why not choose a FSF compatible license, but the Free Software Foundation has no license for content like ours either.

What kinds of things have you seen / do you expect to see post-release of a project such as Sintel?

A lot of things happened with previous films, Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny, ranging from codec research in companies, showcases on tradeshows, to student composers using it to graduate. Even wallpaper!

We are working now on a 4k resolution of the film (4096 x 2160). The 4k market is small, but very active and visible in many places. They’re dying for good content. I’m also very interested in doing a stereoscopic ’3d’ version. As for people making alternative endings or shots; that hasn’t happened a lot, to my knowledge. Our quality standard is too high as well, so it’s not a simple job.

But further, the very cool thing of open content is that you’re done when you’re done! A commercial product’s work stress only starts when the product is done. That’s what I learned with our first film. Just let it go, and move on to next.

And at least one “free culture” aspect then: it’s quite amazing how our films have become some kind of cultural heritage already. People have grown fond of them, or at least to the memory of them. It’s part of our culture in a way, and without a free license that would have been a really tough job.

Might there be a Sintel game (Project Jackfruit?) using the Blender Game Engine like there was a game following Big Buck Bunny (Yo Frankie)?

Not here in the Blender Institute. But there’s already a quite promising online project for it.

You can watch Sintel online and support the project (and get all the data files used to produce the film, tutorials, and many other goodies) by purchasing a DVD set. You may also wish to consider supporting Creative Commons in our current superhero campaign.

Now in it’s tenth year, the festival showcases twelve social justice shorts selected by a fantastic jury of filmmakers and activists. New this year is the impACT salon which will allow attendees the chance to meet the festival filmmakers, learn about the festival’s presenting partners, and will include free ice cream from the Raw IceCream Company.

Following the premiere, the films will be available for purchase under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license on region-free unencrypted DVDs.

The premiere will take place at The Visual Arts Theater (Google Map) and will include not only the films featured but also a salon with some of the MTM presenting partners and a chance to meet the festival filmmakers. Be sure to purchase tickets in advance if you wish to attend in person.

Following the premiere, the films will be available for purchase under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license on region-free unencrypted DVDs. This allows activists, educators, fans, and audiences to host their own non-commercial screenings of the shorts without having to negotiate complex contracts with MTM and the many different filmmakers participating in the festival. Those interested should preorder a DVD, check out MTM’s DIY Screening Guide, and add themselves to the list of existing screenings.

Visit the festival’s site for details, schedules, and downloads. Also, check out the video that Creative Commons and Arts Engine collaborated on in late 2008 that explains how CC licenses have helped filmmakers in the Media that Matters festival (more info and download available here).

Basel Safadi kicked off the workshop, explaining in both English and Arabic the basics behind Creative Commons licenses. Safadi also presented case studies of select films and documentaries already released under a CC license including Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A Remix Manifesto, Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues, and Arce-Rujelah’s To Shoot an Elephant. Mohamed Nanahbay, Head of Online at Al Jazeera English, was also present to discuss the Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository and its recent addition of footage from Lebanon.

The CC Al Jazeera repository and its importance will be at the center of a panel discussion hosted by Perugia International Journalism Festival on Friday, April 23rd. The panel will focus on how the availability of high-quality footage for free and legal download is affecting the future of video journalism. Featured participants include Moeed Ahmad, Head of Al Jazeera New Media, and Laith Mustaq, one of the most prominent bloggers at Al Jazeera Talk.

Filmmaker and artist Vincent Moon first gained notoriety with his verité style performance pieces for French music blog La Blogotheque. Over the past five years his creative output has been prolific, releasing music documentaries that range from impromptu performance Take Away Shows to event-based projects like Temporary Areas to Long Portrait features on rare musicians.

Beyond his distinct and influential aesthetic, a recent decision to release all his works under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license piqued our interest and we caught up with Moon to discuss his approach to art and creation in today’s world as well as his decision to release his work under a CC license.

Could you give our readers some background on yourself? How and when did you become interested in filmmaking?

