At Personal Democracy Forum

I’m here in Manhattan attending the Personal Democracy Forum for the first time, courtesy of Micah Sifry. Tomorrow I’m hoping to organize a session about the upcoming Remix Politics 2008 channel at the PDF unconference.

Ari Melber is live-blogging the conference.  Liza Sabater (blogdiva) and Alex Williams (podcasthotel) are also blogging it via Twitter. Somewhat spotty wi-fi here, and almost no power strips in the hall here at Pace University.

Lots of familiar faces here: Jeff Jarvis, Mary Hodder, Howard Greenstein, Halley Suitt, Jay Rosen, Brian Dear, Bernard Moon, Henry Copeland, Sylvia Paull, Andy Carvin, Esther Dyson, Dave Winer, Danah Boyd, Ed Cone and several others. Hoping to meet Matt Stoller, Josh Marshall, Robert Greenwald and other stalwarts of the grassroots politics constellation.

Someone pointed out that more people are posting entries about the conference on Twitter than are using the conference’s chat channel.

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and a member of Ourmedia‘s Board of Advisors, gave one of his famous slide shows and showed several remix videos. He displayed a glint of optimism, pointing to Barack Obama’s statement supporting making the presidential candidates’ political debate footage available to the public.

"Where is she in this debate?" he asks, as a photo of Hilary Clinton flashes on screen. Good question. "it’s about time the Democrats speak clearly, speak credibly about this issue."

Lessig: "Anyone with a $1,500 computer and a little bit of know-how can take images and put them on a free video hosting site for anyone in the world to access. This is  a radical change in the opportunity for people to participate in the political process."

Flashing an image of Disneyland on screen, Lessig says, "i can’t wait until my kid’s old enough to ask, Dad, can we go to this place, and I’ll say, Over my dead body."

Andy Carvin of National Public Radio stood up and announced that NPR and Iowa Public Radio will release all of its debate material into the public domain, starting in January.

After his talk, I mentioned the Remix Politics channel that Ourmedia will soon roll out and entreated attendees to take advantage of the Internet Archive‘s offer to host political videos, political campaign footage and candidates’ commercials. Lessig pointed out that while the DMCA protects Ourmedia and the Archive (the service providers) for posting such copyrighted footage, the person who uploaded it is protected only under the Copyright Act’s fair use provisions.

I didn’t have a chance to respond, but I would have pointed out that none of the hundreds of thousands of people who have uploaded copyrighted entertainment videos to YouTube has been sued, so the chance that someone being sued for uploading video of, say, the presidential debates is slight at best. But it also spurred an idea: Perhaps we should allow people to use an anonymizer tool to upload such footage for anyone who has that concern.

Eric Schmidt

A few quotes from Dr. Eric Schmidt, president of Google, speaking with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: "The most obvious use of search is as a truth detector in the political process."

Friedman suggested that "George Bush  never could have been elected now if there were cell phones at Yale with all those photos of the times he was young and crazy" and getting plastered at those Skull and Bones parties.

Schmidt: "We’re developing a lifetime of memories, including things you’d like forgotten. My daughter calls this, too much shairng at a young age. There may be a backlash at colleges and schools about too much sharing."

On transparency and citizen media, Schmidt said: "You’re all digital agents of photography — everyone has a cell phone. We could all adopt the lifestyle of Paris Hilton. Maybe not you and I," he said to Friedman, prompting laughter. "The lifestyle of every hour, being in media."

"One of the problems is that we tend to erect stories and we’re gonna learn that these things aren’t true. Once biases are set, it’s very difficult to unseat it. It’s called confirmation bias, everything you see tends to reinforce that."

Schmidt discussed taking down eight videos critical of the king of Thailand out of "many, many thousands of videos" that were uploaded to YouTube by Thai citizens. Whenever there’s a takedown request by a government, he said, "We handle each case painfully and on an individual basis."

After Google bought YouTube, he said, "We learned about the incredible complexity of the media world. They have an incredibly complicated set of rights management. That tends to slow down a lot of decision-making, which is good on some levels. But technology will eventually speed up rights clearing."

"YouTube turns out to be a different phenomenon than television," he said, citing different viewing habits.

Why, a questioner asked, do candidates still seem so artificial when they appear on Internet video? Schmidt said, "It’s surely a generational shift, and it’s possible next gen of political candidates will adjust to new medium of smaller sound bites. We tend to know Internet video needs more humor, it needs to be quicker, perkier, whatever term you want to use."

Thomas Friedman

Friedman on the idea that the 21st century will be China’s: "Never cede a century to a country that censors Google."

The problem with addressing the issue of global warming, he said, is "most of the people who’ll be most severely affected haven’t been born yet." We have to consider a tax on carbon emissions and a gasoline tax, he said, to reduce the United States’ dependence on foreign oil.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.