Team Miro

Hello, I’m Parker, working on the Open Video Project for the summer.

There are a handful of obstacles that stand in the way of a truly open video environment, and we’re working on addressing all of them. One category of these obstacles is technological, and Miro already does a great job overcoming those problems; Miro can play almost every kind of video, and sticks to the open standards in terms of RSS feeds and the like. Another set of problems that open video faces is legal. As any observer of the music industry for the past few years can tell you, copyright laws were not written with digital technologies in mind, and people are still ironing out those issues.

Some video creators are not waiting for copyright law to catch up to the state of technology, and are releasing their videos under liberal licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses. Many prominent video creators have chosen this path, including those behind Boing Boing TV, TED Talks, and geekbrief.tv. Some of the most popular content on the Miro Guide, though, is not subject to copyright at all, because it is in the public domain.

The public domain content on Miro is either so old that it has fallen out of copyright, like the Archive Classic Movies channel or the Classic Cartoons channel, or it is produced by an organization that claims no copyright on their work, like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab channel. Various laws, especially those that have extended the length of copyright terms, have weakened the public domain, but it’s still a valuable source of cultural work. And not only are Miro’s public domain channels chock-full of interesting and classic materials, but because they are completely free of copyright restrictions, everything can be remixed, reconfigured, and reworked to your heart’s content!