Note on Code Swaraj
FedFlix, My Time At The Movies
Making the accessible law was something I had started work on when I founded Public Resource. I had thought about doing the law in the 1990s, but it seemed too hard, so I focused instead on big databases like patent and the SEC. But, after working for John Podesta in Washington, D.C. for a couple of years as his Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress, I told John I thought I’d be more effective running a small nonprofit. I moved back to California, asked my friend Tim O’Reilly if I could rent an office in his headquarters, and set to work. That was in 2007.
At first, I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I spent considerable time working on video, sending volunteers into the National Archives to copy thousands of federal videos and posting them as part of our “FedFlix” program. I also set up a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service for more videos, telling them if they sent me their VHS, Betacam and Umatic tapes, I’d digitize and send them back with a disk drive of the digitized videos, all at no cost to the government. Free help.
After I started that, I met a new Obama appointee who was an assistant secretary of Defense. The military had a great database of videos and a system where a member of the service could request DVDs to be cut and sent to them out in the field. Most of the videos were declassified training films and historical materials, such as a great history of aviation. I got him to send me 800 DVDs. Some of the old Army films about how electricity works are extremely popular on YouTube and I am constantly getting comments about how a particular video explained the subject far better than the class the viewer was enrolled in. All told, we ended up with 6,000 videos on the Internet Archive and YouTube and have had over 72.3 million views.
When I started posting these government videos, my YouTube channel started getting “Content ID” matches. When a content producer uploads their own videos, if they are a major media outlet they can instruct YouTube to search the system for any other videos that are identical, in whole or in part. When a match is found, the content producer is able to flag the other person’s video and issue a formal takedown notice.
If you get one of these takedown notices, you are locked out of your account until you go to “Copyright School” (which consists of answering a bunch of questions about what is legal and what is not). If you graduate from Copyright School, you are let back in your account but it functions with reduced privileges
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