Cory Doctorow is always worth watching: insightful, funny, often provocative and consistently knowledgeable. OK, so I’m a bit of a boingboing fanboy. And yes, the video was posted weeks ago, but I’m just now getting to it.

In this talk, part of the Cambridge Business Lectures series, Doctorow brings together two key topics which I’ve seen lots of folks discuss separately:

• The Internet as perfect copying machine, including the absurdities of digital restrictions management (DRM) and the necessity for changes to business models as a result of a changing technology landscape
• The Internet as (nearly) perfect mechanism for bringing people together for collective action both serious and banal

It’s a mash up of Lawrence Lessing on copyright (including references back to John Philip Sousa’s concern about atrophying vocal cords if recorded music is allowed to circulate) and Here Comes Everybody era Clay Shirky (discussing the traditional cost of organizing, getting large numbers of people working together as the single largest problem for companies to solve in the information age).

There’s also, though, enough Cory Doctorow here to prevent it from feeling like any kind of rehash or unauthorized, second generation degraded copy. My favorite example:

Paris Hilton’s genitals have joined the undead – they will live forever, stalking the Internet until the last plug is pulled on the last network router.

Doctorow points out th risk that the first discussion – the internet as copy machine – has largely distracted us from the second – the internet as a fundamental connecting machine. Here he overlaps a bit with The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It era Jonathan Zittrain, arguing that we can’t allow the solutions to the former use to kill the value presented by the latter. Or, as Doctorow puts it:

We need to have a balance, a detente, that says to these firms, “You can try to make your living, but you can’t do it at the expense of the system that is delivering all of this public benefit. Not just copying movies, but beyond that – beyond that small parochial concern – allowing us to organise ourselves in ways that ennoble the human condition, and if you make it a choice between the Internet and Police Academy sequels, eventually society is going to vote for the Internet, so you can’t make it that choice.”

Well said, indeed – and I liked some of those Police Academy sequels.

Guess the negotiations with Hasbro and Electronic Arts didn’t go so well. It was really my primary reason for actually logging in to Facebook.

You can also subscribe to their video podcast in Miro, using this as a channel:

http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/main/podcast/

(If you don’t use Miro, just copy that url into your podcatcher of choice).

They’ve also just published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, which provides guidance to video creators. The goal of the code is:

to clearly establish what constitutes fair use in online video, and to reach out to creators and copyright holders alike to create a common awareness of what kind of quoting is legal and illegal. This can only be accomplished through participation — by spreading the word to your users, you can help to protect this emerging culture.

It’s well worth reading through whether you’re a video creator or a copyright holder.

I bookmarked it at the time, downloaded a copy to my “to read” folder (a dangerous thing to have) and then ignored it for the last month or so. You should not do the same. This may be your only chance to explain away the hours you wasted watching dramatic chipmonk videos as “work-related.”

The researchers looked at hundreds of user-generated videos, specifically focusing on those which “incorporate copyrighted works into new creations.”

They analyze the videos in terms of the uses to which the copyrighted material is put, and how those uses related to the “fair use” doctrine with respect to copyright. The types of uses they uncover include:

• Parody and satire
• Negative or critical commentary
• Positive commentary
• Quoting to trigger discussion
• Illustration or example
• Incidental use
• Personal reportage or diaries
• Archiving of vulnerable or revealing materials
• Pastiche or collage

It’s not only perfectly relevant analysis, it’s also a really good catalog of the best of user-generated videos.

My current favorite – too recent for inclusion in the report, but otherwise very much in line with the satire and critical commentary approaches is the Obama-supporting Yes We Can video and the corresponding parody of McCain: Like Hope, But Different.