I guess I started by accident. When I was 18 I studied cinema at university – sort of. I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand anything. They were just telling me about impossible things to make, huge movies. They were so complicated and I was way too young to imagine that I could do anything like that. Then I started to do photography and it was what I was really excited about. Just going out in the street and basically being, very simply, a creator. I didn’t need any budget or anything there. So I was doing photos but didn’t really know what to do with it until I got more interested in music and wanted to do something with music and musicians.

I started getting closer to musicians when I met a band called The National – they were just starting at the time and they used some photos I did with them for their third album, Alligator. Then I was like, wow OK maybe this is something to do around music. They asked me if I wanted to do a little guest music video for them. It was all pretty lo-fi and it was still what people would call a “music video” – putting images on pre-recorded music. After a few of these, which we did without any money, I realized this wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t a very interesting relationship with the people I was working with. They just send me a song and ask me to do something with it.

Around that time I was always going to see live music – I spent around 6 years in Paris every night going out to see live shows – and I realized I wanted to do something with live music. When I met Chryde, who runs La Blogotheque, he wanted to do something we called at the time a video podcast – I haven’t seen that word in a long time – but he wanted to do something and I wanted to film music differently so that is how we started the “Take Away Shows” project just over four years ago.

Do you consider yourself a documentarian? Where do you see yourself in the general cinematic landscape?

It’s definitely documentary, but I’ve been thinking and talking about it more and [documentary] doesn’t mean much anymore. Now creation is made in a way that putting names on such creation doesn’t really mean anything. Lots of people from our generation, we are inspired and influenced by so many different fields because we have access to so [much] more than before. It’s impossible to just be inspired by cinema – you listen to music all the time and you read stuff and you have access to all those amazing things and so I guess now we are seeing more hybrid creations and they don’t belong to any genre. So I don’t see myself as owed to cinematography – I don’t even call myself a director or anything. I call myself a “filmer” – I don’t know if that would be a word in English – but in a way I’m not really a filmmaker I’m just a “filmer.” I’m just a guy using a tool and that tool is a camera but it could be something else.

My point is not to make movies but to make relationships – basically, to meet people, and I found a good pretext to do that. I pretend I am a filmmaker sometimes but it is really a pretext to travel and meet people and talk with them. It is very interesting to talk with people without using words – some people use instruments to carry their message and I use a camera. I think it is an important point and something I’ve been really interested in more recently, especially talking to some journalists. Most journalists want to put you in a little box, because of course it is easier – it’s easier to put a word on what you do. But it doesn’t mean anything really.

I’m just a guy using a tool today and traveling just doing my little things – I call them “little things” more and more because I feel that I make most of my movies as gifts. I make them for the people I love I don’t really make money on them.

How did you become interested in Creative Commons and the free culture movement in general?

I don’t really remember what the first thing that got me interested was, I just remember I started reading some books by Lawrence Lessig. I was really interested in reading a lot about all the copyfree things. It’s more recent probably than you would expect. After a while [of] doing these videos for [La Blogotheque] we really became a part of the “blog revolution” and I started to understand that there was such a strong link between Creative Commons and my way of working – it seemed so obvious to me.

What grabbed you about CC? What was the resonance between what you were doing for La Blogtheque and Lessig’s Free Culture?

My way of doing things is that I don’t really respect many of the things you should respect when you work with labels. With the blog in a way we never signed anything with all the labels and that is how we’ve been able to do our project, do all the Take Away shows. And because we didn’t really deal with any labels or manager, we’re always talking directly straight to the artists. My way of doing things is that I don’t care much about the intermediaries, those people between the two extreme points you know, maybe even two creators talking together or creators talking to an audience. My way of doing things has been always to avoid the steps in the middle and talk straight to the people. And that is how I felt the obvious link with Creative Commons. Now each time I get an email from a manager to work with an artist, I tell them to put me in touch with them and we will talk together. It’s more of a direct relationship.

How are you using CC licenses on your projects?

As soon as I started to do things on my blog I started using CC. Now though I put all my original work under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike license – all of it. This is a really important thing to me and I want to be clear with the people I work with that I’m not going to work with a label that doesn’t allow me to use CC on a video with an artist. That’s it.

That is basically the only way I can move things and convince people from the inside. With lots of labels, their attitude to all this has been really complicated and it’s getting really impossible to work with them. I’m in a lucky position in that I can convince people to move towards Creative Commons and this sort of view on how people create and share.

Beyond just believing in CC theoretically in a broader cultural sense, what do you see as the main purpose for using CC licenses on your work? Is it to allow people to share them? To give them a sense of ownership?

I don’t think people are going to use CC with my work in a way that is useful to remix, I just want people to think about my work more and share my work as they want. Creative Commons is a way for creators to share their work just because they want to create, not because they want to make money – I’m not getting a lot of money for what I’m doing, I just want to be able to continue doing this. I really try basically to make movies for no money and I don’t want to have money involved – I tend to refuse working with someone when they come in with a large budget. I like to keep it on that simple level. I don’t want people to make money off these projects as no one is paid. It’s all for free so I like to keep it that way.

Now all my work is under a Creative Commons license, not because I think it will particularly help but because it is a way of thinking, it is a way of life, and it is something to fight for. I work with lots of musicians – I use CC to push the people I am working with to be involved in that movement. It is about how people create – I’m just amazed by how little time we spend thinking about how people create compared to how people make money from creations. It’s crazy, it’s scary.

Talk a little bit about projects you are working on right now. I know you are working on the Temporary Areas project right now and that you recently won the Sound and Vision Award for Faute des Fleurs at the CPH DOX Film Festival.

I have tons of different projects that are mostly based around music – I’m going to make a movie about the Primavera Sound Festival, a festival in Barcelona, and continue to do long portraits that are dedicated to rare musicians. My life is on the road, and I don’t have a home anymore – I’m sort of experimenting with my own life and how you are able to live as a nomad. To use your camera as a tool to interact and meet people.

I organize events more and more, I see myself as an organizer more than a filmmaker. I did this thing in Copenhagen last May where I gathered nine bands in one space and we did what I called Temporary Copenhagen. It is a long piece where I pushed these bands to play their music differently. It’s not always about bands playing their music acoustically, the idea is – how can you push a band in another situation and see what happens? I think that can bring them something and of course that brings me a lot because I’m putting myself in a situation where I don’t know what will happen.

We don’t plan anything anymore. When I was in Copenhagen there was a very strong reaction between all the different musicians – there was something in the air. Thirty minutes, one take, and just one try – you can’t miss it. There was this tension and I just realized that it is exactly what I want to do more of – to gather different groups and live something very strong with them, even for like an hour. I did the same thing in Athens, Greece in October – 15 bands in one space. It is just a way to discover the world, and create some little experiments in everyday life.

Now I am finishing a project in Cambodia, a web-film project about a urban displaced community, where I am trying a new technique that we could call ‘hyper-image’ – I can’t say much about it now, but it’s a special way to document and use interactive tools while including these people in a very specific, collaborative process. It’s somewhere between a rip off of Jia Zhang-Ke films and an integration of new technologies in images. There’s so much to explore!

Basically the big question for me in the 21st century, where you have access to all this information everywhere, where you have access to all these technological tools, is – how do you continue to explore the world? How do you put yourself in a position where you still have things to explore? What is your own way to learn? The link to CC here is obvious to me – its all part of the same movement and desire to experience and access information.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to talk to George Mayo, known as Mr. Mayo to his students, a middle school Language Arts teacher in Maryland. Mr. Mayo was brought to CC Learn’s attention by Lawrence Lessig, CC’s founder and current board member, who Skyped with Mr. Mayo’s class for thirty minutes, answering questions on copyright, YouTube’s take-down policy and downloading music. Mr. Mayo and his class have integrated CC licensed works into their daily activities, documenting it all at mrmayo.org. Instead of elaborating on the various innovative ways Mr. Mayo and his class uses CC, I’m going to let George speak for himself. The following is the interview I had with him via Skype. You can also listen to the audio here.

You were originally brought to our attention by Larry, who said he spoke to your classroom for half an hour about copyright and Creative Commons. And putting aside the fact that it’s awesome that you got half an hour of his attention, what is it that you teach and that spurred you to set up this first conversation with Larry?

Yeah, that was really cool that he gave us that much time; it was so nice of him to do that, and the way that he interacted with the kids was really awesome; he really took them seriously and gave very thoughtful responses. But what I teach this year–I’m a language arts teacher, but this year I’m teaching a film and literacy class. So it’s kind of a cool thing for middle schoolers to be able to take. My district is offering it and basically, we watch films and we make our own short films. And it’s all geared around kids building literacy skills through studying and making their own films.

So do they actually shoot their own films? Or do they use material that’s online and remix it, or do a little bit of both?

Right now, they shoot their own films. They have cameras and Apple laptops. The remixing part–I would like to; I have an after school club where we make stop motion films and we sort of mess around with some remixing in that club.

Do you encourage them to use Creative Commons licensed soundtracks or images or anything like that?

I do. That’s where, particular last year, as we started making films and I knew about all of the wealth of content online that you could use through Creative Commons, I started opening up all those resources to my students. So we’ve been using ccMixter and we use Freesound quite a bit, and so we basically tap into all those resources under the Creative Commons licenses, so it really just opens up just an amazing amount of resources. Like we drop in all this different music and sound effects, [and] it really helps the kids a lot and on their projects.

That’s really cool! So you’ve been doing that for the past year?

Yeah, I did that all last year. And even before that, as a language arts teacher, we were kind of experimenting with some of these resources, but really heavily over the last year.

How did you as a–you’re a middle school teacher right? You teach seventh and eight grades?

Right now I’m teaching sixth and seventh grade.

So how did you, as a middle school teacher, become aware of Creative Commons and decide to incorporate that into your film class?

Well one of the things is, as a teacher I was pretty confused about copyright, and when we first started making movies before I even started teaching the film class, I knew that we were using copyrighted material in some of our projects, and I just wasn’t sure what the rules were. And so as I started learning about Creative Commons I thought, as a way to learn more myself, we would start looking into it as a whole class.

So it was kind of a learning process together?

Exactly, yeah. I know we were making these video projects and posting them online, and I didn’t want to model inappropriate copyright, so I thought, well we’ll look into Creative Commons. And I just started learning more, and when you start looking into it you realize how easy it is and the wealth of resources that are out there at your fingertips. You know, it becomes really advantageous for the teacher to figure it out because the kids really get into it, it makes their projects better, and it helps us all learn about these issues of copyright. So I got into it because I wanted to learn about it, and I wanted to open up these resources for my students.

What are some of the resources that you started with and that were the most help to you?

The main one we used–last year there were two, there was ccMixter.org and there was another one called Freesound. And this year with Freesound… all last year, we took a lot of content from these websites–we just took and took. And this year we though it would be interesting if we added some to these sites as well. So we have a classroom Freesound account called “Pay Attention”, and we capture free sounds around our school with this nice digital recorder and we upload them to the account. So we’re trying to get the kids to understand that these are online communities where you take stuff, but it’s also really good to contribute content. So we’re making a point this year to rate the sounds in the songs as we download them to give feedback to the artists who uploaded them, and then we’re adding our own content that people are really downloading–we have some sounds that have been downloaded dozens of times, which the kids–they see that and they’re like wow, we’re part of this community.

Yeah, a community of sharing. That’s really cool, so how do you guys decide which license to upload your own content under?

Well the movies that we make, the stop motion movies, in the stop motion club called Longfellow Ten, those are all Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Ok, Attribution Only (CC BY), yeah.

And, however, with the stop motion, I like to change that to where there can be remix and mash-ups. However, movies where the kids are in it themselves, those are “all rights reserved” because they’re middle school students and we kind of just keep “all rights reserved” on those. But how are the sounds that we upload–[they] are sampling plus 1.0 license so they can take them, do anything they want, remix them, mash up, whatever.

So I guess when the kids are engaging in these projects, remixing, etc., where does the discussion about licensing and copyright issues come in? Do they see that ccMixter has Creative Commons licensed music and go, hey that icon is Creative Commons licensed music–what’s that? And you kind of go over it with them? How does that discussion come in?

Basically, it’s really just kind of a discussion that goes on all year. Creative Commons content and copyright is a discussion that we have throughout the whole school year. I have printed out some large Creative Commons posters that you guys make available on your site (which are really nice classroom posters), so we have this up and as the kids are downloading songs that they want to use, we have a format that makes sure they attribute the artist, that they cite the exact URL, that they cite the title of the track and the licensing status it’s licensed under. So they really learn about it by doing it. I don’t stand up there and lecture to them, but by going through the process they really get a grasp on the license and how it works. And why–the idea that artists want to share their stuff.

