I've never heard of LionShare before this, but the Internet2 folks just announced it's going open source. Developments like these are always welcome, and with a lot of heavyweights behind its release and an academic focus, it will be interesting to see where this goes.

In a follow-up to the licensing of the Outfoxed movie under a Creative Commons license, Robert Greenwald has also agreed to release the interviews from his previous movie, Uncovered: The War on Iraq under the Creative Commons. The files can be downloaded directly (also available in higher quality format) from archive.org, or you can join the torrent hosted on Torrentocracy.com at uncovered_interviews.torrent.

Hopefully we can match the over 700 downloads of Outfoxed that its torrent has already generated. Either way, the truth is free.

(free as in beer AND as in freedom)

Wired.com explores the Outfoxed creative commons release and discusses the history and future of movie remixing and the benefits of open licensing. Choice quote:

But Hollyn thinks Greenwald may be onto a smart viral-marketing campaign with the release of the raw Outfoxed content, and that it isn't hard to imagine other filmmakers following suit.

"I don't think there's a giant leap from Outfoxed to other kinds of movies," Hollyn said. "I think you'll see the smaller, independent filmmakers leading this. And the studios, if it catches on, will figure out a way to do this within their legal obligations."

Checking in from some free wifi in Albuquerque (on my trip to my new home town of Palo Alto) and I see that unmediated.org has listed Torrentocracy as a "featured project". Very cool.

Perusing their blog I also just learned that someone has released an enclosure enabling plugin for Movable Type. Although the latest release of Torrentocracy no longer relies on the need for enclosure tags in your XML, this is still really cool stuff.

It's worth taking some extra time mentioning that if anyone is looking to use the interviews for their own mash-up purposes, archive.org is hosting a high quality mpeg2 version which runs about 3.5GB. Enjoy.

In working with Lawrence Lessig, Robert Greenwald has agreed to release the interviews within Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism under a Creative Commons non-commercial license (press release). This means that among the rights now granted, interviews balancing out the fair journalism of Fox News can freely be used as anyone sees fit. To see the full movie, you can purchase the Outfoxed DVD or check it out in theaters.

Torrentocracy (along with archive.org) has exclusive initial access to distribute these interviews in their digital form due to the work undertaken to promote a TV-connected, public domain, internet based media distribution network. The torrent file to start your Outfoxed download can be found at outfoxed_interviews.torrent. For more information on how to use bit torrent peer-to-peer filesharing to download this, go here. If you were a Torrentocracy user, you could already be downloading Outfoxed to your television.

It is plainly obvious that this is quite a development not only for the furtherance of media projects that promote sharing and openness, but also as a validation of the legitimate use of peer-to-peer distribution (Induce Act, anyone?). With projects like Torrentocracy enabling any blog to become its own "TV channel" through use of bit torrent, perhaps we can begin to re-enable a plurality of media voices as Outfoxed calls upon us to do. Score this development right alongside MGM v. Grokster. Indeed, we are "dealing with something new."

Congress needs to see that this is not only true, but actually quite an understatement. And maybe, just maybe, we can paradigm shift ourselves to a place where all the established players don't own the turf.

Torrentocracy 0.0.9 is now available (tarball):

* If the RSS entry text has a torrent URL within it and no torrent enclosure XML in the actual feed, parse out the torrent URL so torrentocracy can join it. Duh, this 8 extra lines of code will make torrentocracy able to make use of ANY blog which points to a torrent.

* Added Air America Radio Archive to the list of torrent enabled feeds

* Reconnected MythBrowser to Torrentocracy (it no longer seg faults). You can now hit select on an RSS entry to bring it up in MythBrowser for full web effect. I don't have it perfected yet so control isn't properly returned back to torrentocracy after you exit MythBrowser.

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I've been sparse on updates and time devoted to torrentocracy lately as I've been busy getting ready to move from Austin to Stanford. Though I only see myself getting busier once I get there. We'll see what shapes up.

Over on bt.etree.org, someone has posted a torrent to a previously unreleased studio session done by Phish in Wendell Studios in Boston on 6/17/1990. I've yet to grab this myself, but it certainly looks interesting. The torrent is here. More info available on etree.