Pending US legislation - SOPA & PIPA – is the wrong answer to the wrong question

The Internet is an unparalleled platform for innovation, activism and self-expression that creates opportunities, growth and jobs in the U.S. and around the world. In fact, without the Internet’s global access, robust architecture, and freedom of speech, the likes of Wikipedia, YouTube and the Arab Spring probably never would have happened, or would have been very different.

But all this is now at risk because of pending draconian legislation in the U.S. Congress – the ’Stop Online Piracy Act’ (SOPA) and the ‘Protect IP Act’ (PIPA) – as the following video from Fight for the Future explains beautifully…

So on January 18, to protest against this misguided SOPA / PIPA legislation, dotSUB will join hundreds of other websites like Wikipedia, Mozilla, WordPress, Reddit, Twitpic, BoingBoing by going “dark.”  The dotSUB homepage will be black for 24 hours with links only to US Congressional representatives to show how constricted the Internet under these over-reaching ‘anti-piracy’ regulations would be. (Our full functionality, inside pages, embedded videos, plugins, APIs and the dotSUB Translation Content Management System used by our customers will remain available during the protest.)

As drafted, this legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet’s underlying infrastructure. What that will do is compromise Internet security, inhibit online expression, and slow growth and job creation in the technology sector. The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, provides a detailed analysis of how SOPA will hurt the Internet.

SOPA / PIPA are simply the wrong answer to the wrong question, is also how Tim O’Reilly, founder & CEO of O’Reilly Media, puts it. We agree. It is the wrong question because piracy will never be stopped by new regulations when innovative pirates can satisfy global consumer demand at much lower prices or for free, and those corporations that could legally supply those products and services will not. And it is the wrong answer because the innovations in technology and business models which the Internet fosters will no longer be feasible due to unlimited liabilities that would become possible with SOPA.

What can you do?

1. If you are a U.S. citizen, please contact your representative now to express your disagreement with the proposed legislation!

2. If you are in New York City on January 18 at 12:30pm, come join us for the Emergency Meeting of the NY Tech Meetup to protest outside the offices of U.S. Senators Schumer and Gillibrand at 780 3rd Ave.

3. If you are fluent in languages other than English, and passionate about open, public and global Internet sustainability, please volunteer to translate the short video ”SOPA / PIPA Break The Internet” from above. It is very easy to do, and this tutorial shows you how.

4. If you are a citizen of another country, check if similar legislation is being introduced, and make your voice heard!

Meanwhile, let’s protest these unwanted U.S. laws together on January 18!

David Orban
CEO, dotSUB

We use technology to bring us all closer together, communicating clearly, emotionally, and with passion

From TED Talks to Tahrir Square, from the Yallah Film Festival to A Declaration of Interdependence, dotSUB gives global stories a local voice. We connect people, communities, organizations, and governments—dotSUB Connects the World—in Any Language!
Thought-leaders, tech start-ups, advocacy movements, even gurus—people who are persuading and trading in ideas—adopted dotSUB’s crowd-sourced and professional subtitling technology first. Now the whole world wants to speak across the old language and cultural barriers.

Here’s one such Season’s Greetings in Any Language…

Publicis Healthware International’s multi-lingual video greeting from employees in 50 offices that you can see above, was created using dotSUB’s tech-enabled, human-powered, language services, to better engage their multi-cultural audiences in their native tongues.Working together with such innovative partners, global clients, our website users, and social media followers is an honor. Our dotSUB Team makes leading this a privilege, too.

We try to share our excitement about all these dotSUB endeavors through our monthly newsletters, but I am eager to hear your feedback on how we can serve you better. Send me an email with your thoughts at anytime or post a comment on dotSUB’s Facebook wall.

Meanwhile, here’s to a healthy, happy, prosperous and way more connected 2012!

Happy holidays!

David Orban
CEO, dotSUB

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. A large community of passionate users has formed in the recent years around it, and with new initiatives, like the availability of the kits from Radio Shack, and the Arduino Education website, Arduino is becoming important to teach electronics to a new generation of makers.

David Gomba of Arduino says: “As we have announced on the Arduino blog, Radio Shack is starting to sell Arduino in most of its 6000+ stores all around the US. We want our videos to be understood all over the world, and crowdsourcing translations and subtitles to our community is a way to make Arduino even more usable and friendly. Be part of this revolution on our blog videos and on the scuola site for our teachers. Arduino is You!”

