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

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!

Starting today dotSUB allows all its users to send their subtitled dotSUB videos to their YouTube account.

Users can upload and caption their videos on dotSUB and push the video file and subtitles to YouTube. If your videos are already uploaded to YouTube, do not fear! Just upload the video file to dotSUB and we will help you match up your dotSUB subtitles to the existing video on YouTube.

dotSUB is the perfect captioning and subtitling tool to complement your YouTube account, and to increase your video views globally!

Internet consumers must be given experiences that are equal to, if not better than, the experiences provided when content was originally aired on television, is the new mandate included in the  July 13 report by FCC’s Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee on the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010.

So next January, advanced captioning for live and near-live programming must be online. By next July, all prerecorded programming “substantially edited” for the Internet must be captioned.  Carriers of Internet media must support closed-captioning and end-user display in terms of language, character color, opacity, size, edge, background and font.

“User settings are new to players which support Internet-delivered video, and will require time and effort to implement,” the Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee report said.

The new rules allow for Internet delivery of the single standard interchange format now used for digital television. Distributors can transcode for various playout options — such as proprietary or browser-based players — as long as the captioning characteristics are maintained.

Media giants Time-Warner, CNN and Netflix have all been recently sued in City, State and Federal Courts for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by not providing the deaf with equal access or closed captions to “watch instantly” digital video, archived news and programming.

“The lack of captioned videos means that millions of people with hearing loss will continue to be denied equal access to video news content on CNN.com,” Anna Levine, the plaintiffs” attorney in the suit, said.

The Netflix lawsuit also states: “While streaming (video) provides more access to entertainment to the general public, it threatens to be yet another barrier to people who are deaf and hard of hearing.”

Consequences – legal costs, lost audiences, brand damage – for non-compliance seem serious now, and look like they are just getting started.

More Resources:

dotSUB’s General Overview: U.S. Accessibility Regulations for Online Video Captions

Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (October, 2010): Signed by President Barack Obama

Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee (July 2011): First Report on Closed Captioning of Video Programming Delivered Using Internet Protocol

Broadcast Engineering.com (July 2011): FCC sets six-month deadline for Internet closed captioning

KTVU.com (June 2011): CNN Being Sued For Lack Of Closed-Captioning Online

Paid Content (June 2011): Deaf Group Sues Netflix Over Lack Of Captions On Instant Viewing

National Association of the Deaf (NAD)

The Yallah Film Festival is the first ever short film festival dedicated to the Arab Awakening.

We’ve been following very closely and with great emotion, enthusiasm, and passion the events that have been occurring since January 2011 in the Arab World.

These “Arab Spring Revolutions”, as coined by the press, have given way to the most extraordinary events of the 21st Century: tens of millions of people protesting for freedom and democracy, the overthrowing of some dictatorships by non violent protests and gatherings.

The goal of the festival is to give a chance to all the creators within the Arab geographical area to talk about their daily life through an original video creation, whether fiction, documentary or film shot with a mobile phone, with the goal of giving the viewers an impression of what their life looks like now.

The Yallah Film Festival gives a chance to all film makers to tell their stories of the Arab Awakening by sending their Dramas (3 minutes), Documentaries (3 minutes) and Mobile Films (1 minute).

All the films published online will be subtitled in English by a group of volunteer translators from Translators without Borders.

The Yallah Film Festival wants to highlight new talents from the Arab world and help them emerge. So take a chance and send your film! A selection Committee of the organizers will present a selection of 50 to 70 films on September 26th of 2011, and a prestigious Jury will then assign the Prizes.

The Prize Ceremony will occur at the prestigious Arab World Institute in Paris on October 19th of 2011, in front of 400 cinema enthusiasts and professionals.

The message of the Yallah Film Festival is a message of peace and positive aspirations. The spirit of the festival is to go beyond the overwhelming violent images that have been spread everywhere on the Internet and the TV News, and each film submitted will be moderated before publication, selected first of all on a quality basis.

The Yallah Film Festival, organized by MobilEvent with the support of dotSUB and other media partners, is not for profit. Visit the “How can I help ?” page to learn how you also can support it.

Who can participate ?

Participation in the Yallah Film Festival is open to every professional, semi-professional directors, video enthusiasts, just about anyone making films. If you want to take a stance or testify on the tremendous events that have been occurring in the Arab world since January 2011, just go ahead: we would love to see your film.

Here is one of the first entries in the festival:

“Ghassan El Hakim – Mamfuckinch
To take the street or not, that’s the question. For the love of a king?! What if we didn’t love him? Will they call us traitors? Morocco is in a ferment, and the youth is not ready to give concessions. It’s not a simple wave and it’s called “mamfuckinch”, and soon in your streets ;) “

We released an update to our Brightcove plug-in used by our Enterprise clients. This is the second large update in the last few months. The latest version features simpler configuration for our clients and language loading using ISO-639-1 and ISO-639-2 language codes.

If you are a new client, contact us to take advantage of our always evolving set of tools to provide captions and subtitles on your Brightcove videos. Existing clients can contact their dotSUB representative to upgrade to the latest version of the plugin at no additional cost.