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This is a video of a talk that Lawrence Lessig (Professor, Stanford Law School) gave for an unnamed organization. In his talk, Lessig provides a powerful and piercing analysis on the impact that legal restrictions on the re/use of media resources has on creativity and cultural production. During his talk, Lessig shows some remarkably creative mash-up videos on YouTube to exemplify the kind of creativity/cultural production that is possible through ubiquitous digital media, yet is considered copyright violation, for example, in the eyes of Warner Brothers Music Group. Ironically, the organization that hosted the talk received a notice from Warner Bros Music after posting a video of the Lessig's talk on YouTube, which, according to Lessig's blog, "objected to its being posted on copyright grounds." Warner Brother Music Group has implemented content-id algorithms (i.e., technology that detects the digital "fingerprint" of corporate-"owned" copyrighted works) through media hosting services, including YouTube, FaceBook, and others. When the video of Lessig's talk was posted, it was 'dusted' for fingerprints of WBMG copyrighted works. The detection system identified the soundtracks in the YouTube videos Lessig showed, as materials to which they held copyright. Both the video of Lessig's talk and the blog conversation regarding WBMG's objection are must-see resources.

There are heaps of other sites all around the web where you can put your short stories, anything from DeviantART to Yahoo! Geocities, so when the magical unicorns went to create Ego, they knew exactly what they wanted. Ego was born to be a tool that specializes in creative writing of all sorts, one not distracted by social functionality. With lovely typography and beautiful designs, writers and roleplayers can focus on their writing and have results like this page, without any branding or distractions to the reader. Owning Your Content With some websites you need to agree to Terms of Service pages far too long to read, selling your soul, and your creations, to the website operators. Not so with Ego. There are no Terms of Service beyond three simple rules: No Pornography, No Illigal Material, and the unicorns may remove content they feel inappropriate. If your content is removed, this simply means that your account will be restricted from publishing through the ego website, and to host your content you'll need to use the Download Zip functionality to get the html files, and upload them to a hosting service. You will continue to have access to your content regardless of these rules, unless we're legally required to remove it, or we become aware of attempts on your part to disrupt access for other users. Interoperability When you publish through Ego, not only is the static html file available, but also a 'JSON' based computer source code file, which can be read in the vast majority of common programming languages, and manipulated with ease. This means that if you provide a link to one of your pages on another website, they can potentially do all sorts of interesting things with the data, like import it in to their own competing publishing systems, add it to a search engine, or combine it with other useful information like maps. If you'd like more information on this, check out our page on Hacking. Additionally, when creating a new page, there are a few othe

There are heaps of other sites all around the web where you can put your short stories, anything from DeviantART to Yahoo! Geocities, so when the magical unicorns went to create Ego, they knew exactly what they wanted. Ego was born to be a tool that specializes in creative writing of all sorts, one not distracted by social functionality. With lovely typography and beautiful designs, writers and roleplayers can focus on their writing and have results like this page, without any branding or distractions to the reader. Owning Your Content With some websites you need to agree to Terms of Service pages far too long to read, selling your soul, and your creations, to the website operators. Not so with Ego. There are no Terms of Service beyond three simple rules: No Pornography, No Illigal Material, and the unicorns may remove content they feel inappropriate. If your content is removed, this simply means that your account will be restricted from publishing through the ego website, and to host your content you'll need to use the Download Zip functionality to get the html files, and upload them to a hosting service. You will continue to have access to your content regardless of these rules, unless we're legally required to remove it, or we become aware of attempts on your part to disrupt access for other users. Interoperability When you publish through Ego, not only is the static html file available, but also a 'JSON' based computer source code file, which can be read in the vast majority of common programming languages, and manipulated with ease. This means that if you provide a link to one of your pages on another website, they can potentially do all sorts of interesting things with the data, like import it in to their own competing publishing systems, add it to a search engine, or combine it with other useful information like maps. If you'd like more information on this, check out our page on Hacking. Additionally, when creating a new page, there are a few othe