Human Language Families

Ordered by number of native speakers, these numbers should be taken as no more than an indication of the rough order of magnitude of a linguistic community. the estimates used for this list are those of the SIL Ethnologue, and other estimates will vary.

Figures are accompanied by dates the data was collected; for many languages, an old date means that the current number of speakers will be substantially greater. A range of dates means that the figure is the sum of data from more than one country and from different years.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

More than 100 million native speakers

In 2008, Laurent Zylberman and Éric Meyer have been the only free-lance press people allowed into Tibet to report on the autonomous region since the March 2008 riots. In their book “Tibet, Last Scream!” resulting from that trip, they both endeavored to subtly depict two confronting, if not clashing cultures. Narrated day by day, Laurent’s black-and-white photographs and Eric’s diary immerse the reader into a journey through the roof top of the world and open up a window onto modern Tibet: a window not on what it used to be, but on what it is or could become.

One of the stories from their trip, included in the book…

On the 24th of September 2008, on the side of the main road from Lhasa to the lowlands, we were visiting a farm. Dianba, his wife and two relatives were busy threshing the grain.

The work was hard, the farm was busy, the atmosphere pleasant and full of wit. The farmer had four “mu” (2500m²) of wheat, soja and barley, 5 pigs, 2 cows, 20 yaks, the butter of which they sold weekly to the market. More than anything else, they also had their house, newly built at a cost of 50000 Yuan(7000 Dollar), half of the money being let by the province, via the local credit cooperative. Quite a nice, sturdy two-story mansion of heavy stone and carved wood, built according to local precepts. Dianba was paying back about 200$ per month, which in is words, was “no problem”. 50 Meter away, his neighbor was boasting on top of his puffing and panting tractor, which had helped cut and bring in his fall crop. Dianba was planning to buy his own the year after. For Dianba and his people, life was not too bad.

Nonetheless, Sanmu, our young guide was  nervous, watching us all the time and never leaving us out of sight. Even in the face of this true success story for the regime – a story which could not have been cheated, as we had chosen the spot on a sudden inspiration (“taxi – stop here pls”).

During the whole trip,Sanmu’s nervousness would only grow more and more intense, especially as we were visiting monasteries like Ganden, Tashilumpo or the Jokhang: there, she went as far as prohibiting me from asking a question to an old monk, or denying translation. She gave us hell, and we reciprocated, as we split into four directions in order to see things and people on our own, with a minimum of privacy – she could not be with all of us at the same time…  On the last days, nervously exhausted, close to tears, she would confess that she had been under strict orders to act so rudely, and would have been fired, had she relented. After the mission, she asked to be transferred to another department or her “waiban” (Bureau for Foreign Affairs) – she felt, and was felt definitely too sweet for the job.

As a matter of fact, the entire provincial government was nervous. It was afraid of the tension that could flare and burst at any moment. I have never seen such heavy armored and busily patrolled cities like Lhasa or Shigatze. Though the regime has spent, and still spends billions of dollars per year on the plateau’s modernization. Though the regime has very convincing deeds to show, good roads, schools, dispensaries, all of these infrastructures and social services at a preliminary stage, but they did not exist at all 50 years earlier at the time before China. The regime has even done better than that: it has trained and hired cohorts of Tibetan nurses, doctors, teachers, juges, experts and industrialists, all of them with salaries and paid holidays, social welfare and pensions. People who accept, and perhaps secretly welcome the system as possibly the best deal the region could hope for. Those people, we met them mostly at night, strolling in the city, without any guide to tell us who to talk to and about what.

Some of them, we met through contacts pre-arranged from Beijing. In my raw estimate, “rule of thumb”, up to 30% of the Tibetans there may be accepting or supporting the socialist regime. At the same time, they keep staying faithful “gelubka”, yellow hat-Buddhists, dreaming of seeing the Dalai Lama back here to ensure their spiritual future and the reemerging of their culture. Up to 80% of them, upon their death, chose the “aerial burial” – letting their bodies being devoured by gigantic vultures at the tops of hills around Lhasa. And the local law protects this tradition, warning outsiders by posts and signals in Tibetan, Mandarine and English to stay away.

