Economies of the Commons 2: Paying the Costs of Making Things Free
International conference, seminar and public evening programs
Amsterdam and Hilversum
November 11 – 13, 2010

Economies of the Commons 2 is a critical examination of the economics of on-line public domain and open access resources of  information, knowledge, and media (the ‘digital commons’).  The past 10 years have seen the rise of a variety of such open content resources attracting millions of users, sometimes on a daily basis. The impact of projects such as Wikipedia, Images of the Future, and Europeana testify to the vibrancy of the new digital public domain.  No longer left to the exclusive domains of digital ‘insiders’, open content resources are rapidly becoming widely used and highly popular.

While protagonists of open content praise its low-cost accessibility and collaborative structures, critics claim it undermines the established “gate keeping” functions of authors, the academy, and professional institutions while lacking a reliable business model of its own. Economies  of the Commons 2 provides a timely and crucial analysis of sustainable economic models that can promote and safeguard the online public domain. We want to find out what the new hybrid solutions are for archiving, access and reuse of on-line content that can both create viable markets and serve the public interest in a competitive global 21st century information economy.

Economies of the Commons 2 consists of an international seminar on Open Video hosted by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision on November 11 in Hilversum, a two day international conference and two public evening programs on November 12 and 13 at De Balie, centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam. The event builds upon the successful Economies of the Commons conference organised in April  2008.

Confirmed speakers include:
Charlotte Hess (Syracuse University – Keynote), Ben Moskowitz (Open Video Alliance), Simona Levi (Free Culture Forum), Bas Savenije (KB National library of the Netherlands), Yann Moulier Boutang (Multitudes), Peter B. Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Harry Verwayen (Europeana), James Boyle (Duke University), Jeff Ubois (DTN), Sandra Fauconnier (NIMK), Dymitri  Kleiner (Telekommunisten), Nathaniel Tkacz (University of Melbourne), a.o.

On the occasion of the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage and to celebrate the 1000th added video, a few special videos have been added to Open Images. These videos from the Polygoon collection of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision are about the arrival of the first Polygoon newsreels with sound.

From 1922 the audience was able to watch the Polygoon newsreels in the Dutch cinemas. The first years the Dutch audience had to watch these newsreels without any Dutch commentary. The Dutch news was silent and the reports that were imported from abroad only had foreign commentary. Almost ten years after the first Polygoon newsreel this changed. On May 29, 1931 Polygoon showed the first Dutch film with sound in the cinemas. Soon after that, Dutch commentary was also added to the well-known Polygoon Hollands Nieuws (Polygoon Dutch News). Before the first Polygoon Hollands Nieuws with sound was made a few test films were shot. As a test for the sound-film, the director of the film factory Polygoon, mr. B.D. Ochse, read a couple of texts aloud:

To add lustre to the arrival of the first Polygoon Hollands Nieuws with sound, a few prominent figures from the film industry were asked to deliver a speech. Mr. D. van Staveren, chairman of the Centrale Commissie Filmkeuring (Central Film Censorship Board), spoke on film about how delighted he was with the arrival of the sound-film. He thereby also spoke of his displeasure with “all kinds of foreign influences creeping into the Dutch language”, which he mainly blamed on the American sound-film:

Besides mr. van Staveren, the chairman of the Dutch Union of Cinema Proprietors, mr. David Hamburger jr., was also asked to speak about the arrival of the sound-film. He was delighted that he could now understand the foreign news reports just as well as the German, French and English speaking inhabitants of the country. According to him the arrival of the Polygoon Hollands Nieuws with sound was “a real boon”:

Finally, a recording of mr. Ochse in which he announces the sound-film and contemplates on the added value this will have for watching football matches. These will now “enter the cinema with the richness of it’s buzzing sounds”: