More open content: The Open Video Project.

The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities.

Clips are searchable by keyword and freely downloadable, or you can view a fastforwarded quicktime version first. The copyright issues are interesting – the “about” page very carefully frames the project as a research and not a production resource:

Although the government agency videos were produced with public funds and are freely available from the Archives, no copyright clearance has been obtained for audio or video elements in these productions. We encourage researchers to use the data under fair use for research purposes. Those wishing to use these video clips in any commercial enterprise must bear the burden of obtaining copyright clearances.

But what about an amateur production subsequently made freely available online? It isn’t the actual legal status of such a production I am most interested in, rather the omission of any reference to it in the blurb.

At the time of posting I was listening to: Squarepusher,  Iambic 5 Poetry, from the album Budakhan Mindphone.