So they have an idea of–if it weren’t for the Creative Commons license the artists wouldn’t be able to share legally? Do you talk about how restrictive copyright naturally is? Or, have you gone over that with them?

Yeah, that comes up a lot because they don’t quite understand that you can’t take a 50 cent song or something and just drop it into your video.

They just do it anyway.

Yeah, and they do do it anyway because a lot of these kids are posting all kinds of content online as everybody knows, and then I’ll say, have you guys had YouTube videos taken down? And they’ll all raise their hands. And those are some questions we had for Professor Lessig.

Wow, so a lot of them have uploaded on YouTube and have gotten their stuff taken down?

Yeah, they’re all completely familiar with having videos taken down and it’s because of copyright. Some of the questions for Lessig were, you know, how are the filters on YouTube? How do they work? How does YouTube catch this? And the problems with that, and how the filters are distinguished between different types of use. So that’s another thing that’s interesting with the discussions of copyright is [that] the kids are really interested; they want to know what the rules are and they don’t know. Like particularly when one of the questions was can I take a song on iTunes and use it in a movie and upload it to YouTube, you know, again, underneath fair use there are ways you can do that, but generally, no, you really can’t. And then a lot of questions–when you talk about these issues of copyright, they’re really interested in this because, I mean they’re all using this. They’re using the website and uploading content all over the place, but they have sort of a–not a clear idea of what the rules are.

So do you find that once they–over the process of the year that they’ve been learning more and more about Creative Commons and copyright law–that once they know more about it, they start following the law more and they don’t post 50 cent videos up onto YouTube?

I think they do, and I know I’ve had some students who tell me, oh in our videos now we’re using ccMixter songs–you know, on our videos we’re making on our own at home. So a lot of this, it’s transferring to what they’re doing outside of the classroom. In my class, they can’t, I mean they have to use, they have to follow the copyright rules. But outside, I know from a few students who have told me that, they’re taking what they learn and they’re applying it to what they’re doing on their own.

So do you think that was kind of the biggest barrier to sixth and seventh graders (like breaking the law before)–[that] they just didn’t know about it?

I don’t think they had an idea. You know, even as a teacher, as far as fair use, it seems kind of complicated… I know talking to other teachers and being online and seeing what teachers say about this topic–even teachers are confused by it, so students are as well.

Yeah… I think everyone in general is confused about copyright and fair use.

But if they use Creative Commons it’s so simple. It just kind of bypasses all that complexity and it’s so clear.

Have you focused on any of the international aspects of Creative Commons? Because our licenses are global, so have you found that your students have been interacting with media from other countries or connecting even with video makers or video clips that were made in other countries under a Creative Common license? And if they have, what they think about that?

We’ve done projects in our classroom where we collaborated with students from other countries. We have projects that we’ve done but not directly related to Creative Commons. It’s very, very likely that the content they’ve downloaded is from countries besides the United States, but they don’t–that’s not something that they are actively sort of recognizing.

Right. What are these projects that are international projects?

Well we did one last year, actually a year and a half ago where we wrote a Twitter story. One classroom got the Twitter account and wrote a chapter, and then I sent it off to the next classroom and when it was done we had over a hundred kids in six different countries who added to the whole story. And then we published it as a little book and it was 140 posts total, so it was a cute little science fiction story.

So it’s kind of a story game where each student contributes a Twitter?

Yeah, but like in each classroom would be a chapter. So each classroom had 5-10 students and they would write, and we would get done with that chapter in a day and we would ship it off to the next class, and then they would add a chapter and figure out where the story goes. And it was at the 140th entry that was the ending.

So how did you coordinate among the different schools? Did you set this up beforehand, contact the schools and say we should all have Twitter accounts and do this? Or…

No it was really just on the fly, totally. Actually, we were sitting around at lunch and we came up with the idea and we sent it out, and I was talking with the teachers on Twitter… somebody in Canada, this teacher in Canada, grabbed the next chapter. We actually had like kids in England, China even, we had kids in China, like all over the place! And then another project we did recently, like a year or so ago, was the mini voices for Darfur–like March 6th we declared it Darfur day and we invited students from all over the place to come and comment on efforts to raise awareness about genocide. And we had almost 700 comments within a 24 hour period.

