The 0xdb, developed as part of the “Oil of the 21st Century” project, is a proposal for a new type of cultural database, build on top of file-sharing networks — and a practical intervention in the ongoing conflict between the protection of intellectual property and the exercise of fair use rights.

The 0xdb is a rather unique kind of movie database. It uses a variety of publicly accessible resources, like search engines and file-sharing networks, to automatically collect information about, and actual images and sounds from, a rapidly growing number of movies. What the 0xdb provides is, essentially, full text search within movies, and instant previews of search results.

The core idea behind the 0xdb is that file-sharing networks can not only be used to download digital works, but also to just retrieve information about them. Even though most movies in the 0xdb are copyrighted, and many of them are practically inaccessible for legal reasons, the monitoring of peer-to-peer traffic allows the 0xdb to identify and index these materials.

The 0xdb is not a place to download movies, which in many parts of the world would constitute copyright infringement. The 0xdb simply exercises a few elementary fair use rights: it collects metadata, provides citations, analyzes and contextualizes different types of media, and makes both the information it gathers and the tools it employs available for personal, non-commercial use.

Quite obviously, the 0xdb is also intended to serve as a point of reference for private or public institutions that are planning to make accessible large collections of films. Rather than a universal solution for the problem of cinema, or a definitive answer to the question of the archive, the 0xdb tries to provide a few practical starting points for the digital future of moving images.

The 0xdb has been developed as part of the project “The Oil of the 21st Century” (www.oil21.org).

Another recent development is Pad.ma, an annotated film archive based in Bombay (www.pad.ma).