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works in a way that can help artists gain widespread recognition? (3) How can
we help creators distributing via filesharing systems to develop a sustainable
and even profitable, practice? We approach these problems by, first, gathering
quality “unpublished” content (books, films, music) from a variety of sources.
These may, for example, be commissioning boies who know about work
they’ve  comissioned that couldn’t be or wasn’t published; they may be
“slush-piles” from literary agencies; they may be first albums submitted
directly by bands, or offered by managers. (The fact is that a lot of great
content will never make it to a mainstream publication –– for a
variety of reasons that we won’t go into here, but NOT just because they’re not
good enough.) Second, we filter the content. Once it’s uploaded, we allow
VODO’s Regular Supporters to download or stream any work they like, in order to
comment and vote on it. Taking into account these votes and comments our team
select works to distribute. Third, we are bringing together some of the world’s
largest P2P services and sites to help promote and distribute winning works.
Works selected are promoted prominently to our ‘Distribution Coalition’, which
has many millions of eyeballs. The promotions we place on these pages will link
directly to the works, which will be seeded in partnership with Bittorrent and
other filesharing services. Finally, at the core of VODO is a commitment to
providing revenue for creators of media content, in a world in which the
systems for distributing, copying and viewing that content are
cross-territorial, rapidly changing and difficult to predict or control. Put
simply, we provide a freely accessible “look up” table that stores hashes of
works we’ve helped distribute, against payment details (e.g., PayPal) for
producers. With this table, any site that implements the VODO system can offer
donation links for VODO works. In time we’re aiming to extend this to all sorts
of works, even those not published by us. But as you can guess, this
will take some time! With the system we’ve developed, we’ll be able to let
consumers of media shared through P2P networks make voluntary donations to our
creators wherever their works are shared. BACKGROUND Until
recently the assumption has been that if consumers cannot be made to pay for
copies of media obtained through traditional channels, revenue is entirely lost
to creators. However, content/distribution projects such as Radiohead’s ‘In
Rainbows’ and our own STEAL THIS FILM 1 & 2 have shown that a proportion
(in Radiohead’s case, 38%) of people consuming media through P2P networks are
willing to make entirely voluntary donations. If a small proportion of the
massive amount of P2P users downloading works through VODO decide to donate on
a regular or semi-regular basis to some of the artists whose works they are
sharing, these creators would be able to build an excellent means of support.
One of the advantages of direct, after-the-fact donation is that there is no
friction and much, much more of the money makes it into the artists’ pockets. VODO makes it easy for users to donate and is part of a
culture in which it will become normal for them to do so. We think there is a
great opportunity for small-to-medium sized media producers to maximise usage
of efficient, free P2P networks by encouraging free copying and distribution of
their materials, while actively seeking voluntary supportive donations. We also
think that around works distributed this way, we can build all sorts of new
revenue channels for creators. Films and music establish a powerful
relationship between ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’. One of 
VODO’s key benefits lies in distributing payments out to players and
downloading software, making it as trivial as possible for donors to initiate
voluntary donations when they feel most ‘connected’ to the artist: at the point
of enjoyment of the media. About Us Today, VODO’s core development
team comprises filmmaker/technologist Jamie King  (UK/transient), Nisse Hellberg
(Sweden),
programmer/activist Rama Cosentino (Argentina), documentarist/advocate
Adnan Hadzi (UK), and BRITDOC’s Jess Search (UK), who sits on board. You can
contact most of us by sending mail to info AT vodo DOT net. VODO began in 2006
as the Pretext project, which was kindly supported by a grant from the Arts
Council of England (ACE). Pretext’s aim was twofold: to distribute quality,
minority texts over the internet, and to find a model that could remunerate
authors while they did it. Back then, Pretext was Jamie King, artist/programmer
Jan Gerber, then-CC-UK head Christian Ahlert, Hannah Upritchard and noted
author Hari Kunzru. To cut a long story short, it took us just less than two
years to realise that ‘revolutionising’ the publishing industry was VERY hard
way to tackle the problems that really interested us: how online distribution
was changing what it means to communicate, to ‘get published’, to be a creator
and an author in the ‘network society’. In the meantime, two of the original
team — along with other friends — happened to make STEAL THIS FILM 1 and STEAL
THIS FILM 2, which represented some of our thinking around this topic, live and
very much in the public eye. Artist/programmer/guru Sebastian Lutgert was
another person instrumental in developing the ideas behind VODO during late
2007/early 2008. Sebastian and Jan are now working on the very significant
Pad.ma system, mostly from Mumbai,
India. After
STEAL THIS FILM, we focused on the core question how to distribute content of all
kinds using existing P2P infrastructure (i.e., without re-inventing the wheel!)
and how to sustain content producers while doing it (i.e, get them paid!) A
third, and equally important question circulated through much of our pragmatic
research: how to help creators get as much attention as we’d got with the STEAL
THIS FILM project. Without attention, you might as well upload your work to
YouTube and hope for the best — not an enticing prospect for many. So we came
up with VODO, short for ‘voluntary donations’ but really much, much more than
that. VODO is the publishing system we first started trying to create with
Pretext in 2006; it’s the distribution system that filmmakers all over the
world have been wanting ever since they knew about distributing films online;
it’s the same attention-gathering machine that was behind STF — only much, much
more powerful. In short, VODO is the culmination of a lot of thinking, a lot of
work and lot of goodwill. From the initial funding offered by ACE, we were
carried through by grants from the OSI’s Information Programme, support from
the BRITDOC Foundation and the UK’s
Emerald Fund. We know that in the current economic environment, finding funding
to continue developing VODO is going to be tough. That’s why we’ve designed
VODO to be lean, simple and easy to maintain. Today, VODO’s core development
team comprises filmmaker/technologist Jamie King  (UK/transient),
programmer/activist Rama Cosentino (Argentina), documentarist/advocate
Adnan Hadzi (UK), and BRITDOC’s delightful Jess Search (UK), who sits on our
as-yet-not-really-existent board. In addition we’re delighted to welcome Stu
Tilly (Shooting People) as a collaborator, and Pixeco, who’ll be helping us out
with design before we go live.