[okfn-discuss] Open Source Movie Def. request for comments

Mon Mar 23 10:10:09 UTC 2009

Hello,

Jonathan suggested me to post this here. I've been writing a thesis 
paper on Open Source Film business models and since I couldn't find a 
suitable definition for the term Open Source Film I consulted Open 
Source Filmmakers (among them Ton Roosendaal / Blender Foundation) in 
order to discuss the issue. I already used the def. in my thesis paper 
but I would be very happy to get feedback from you in order to possibly 
improve it.

An Open Source Movie is a movie where:
1) The license of the movie is approved for Free Cultural Works. 
Specifically this is true for the Creative Commons licenses by and by-sa.
2) The materials used in the movie (sources) are also available under a 
license which is approved for Free Cultural Works.
3) The movie and its sources are made publicly available via an online 
download or by other means that are either free or with a cost that 
covers reasonable reproduction expenses only.
4) The sources should be viewable and editable with free/open source 
software. If this is not the case, they must be convertible into such a 
format by using free/open source software. The same applies to the movie 
itself.
5) It should be possible to re-create or re-assemble the movie using the 
source materials.

The definition tries to apply the OSI definition of Open Source software 
to film. For reasons of simplicity I refer to the definition of Free 
Cultural licenses (see 1). I did not include the requirements of the 
definition of Free Cultural Works because this one is far too demanding 
when it comes to the term "free" and thus doesn’t suit for filmmaking 
for several reasons. Naming the specific CC by and by-sa is simply done 
because the CC licenses are the most well know and in the case of movies 
the most widely used licenses which are approved for free cultural works.

Thanks a lot for feedback,

Tim Baumann

Valkaama Open Source Movie project
www.valkaama.com