Damian Kulash, lead singer and guitarist of the rock band OK Go, will give a talk at this year’s Open Video Conference.

OK Go is perhaps best known on the web for its mega-viral “Here it Goes Again,” the famous music video of the band dancing on treadmills. OK Go choreographed and shot the video themselves, and posted it to YouTube in 2006 without the record label’s permission. A legion of bloggers and positive word of mouth helped popularize the video and launched the band into the stratosphere. “Here it Goes Again” has been transmitted over 200 million times and counting.

Since then, OK Go has produced a number of other massively viral videos, each more creative than the last (be sure to check out the amazing video for “This Too Shall Pass,” for which the band built an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine). The videos have been an effective promotional tool and have continued to earn the band exposure. But earlier this year, a decision by the band’s record label to forbid embedding videos on blogs and other social media created a small controversy. The move frustrated fans and followers, and views dropped precipitously. “When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000,” Kulash explains in a recent New York Times op-ed.

As one of the bands to most successfully leverage the web, OK Go are at the center of a discussion of how artists can reap success from sharing and open networks. In addition to being a major creative force, Kulash and company are also outspoken advocates for an open internet—in 2008, Kulash served as a lead witness for a House judiciary committee hearing on net neutrality.

Join us this Fall to hear from Kulash about the relationship between artists, their fans, and the new distribution channels. And keep an eye out for more information about Open Video Conference. Registration begins next week!

This year’s Open Video Conference will feature a panel on the ongoing conflict between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Burning Man festival.

Each year, Nevada’s Black Rock desert plays host to the Burning Man festival. Tens of thousands of people make the pilgrimage to celebrate self-reliance, creativity and freedom. It’s a week of fire art, bad techno, art cars, combat boots, and more.

For some time, the organization behind the event has enforced a highly restrictive set of policies around photography in Black Rock. Through its ticket sales and online terms of use, the Burning Man Organization claims ownership over all photos and videos created at the festival.

Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Corynne McSherry criticized these rules in a post at EFF’s Deep Links:

Those Terms and Conditions include a remarkable bit of legal sleight-of-hand: as soon as “any third party displays or disseminates” your photos or videos in a manner that the Burning Man Organization (BMO) doesn’t like, those photos or videos become the property of the BMO.

The BMO also limits your own rights to use your own photos and videos on any public websites, (1) obliging you to take down any photos to which BMO objects, for any reason; and (2) forbidding you from allowing anyone else to reuse your photos (i.e., no licensing your work no matter what is depicted, including Creative Commons licensing, and no option to donate your work to the public domain).

Burning Man argues these restrictions protect attendees’ privacy. People do wacky stuff out there—in various states of undress and sobriety—and they need to be protected. But EFF thinks attendees’ freedom of expression, and their copyrights, must be respected. How do you balance both concerns?

In a interesting turn of events, Burning Man, the EFF and Creative Commons have entered into negotiations to transform the largest counter cultural art gathering in the world into a legal platform for human readable language and free culture.  Will it work? Will it crash? What will they as a team decide?

Join us for a real world ethics question, with insights into the governance of online video platforms, privacy, autonomy, and freedom of expression. Throw in panelists from Burning Man, EFF, and Creative Commons—and giant burning wicker man—and you have one interesting discussion.

The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. This mission encompasses a comprehensive strategy of policy analysis and reporting, public campaigns, investigative research, grantmaking support, and open source technology. Together, these efforts improve the quality of public discourse, empower citizens through access to information, and hold political figures and institutions more accountable. Sunlight shares our passion for free expression and healthy public discourse on the web, and we’re very excited to have their support for this year’s Open Video Conference.

Join us this October 1-2 in NYC.