And this was on Twitter?

This wasn’t on Twitter; we used Twitter heavily to sort of promote it…

Was this on your blog?

Yeah, it’s on my blog.

Where is the Twitter Sci-fi story located? Is that on your blog as well?

It is, and it’s still up.

Are you planning to have any other projects kind of like that? Like another Twitter project–it might not be a Sci-fi story, it might be something else.

Yeah, I’m always open. Like one thing on my mind lately that I thought would be really interesting is to do a collaborative–and I’m just thinking middle school–is to do a remix project. I saw this thing online, following Creative Commons, and it was Infinity–you had artists create a picture, and musicians grab the picture and add a loop, soundtrack to it. This year it would be neat to do some sort of remix collaboration project where we upload all this content and everybody grabs it and remixes each others content as a way of teaching about Creative Commons and the whole idea of remixing. That’s kind of what’s floating in my mind lately and I have a couple teachers who seem like they would be interested.

One of the things I’ve always done with my projects is I make it super, super easy. Like lower the barrier to participating and just make it so stripped down and easy for people to participate so they can–I mean that’s why some of the projects have worked well, because people can jump in and it’s not very complicated. It’s very clear cut.

So have you found that your students are pretty adept at using the Internet and Web 2.0 tools? For them to just jump in and Twitter? Do your students come from a background where they have computers at home?

Yeah, many of my students, this year they do. Like in the past as a Language Arts teacher we used lots of blogs and wikis. When I’m just teaching this film class we share many of our movies online on a blog, but the kids aren’t actively blogging themselves in this video class. In the past I’ve had all my kids blogging, they’ve had individual blogs and stuff, but with the film class we’re just focusing on the movies and we share our movies on one collective blog.

So have you come across students that aren’t as comfortable with technology? And if you have, how have you dealt with their skills?

Well, yeah, there seems to be… even just going on ccMixter, downloading a song and putting it on a flash drive, putting it into the Mac and grabbing the song–just simple things like that, some kids aren’t quite clear on some of those things. And since we’re all together, we’re all sort of learning and doing this, you find that kids help each other, and the kids that don’t quite have a grasp on some of the things we’re doing quickly learn by watching and being helped by other students.

So I guess, going back to your Skype conversation with Lawrence Lessig, I was wondering about your students’ reactions to Larry. After they finished interviewing him, what did they think about Larry? Did they feel like they got their questions answered?

Well, I think they were really proud of themselves because you know he had answered the question and there wasn’t any sort of playing around, and I think it helped clarify some of the issues. I mean one thing that stood out–they had a lot of questions about peer to peer file sharing sites and they’re not clear why that’s illegal, and then Mr. Lessig spent some time talking to them about that. I think that overall, they felt really good about the conversation. That was the last week… We haven’t had a lot of reflection time with that particular class (yet) but I know things went well. We had a bunch of students come in from other classes to watch that, [and] the principal was in it. I thought we had a really good conversation and the students felt good about it. Mr. Lessig was really awesome with the way he talked to and treated them.

What do you consider was the most interesting student question and answer from Larry?

I thought the questions about the filters on YouTube and how that can start to restrict–he was mentioning if the content industry has their way, YouTube would have heavy filters that would really limit the YouTube as we know it now. We were interested in that, and then another thing that I was really surprised by is their questions about peer to peer file sharing. Because they all used the site, they all use various peer to peer file sharing sites to basically download copyrighted content, and they weren’t aware that was really illegal, so that really helped them clarify that for them.

What did Larry say about that?

Well, he said–another question was, why are these sites allowed to exist if everybody’s using them illegally? And he kind of clarified how peer to peer file sharing sites can be used legally. I mean, if you’re downloading CC licensed content, you can do that. And he went up and talked about how these make it possible for artists to sort of distribute their content to a larger number of people, and he explained how the supreme court said these sites are allowed to exist, even though as a tool people are using them for illegal things, he said the tool itself is not an illegal tool.

