P2P-FUSION - Peer to Peer Fusion
P2P-FUSION supports creative reuse of audio and video through an open, accessible, legal and economically efficient environment for audiovisual cultural activities.
- Project type: STREP (Specific Targeted Research Project)
- Start date: 1 June 2006
- Duration: 36 months
- EU funding: € 2 600 000
- Number of partners: 8
- Project coordinator: Taideteollinen Korkeakoulu, Media Lab Faculty, Finland
- Contact: Prof. Philip Dean
One of the promises shown by the digital age is for more open and democratic creative cultural practices. New tools enable users to open their own 'media channels' and reach large audiences with content and operating concepts that differ from those of the traditional mass media.
Culture has always been built upon the work of others, but with PCs being used at the same time for consuming and for producing digital media, each reader/viewer can become a creator/editor/reviewer, and can feed their own contributions back to the media space. Today's technologies open it to everybody to become a creative actor in the 'web of culture'.
In the domain of audio and video, the exploitation of this potential is impeded through the lack of internet technologies that adequately support creative audio and video applications; and of systems and practices in intellectual property and rights management that match the facilities of the digital tools at the users' hands.
The P2P-FUSION project aims to create an open, accessible, legal and economically efficient environment for creative audiovisual cultural activities that can also be based on the work of others and on materials from cultural institutions, through built-in, easy-to-use support for suitable licensing schemes.
The software platform will overcome some of the main limitations of current P2P systems and adds new features such as a set of tools for building social media applications, a distributed semantic database, social processing, machine readable licenses, and for addressing and distributing also fragments of audiovisual content.
Practical viability of the projects' work will be ensured through awareness raising activities towards end-users, and through involving a number of selected user communities as co-design partners for the applications to be developed. Two major audiovisual archives will be integrated into the system as both content sources and repositories for newly created content.
In addition, the project will contribute to the development of new social, legal and technical solutions for intellectual property issues, through:
- offering built-in support for embedded, integrated and easy to use licensing schemes;
- supporting open content licensing such as Creative Commons;
- investigating the legal aspects of technological and social design solutions;
- organising a social process for mapping intellectual property related problems and envisioning novel solutions.