Jamie Wilkinson, internet culture researcher & software engineer, is joining the speaker lineup for this year’s Open Video Conference. While working at Rocketboom, Jamie co-created the Know Your Meme video series & Internet meme database, selected as one of TIME Magazine’s Top 50 websites of 2009. He is also a founding member of the Free Art & Technology (FAT) Lab, an open-source research & development group. In 2007 & 2008 Wilkinson taught the “Internet Famous” class in Parsons graduate design & technology program, where students’ grades depended on how much Internet traffic they can generate. His work has been featured on NBC, TIME, NYTimes, CNN, CurrentTV, MAKE, ArtNews and more.

Jamie and his friends at FAT and Graffiti Research Labs are pushing the boundaries of pop-culture and open technology with projects like Laser TAG , LED Throwies, and Grafitti Markup Language (GML). GML (“The new digital standard for tomorrow’s vandals”) is a file format for archiving motion-captured graffiti tags. In other words, a specific piece of graffiti can be captured in real time, stored as a file, and played back as a video visualization or even reproduced physically (with the help of a robot arm holding a marker). GML is an open format, so graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data. The project aims to bring together two seemingly disparate communities that share an interest hacking systems, whether found in code or in the city.

Recent GRL projects are listed here. Check out Open Video Conference, this October 1-2, for a look into some cool new video projects.

At 22 years old, Amelia Andersdotter is the youngest member of the European Parliament, representing a new Swedish political party. That’s interesting in its own right.

What’s perhaps more interesting is that she represents Piratpartiet, a political movement for freedom of information, transparent government, and intellectual property reform. Piratpartiet (“Pirate Party”) has a full legislative platform, but to many concerned copyright holders it’s just a platform to legitimize file sharing. Perhaps that’s because Piratpartiet recently announced its intent to host the Pirate Bay servers from inside the Swedish parliament, invoking parliamentary immunity.

Boosters of the Pirate Party insist that it’s not simply a political stunt. Instead, it’s a fork in the road: “New technology has brought us to a crossroads,” reads the party platform. Either we find new ways of compensating artists, and ask the market to adapt—they say—or we embrace ever more extensive government control and surveillance of what citizens do on the internet.

Copying and sharing are essential parts of the success formula for the web. And though the web has long been a wild west, with frontier zones of varying danger, it’s now an essential part of everyone’s lives.

There are fundamental questions we must be asking: how deeply should governments be involved in policing and protecting information? What expectation of privacy should web users expect? And how will creators be compensated in a thoroughly media saturated world?

Piratpartiet is the third largest political party in Sweden, and Amelia is its leading spokeswoman. Whether you agree with her or think she is destroying the creative economy, her perspective is pressingly relevant and interesting.

Join us this October 1-2 and join the conversation with Amelia—and many others—about the future of video on the web.

Communications scholar Barbara van Schewick, of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, has joined the speaker lineup for this year’s Open Video Conference. Barbara will share insights on video innovation and the architecture of the web, based on her recent book Internet Architecture and Innovation. The book has earned widespread acclaim (including praise from figures like Lawrence Lessig, who called it “the very best” analysis of its kind).

Barbara’s research focuses on the economic, regulatory, and strategic implications of communication networks. In particular, she explores how changes in the architecture of computer networks affect the economic environment for innovation and competition on the Internet, and how the law should react to these changes. This work has made her a leading expert on the issue of network neutrality.

Professor van Schewick is the Faculty Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society and an assistant professor of electrical engineering (by courtesy) at Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering.

Join us this October 1-2 in New York City to hear from Barbara and many others about innovation and the web.