RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a community-driven documentary that focuses on copyright and remix culture (covered earlier here and here) is just beginning to creep out into theaters, having its U.S. premier last week at SXSW. While the film largely focuses on the story of Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) it includes interviews with a wide variety of figures, including both Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow.

Perhaps most interesting is that the filmmakers have teamed up with open source video platform Kaltura (early coverage here) enabling anyone with a computer to remix the film only at opersourcecinema.org. All the footage of the film is released under a CC BY-NC license.

The Open Video Conference taking place on June 19th and 20th in NYC has published its call for proposals:

The conference is a co-production of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, the Participatory Culture Foundation, Kaltura, and iCommons. The conference will feature talks from internet luminaries, panels and discussions, screenings of video art, and demonstrations of the newest internet video technology. We expect more than 400 participants. Here are some goals for the gathering:

1. Bring together stakeholders in the online video space (video makers, coders, lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs, etc.) for cross-pollination and development of the Open Video movement.
2. Raise public interest and awareness around the Principles for an Open Video Ecosystem, a community effort to define best practices in online video.
3. Raise the public profile of video creators and artists working in the online space.

Check out the proposal form and make sure you get yours in by March 19th!

Of particular interest to the CC-community is Kaltura’s decision to require that all user-submitted media be licensed under a CC BY-SA license, creating a community of true sharing and remixing that is in line with our Free Cultural Works guidelines. From Kaltura:

Kaltura’s open source platform enables any site to seamlessly and cost–effectively integrate advanced interactive rich–media functionalities, including video searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, and sharing. Kaltura’s goal is to bring interactive video to every site and to create the world’s largest distributed video network.

Kaltura are also funding open video work at Wikimedia, great news we posted earlier here.

Wikipedia and its media repository, Wikimedia Commons, have long been an important piece in this adoption puzzle. Along with only accepting liberal copyright licensing, they accept only free file formats.

Late July the Wikimedia Blog featured two hopeful items regarding open media formats. Both are still developing and well worth checking out despite this late posting.

First, an announcement that MetaVid lead developer Michael Dale has been hired by the Wikimedia Foundation:

As many of you may know, Wikimedia is working with Kaltura, Inc. to explore collaborative video editing in the Wikimedia projects. I’m very happy to announce that Kaltura has decided to support the further development of a 100% open source video editing solution integrated into MediaWiki. To this end, Kaltura is sponsoring Michael Dale, lead developer of the MetaVid project, to work in the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco beginning in early August.

Michael will work on adding support for video editing operations and other video-related functionality to MediaWiki, with a rich user interface built entirely on open standards like Ogg Theora. Michael’s work priorities will be coordinated between Kaltura and WMF. I am hoping that we can make incremental improvements to Wikimedia’s video capabilities that will start to become visible to users soon.

This is really excellent news. MetaVid impressed when presented at a CC Salon two years ago.

Second, a post on news that Firefox 3.1 to support open video and audio. This post also has an excellent summary of why open formats matter for free culture. Go read it!