Throughout our project, copyright and intellectual property law play an important role. These have been hot topics in the remix and participation culture we live in for quite some time now. Remix has been part of our society for centuries but has exploded ever since participation culture, and especially Web 2.0, gave rise to what others have called: the produser. New technologies have caused a blurring between professionals and amateurs and changed the audience from consumers into consumers that produce for themselves (produsers). Semi-professional cameras, high tech mobile phones, HD video cameras – technologies that were once rare and limited to professional use now shifted towards a more general public and became common. Through the Web 2.0 produsers were handed platforms to upload and broadcast their videos, journals, pictures, etc.

A basic principle of this culture is sharing, something that is also evident in remix culture. World’s offline cultures are now available for download online. Technological developments and the participation mindset of the time stimulated the explosion of remix culture. Mash ups and remixes can be made by the common former consumer and uploaded anywhere, anytime. This new way of producing culture collides with the old intellectual property laws we’ve been stuck with for the past decades. Remix advocates such as Lawrence Lessig support a new way of distributing cultural and creative works: through creative commons licensing. The videos we are using for our project (Open Images) are all licensed this way. We are not just trying to stimulate people to start remixing their cultural heritage, we support the idea of free culture and openness.

So what are the copyright implications for our use of old games? The top 3 we’ve chosen were born out of the famous Memory, Ezelen and Hangman. To be sure we won’t get sued after launching the installation at a festival, we contacted Bureau Kennistransfer of the University of Amsterdam. They agreed to help us out and here’s the first feedback:

• Our version of the memory game should at least be named differently. The game in itself is very old and can be traced back to Japan. Ravensburger however owns the brand name ‘memory’ and is involved in over 100 lawsuits per year to protect that brand. The extreme amount of online variations to the game – find the difference, what is missing, spot the difference – point to the fact that our version could probably be used safely.
• Ezelen seems to be a very old card game that has different variations in different countries. There is no commercial party ‘claiming’ the game as theirs, so it’s probably safe for us to use – even the name. Our version of the game also has a feeling of ‘kwartet‘ to it, which is a typical Dutch game according to Wikipedia. This game has been used by numerous businesses and game producers for decades. It is unlikely that they all bought a license for it so for now it seems we can use it safely.
• Hangman, or galgje in Dutch, is a very old game. It’s been mentioned as early as 1894 so this game too seems safe to use.

That’s it for today. Check these videos if you want to know more about creative commons or remix culture:

Mister CC himself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Creative Commons:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The very interesting documentary ‘RIP: A Remix Manifesto’:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s been a while since  our last update so it’s time for us to drop a line. The last 2 weeks we’ve been draining the creativity from our brains to come up with several concepts. It was challenging to incorporate and merge together the wishes and goals from all parties involved. For Dropstuff the central theme is interaction, for Sound & Vision it is remix. Culture Vortex wants participation and we, Led It Up, want brilliance. Taking these 4 keywords as a starting point we soon figured that using gameplay elements would be the best way to develop a concept that would suit all. Within a game we would be able to remix images from the Open Images database, a webapp would be developed to create interaction and the use of competitive elements would stimulate people to participate and keep playing.

A million post-its further – several trees were hurt in the process – we developed a big pile of games of which we chose our final 5. The overall format we will use is that of mini games. This means you will be able to play games through your mobile phone on a huge screen – ain’t that cool? Out of our 5 favourite concepts we are now developing 3. Time for a new project phase! The rest of this week we’ll focus on creating the first draft of our design document. Tomorrow we’re meeting someone who could help us out on the interaction design, more on that later.

Next week we might have some exciting festival news.. Stay tuned!