All of this and lots more, contributed to the decision to write the book, in order to sort out all these conflicting elements. This region was lacking freedom for sure, and therefore, was not in a position to build its own free image, consciousness. Laurent, with his powerfulblack & white pictures, was very close to me on the interpretation, also engrossed with the altitude drunkenness and an instinctive refusal of those stern, unforgiving ideologies. Going for the people and seeking to restore the natural link of mankind. Tibet belongs to the world, to itself, to us, and we, i.e., both Tibet and the world, need one another. Seeing Han Chinese and Tibetan youngsters dancing together in the night club in both Lhasa and Damxiong near the Namso lake, we both had the intuition of a future culture, half spiritual (buddhist), half materialist (Han Chinese) that could emerge, where reconciled people were in dialogue. What a bet, for Tibet, and for the future !

Later, back to the lowland, after having spent a year writing down our trip, I found out that the conflict perceived up in the mountains, was spread everywhere and predominant around the rest of the world.

If you feel inspired by “Tibet, Last Scream“, you might want to consider supporting the Kickstart project funding the publishing of the book.

There are more than 6000 languages in the world, and English is, well, just one of them. There was a time when most of the content on the Internet was in English, and that was enough to communicate, or to tell your story. Not anymore…

Content in languages other than English is growing very rapidly, driven by more and more people coming online in countries like China, Indonesia, or in South America, and Africa. These people will be likely to find new and different ways to use Internet’s infrastructure, whether in something as simple as their choice of search engine (yes, Google is not the leader in many countries, from China to the Czech Republic), or in more complex areas as with mobile access being more and more preferred rather than personal computers.

Video content is also spreading worldwide. GigaOm recently reported that most video views on YouTube come from non English speakers.

The image above is the pie chart representation of the videos on dotSUB by subtitle language: there are several hundred of them, and as you can see, not one of them is dominating. (Yes, this is not the traditional way of representing a long tail. We have an other image as well, but this is nicer!)

Your video can be personal, or commercial, and you can decide to use the crowd to have it captioned and translated, or professionals. It can live of dotSUB, YouTube, or incorporated in your online strategy through BrightCove, Kaltura, Ooyala, or others. In any case, with the help of the easy to use tools and effective integration in the online ecosystem, you know that you can reach everybody on the planet!

…

And if you are in the US (4.55% of the world population), happy Thanksgiving!

Jason Silva will present his new short film “The Beginning of Infinity” at the Singularity Summit in New York tomorrow. It is one of those videos with very high information and visual content, where captions and subtitles really add value in deeply understanding its message, in English, and other languages.

Jason says:

“My goal is to give audiences a ‘download’, an inception of rapturous awe. We live in a world of radical progress where, increasingly, technology is shrinking the lag time between our imaginings and their instantiation in the world. I see our technologies as tools for consciousness expansion, expanding the boundaries of our thought reach and vision. I’m an unwavering optimist, and I believe creating content that “epiphanizes” in short, two minute bursts of inspiration is an effective means of spreading the meme and cutting through the noise. I hope you agree.”

And about the short film, he adds:

“This video is inspired, in part, by the ideas explored in David Deutsch’s new book, “The Beginning of Infinity“. In our work, we use the tools of editing: we juxtapose ‘transcalar’ imagery, cutting and overlapping the very small and the very large… From the nano to the galactic, stretching and compressing time, we feature time lapse to reveal the repetitive and recurring patterns across different scales of reality. The aim is to provide multiple perspectives all at once, whose simultaneous presentation might cause spontaneous epiphanies. “These patterns are omnipresent, but only when we see these patterns in a more compressed mode of presentation do we start to attend to them as such.”

Our stated goal is to re-ignite the art of the “performing philosophers” … like Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller… A post on Space Collective wrote about “thinkers who act as substantial agents of change, who drastically alter the infocologies they interact with, in the process transforming and meshing the different dimensions in which our minds operate.”

We care about the pleasures derived in forming new connections, mash-ups and innovative solutions for the next step in human evolution. We are working to articulate our understanding through the creation of recombinant media mashups meant to epiphanize audiences—the creating and sharing of awe; “performance philosophy” in an age of collapsing boundaries and exponential creativity.

The director of the Imaginary Foundation described our work as “some kind of Ontological DJ’ing, recompiling the source code of western philosophy by mixing and mashing it up into a form of recombinant creativity, which (hopefully) elevates our understanding from the dry and prosaic, into the sensual and transcendent.”

Information technologies have become instruments of mind expansion, sensorial scaffoldings that increase and augment our capacity to process greater amounts of information, allowing us to extract richer gradients of meaningful data about the world and our experience. Whether its a telescope, a microscope or a marijuana joint, we need to think of these tools as aids, contact lenses through which we can see so much more than before.

In the digital dimension we use the term resolution. Certainly we can appreciate how much more can be ‘revealed’ by having higher resolution….. and technology offering complex visualizations literally ups the resolution of our internal and external perceptions. Different Scales and perspectives of reality show how much of what we perceive is dictated by our point of view–literally by where we are and how we think. The most exhilarating realization, then, is that we all have the power to shape our experience by our linguistic and creative choices.”

Follow Jason on Twitter: @jason_silva.

Come to a special discussion dotSUB’s Peter S. Crosby will be leading about the award-winning Sundance documentary “CONNECTED: An Autobiography about Love, Death & Technology,” directed by Tiffany Shlain, after the Monday 4:40p screening during its opening week at The Angelika / NYC.

“I’m honored to be asked to host the discussion about crowd-sourcing, multi-culturalism & interdependence based on both ‘Connected’ and the short film ‘A Declaration of Interdependence.’  It’s literally a demonstration of interdependence how volunteer translators from all over the world have added 54 language subtitles in just 22 days!”

It’s part of a fantastic line-up of speakers all week. Watch trailer and buy tickets.

Come support indie film! 

This guest post is by Robin Kent, Founder of The Fearless Group, an Advertising Consultancy, former Chairman & CEO of Universal McCann, and member of the dotSUB Board of Advisors.

Recently I wrote a post asking the question, “Should digital video commercials come with subtitles?” I finished by saying “Each advertiser must decide based on the many factors that define their brands, but I think subtitling should at least be considered.”

I decided to recommend subtitles for the video commercials we at Fearless wrote and produced for the launch of a brand new sTLD (sponsored top-level domain) dotXXX exclusively for the adult entertainment industry. After a 10-year campaign ICM Registry won the right to market dotXXX to the adult entertainment industry and launched September 7, 2011.

The current campaign can be viewed on our YouTube channel. It was aimed at the adult entertainment industry and intended to demonstrate to them that while a dotXXX domain is affordable, given the substantial investment .XXX is making in this new online adult destination they cannot afford not to be part of it. The commercials were humorous and deliberately designed to go viral. We worked to make them look less like ads than episodes in an intriguing ongoing story of one man’s decision and its consequences. There’s Gavin, who decided to keep his dotcom and save $100 (He’s happy about it honest!) versus his alter ego (King Gavin XXX) who chose a dotXXX and made a fortune.

dotSUB undertook the task of subtitling our 4 videos of various lengths in German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish—the languages our research showed to be relevant to the world’s largest adult entertainment markets.

If every minute 48 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube, how do you get a video to go viral? We’re all familiar with the videos that get passed around globally (the sneezing baby panda, the kid under anesthesia).

Those that don’t feature a celebrity tend to be outrageous or to involve freak accidents. But it’s hardly a science. How do you set out to make a video go viral, much less an ad?

I can’t tell you how we did it, as that’s part of our secret sauce. What I can tell you is that we made it happen for dotXXX. After 72 hours our first commercial was viewed over 1.3 million times and our second reached 2 million in the same amount of time, achieving the most viewed video and channel on YouTube for the week!

My partner Peter Gibb was the Creative Director on all four spots. They were shot by the production company, Rooster NY. The lead actor is Gavin McInnes, a known internet personality. We chose him because he’s a little crazy in a good way and a real character. Gavin enhanced the overall effect of the commercials aiding their “viralabilty”.

Did the subtitles make a difference to our YouTube success? Actually they did. After USA and Canada the countries where we received the most views were exactly those whose languages we featured in subtitles: Germany, Brazil, Japan and Russia.

In the end of course, the only measure that counts is sales. ICM Registry is 80% above their planned target and expects to be 300% above by the end of the year.

My view is as I previously said, if you can add subtitles you should!