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

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

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! 

The use of online and mobile video continues to grow rapidly worldwide in the consumer market, as does the adoption of health related video by healthcare professionals.  Due to the complexity of the subject matter, the inherently visual nature of video is particularly well suited to communicate difficult concepts in this field. But while the need and desire for healthcare related video is high worldwide, the costs to create quality video content can be prohibitive, and much of the leading content is not available in multiple languages, making it difficult, if not impossible, for healthcare professionals and consumers to take advantage of it globally. This is most true in emerging markets, where often the need is highest.

Enter Publicis Healthware International (PHI) and dotSUB. Two entities on the forefront of digital media pooled their respective core competencies, and created Videum, to enable online users from all reaches of the globe to meet with one another. By utilizing dotSUB’s industrial strength online platform for captioning, translating, and subtitling video, and PHI’s global reach for content, creativity, and understanding of the Health 2.0 ecosystem, this new portal will provide unparalleled, universal access to quality healthcare content from multiple sources around the globe.

The partnership’s offering, www.videum.com, is a video portal where users will soon be able to access health and wellness video content in any language. Offerings of the site will include the ability for channels, 24/7 monitoring and maintenance and verified translations.

“Video on the internet is the most powerful, yet scalable medium to communicate passion, emotion, and high quality content. But its message must be understood by everybody”, said David Orban, CEO of dotSUB.

“Health related communication on a global level need specific solutions”, said Roberto Ascione, CEO of PHI. “We are partnering with dotSUB, to bring the power of online video in health and wellness to users worldwide”, he added.

A preview of Videum is featured on September 27th, at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. A private beta of the portal will be revealed at Health 2.0 Berlin at the end of October and a full launch is planned for early 2012.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”                  ~ John Muir

Muir, a 20^th century naturalist, was certainly ahead of his time; before viruses were known, phones or radios used, even before U.S. National Parks – until he created the first one at Yosemite in 1899.  Muir knew “hitched-to-the-universe” experiences could come from sharing of nature.

It was a simpler time then; land was plenty, people few, and we didn’t really know as much about each other; we were still in discovery mode.  We could also claim ignorance to rape, famine, slavery, genocide, and even get away with it.

“We,” you say?  “’We’ could get away with it?”  “Not my problem, not my watch, nor my people,” most will exclaim, distancing ourselves from those “others.”

Yet now we can all see the earthquakes and hurricanes, feel the poverty and hunger, cringe at the Holocaust and Darfur, and who will forget 9/11?

By the same measure, we can celebrate Apartheid’s end and HIV’s decline, share the liberation of ‘Arab Spring” and the pride of a man on the moon.  We now know that human DNA is 99.9% the same.  And a new feature documentary film, Connected, by Tiffany Shlain explores this all brilliantly too.  So we get it; we’re related, connected, sometimes even reliant.

But could we go further?  Could humans connect more with each other?  Could we agree to truly universal basic human rights for all?  Could we actually become inter-dependent?

“In an interdependent relationship,” Wikipedia defines, “all participants are emotionally, economically, ecologically and/or morally self-reliant while at the same time responsible to each other.”

“Responsible to each other;” I like that; Response – able.  We sure respond to natural disasters around the globe well enough.

Except ongoing requests for food, water, medicine and equality require more listening, forethought and commitment.  “Proactive for each other” might be a bigger step in the right direction; Pro-Active interdependence.  Sounds nice, and how might we practice such interdependence – proactively?

Examples could be: car pooling, food coops, pot luck dinners, Wikipedia, Google Maps’ traffic updates using shared GPS signals, Ushahidi in Kenya maps civil unrest by SMS messages, Witness.org does it via user videos, and social media is rife with samples like Facebook, Twitter and Quora.

My favorite case in point, of course, is crowd-sourced video translation initiatives such as TED’s Open Translation Project, Adobe TV, Global Oneness.  Now dotSUB’s bold new “100 Translations Interdependence Challenge” will translate the inspiring short film A Declaration of Interdependence into a multi-cultural celebration of interdependence in action as volunteers from around the world translate the 4-minute film into as many different languages as possible. Apply here.

dotSUB’s translation process is fun, easy & rewarding for fluent multi-lingual volunteers.  Translators will be credited with their name on the websites of the Interdependence Day partner organizations including dotSUB, Connected – the film (opening September 16 in San Francisco, local US theaters thereafter), the Interdependence Movement, WE Campaign, Youth Now and other interdependent global organizations.

Projects like our 100 Translations Interdependence Challenge are dotSUB’s practicing of collaboration, connectivity and interdependence as a company, a team and as individuals who believe we are all an integral part of the universe.

“I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything created in the universe,” writes Paul Coelho.

And now the 100 Translations Challenge is inside us too!

Many colleges today put their lectures online for free, and allow people from all over the world to follow the courses, if somewhat passively watching the video lessons. Recently Stanford University decided to go one step further, by not only opening its course in Artificial Intelligence to everybody, but by enabling those enrolling in the online course to also participate in interactive exercises, and be graded, receiving a statement of accomplishment at the end.

Originally expecting a few thousand applications at most, the initial signup page at AI-Course received over 130.000 (!) applications instead, from every corner of the globe. Here is a video of Sebastian Thrun, one of the directors of the course together with Peter Norvig, explaining it:

The course is based on the interactive platform being developed by Know Labs, which partnered with dotSUB to coordinate the crowd of passionate followers of the AI Course, creating captions for the hearing impaired, and translating them into foreign language subtitles. “We have students in 190 countries so foreign language subtitles are extremely important. We are excited to work with dotSUB to make our videos accessible to all our students,” says David Stavens, CEO of Know Labs.

• 130.000 students
• 170 languages
• 190 countries
• AI, and Robots
• Stanford

Does it  get any cooler, and more global than this?

If you are interested in attending the Stanford University AI Course, the official enrollment is still open. And if you want to volunteer for the translations of the course videos, let us know via Facebook, Twitter, or in the comments below!