LessigEG8_RREN

=English version of Roberta Ranzani's account of subtitling Lawrence Lessig's Keynote Address at the eG8 Summit= This video is made of the slides and of the audio recording of Lessig's introduction to Plenary V "Fostering Innovation: How to build the future" at e-g8 in Paris, on 25th May 2011. media type="custom" key="10236849" It was first uploaded to Universal Subtitles by Carlos Castillo who made the English captions, which I translated into Italian. At the end of the [|e-G8 Forum] on the future of the Internet, in which representatives of several European states and CEOs of multinational participated, Professor Lessig described what he sees as a big obstacle to the development of online innovation: the excessive interference of governments who are contradictorily addicted both to wanting to act for people's good and to acting against it under the influence of big media companies. Lessig shows how this influence has been particularly nefarious in copyright law, made totally incomprehensible under the pressure of these big media companies, thus stifling innovation by individuals. He therefore advocates a complete overhaul of this copyright framework. And - Lessig points out - innovation has been and is furthered by individuals, not by the state representatives and CEOs of big companies, least of all by press tycoon attempting to ride the internet wave as an alternative to classical media. But individual innovators have not been invited to this E-G8 forum: hence, "the future is not there".

Collaborative subtitling problem
As to the subtitling of this address, unfortunately, there was a lack of interaction between subtitlers, despite the "Comments" module and the personal messaging possibility. This can lead to vaguely embarrassing episodes: for instance when someone starts revising someone else's work without checking whether the first person has finished it. Of course, this kind of intervention in an incomplete version is not as bad as trolling or vandalizing. Moreover, Universal Subtitles keeps all saved versions, so you can always revert to a former version. Nevertheless, it can be perceived as an uncalled-for invasion. Summarizing: a modicum of coordination and organizational structuring is needed to avoid that a subtitling be hampered and slowed down by possible conflicts between users, which goes against the spirit of collaboration. Someone who started working on a set of subtitles and sees it completed or changed by another person without warning might lose motivation and stop subtitling. This issue might be solved by a more efficient and maybe more visible tool than the comment module, e.g. by a wiki integrated in the video page. =Short URL for this page= http://bit.ly/RRonSTLessig

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