So this is kind of off topic, or it’s more about yourself, because I remember middle school teachers–I remember when I was in middle school myself, and I hated it, because you know, middle school is just known as the age when students are not at their best, and I was wondering what in the world made you want to be a middle school teacher? Because you’re obviously really involved with your kids and really involved with copyright and Creative Commons issues and what made you, I guess, want to be a middle school teacher first of all and second of all, to delve into these issues with your students? I mean, for instance, do you have any background in your schooling with open issues or copyright issues?

I don’t, actually. I was actually a construction worker and a truck driver for a number of years. I dropped out of college. And I always wanted to be a teacher so I went back to night school for like a number of years. In San Diego I got my teaching degree. So I come to teaching after having a lot of other jobs. I just always wanted to do it.

And middle school–I don’t know what it is, I really like teaching middle school students. I have a sub this week, I was talking to him yesterday and he was telling me how hard middle school is, you have to deal with behavior issues and it’s kind of a tough age group. But it’s really–something about middle school appeals to me. It’s kind of crazy, you never know–you know the kids are going through so many different changes, and there’s so much psychology involved, and sort of like getting the problem students and the good students and making everything move along. It’s kind of just mentally appealing. And also I like the creative aspect, where you can do all these creative things, you have a lot of room to sort of do out-of-the-box types of things. If they see that the kids are engaged and learning the content, you really can kind of go out there and do some kind of crazy stuff, so it’s kind of open in that regard. So we have a lot of fun and do some kind of nutty, you know, just projects that are a little unusual sometimes.

Reflecting back to your own middle school experience, how would you compare yourself with the kids of this generation? Do you think they’re all that different from you? Do you think they’re much more–obviously the Internet just recently took off–has that made things different about the way you teach and the way you were taught in middle school?

I don’t even remember. I mean I can remember one or two of my middle school teachers. I don’t remember anything particularly that I learned or like what I was–

I don’t either.

I think it’s sort of a gray area, the whole experience of middle school. I remember being really awkward and skinny and self conscious. And I was in Texas and we were still using typewriters. We didn’t have computers when I graduated from high school–there weren’t even computers yet in the buildings really. So I mean it’s just so different now. The kids today–all they know is the Internet, they grew up with it. So not a lot of parallels I don’t think, and I sort of blacked out my middle school years, to tell you the truth.

They were too traumatic. Do you think your kids are awkward too at this age? Or do you think they’re a little bit more well adjusted than we were?

I guess a little bit of everything?

What do you think the value of them learning about Creative Commons now and copyright issues will be for their future?

Well, I think as they–I think these are skills that are worthwhile knowing as they move on. ‘Cause the whole world is sort of going into this Web 2.0 and everybody is sharing and adding content, and I guess as Mr. Lessig was saying, “the Read Write Web,” so it’s good to have them understand these basic issues of copyright and to open up the world of Creative Commons to them. So I just think that it will be helpful to them as they go through knowing that they have all these resources and that they can sort of–what they make and create can be added to all the content that’s out there. They’re not just consumers, as Mr. Lessig would say, they’re artists themselves.

What advice would you have for other teachers? A lot of teachers are in the dark about copyright and Creative Commons just as you and I probably were a few years ago. What advice would you have for them to incorporate that kind of education into their classrooms and why should they do so?

Photo by Mr. Mayo CC BY-NC

I think why is just to show their students how much great resources are out there for them to use. That’s a great entry point. And also if they’re doing a project, like many classrooms now are doing multimedia projects, it’s worth the teacher’s effort to go to a site like Freesound.org, which is a really great community for classrooms because it’s a very–it’s middle school safe as far as being appropriate. If you find one of these sites that have Creative Commons content and just allow your students to investigate it for possibilities of sound effects and music to use in their multimedia projects, it doesn’t even have to be music. Obviously, Archive.org has all these resources, so I think it’s very much in the teacher’s interest to open up the doors for the students to see this stuff, and I mean it’s just so easy. Right click, download, download, I mean you can grab this stuff so quickly that it’s just crazy not to allow kids the access to this content… It’s a good entryway into starting a conversation about copyright.