About Public Videos

Last updated on January 08, 8:02pm (GMT).

Public Domain and Free Culture

On January 1st of this year we celebrated the Public Domain day, although one might argue that there wasn't much to celebrate at all since in the US and some other countries, thanks to retroactive copyright term extensions we are living a public domain ice age and few works will return to the commons for the next 9 years.

That's a bummer, since culture is always better when it can be shared, reused and repurposed freely. Specially nowadays, when regular people can have access to editing tools and publishing channels only available to a few in the past, and artists continue to amaze us with their art built on top of other works.

Luckily, for the ones in tune with our generation's speed, there are legal tools like the Creative Commons licenses that allows people to release their stuff under better-than-the-default terms. Or even, as is the case of the CC0 waiver, allows copyright owners to narrow the time it would take for the work to return to the commons to zero.

Enter Public Videos.

Since around 1 year ago I've been sponsoring the shooting of generic stock-footage clips using consumer high definition camcorders with the goal of building a free clips farm that could be freely used by anyone for any purpose. Similar to projects like Open Clip Art but for open video.

Then last year, at the time I left my good job on a Palo Alto based startup I had already a reasonable sized collection and enough savings to live some months on my own and to invest on the building of the web system and business model that would make it possible for a free footage library to exist.

Public Videos Alpha.

As I said earlier, the website is not done. But I thought I could use some help and feedback by allowing everyone to sneak-peak the project as it develops and at the same time let people play with it and use the material while the basic launch library is still being populated.

Bare in mind that this is very early-stage and still missing very basic important features, it is unstable and bugs are expected while on this experimental stage. The good news is that the development is moving at a reasonable decent speed for a "1 to 3 people" design and dev gig, that is :)

The idea is to reach feature-completness and a "ready for production" stamp sometime next month, but I don't want to make promisses…

I sincerily hope you like it. If you have suggestions or want to participate more actively in the alpha and soon-to-come beta stages please feel free to contact me by email, or register yourself in our mailing list, ask questions on the faq page, use the wiki, or the launchpad page. See the links below.

Enjoy!

Fabricio C Zuardi