It Takes a Nation of Lawyers to Hold Us Back

Article on the Design Observer - Click Here

A good insight on how copyright laws are strangling creativity.

Hackney vs Nike

Story on the BBC

Ideas on the end.

This is an awsome video I came accrioss while reading Matthew Roberts' PDP. Im thinking about doing something much like this, but to express my view on Copyright and ethics, or to question it, to be more specific.

A visual essay to represent my finding will carry off my message well.

A quite interesting article on YouTube

Simon Schama’s vast history of the French Revolution, Citizens, is not the kind of tome from which you would expect to glean much insight for a media column. Yet, back in late 18th century Paris, the mob was a genuine part of the political process and, while there are no guillotines or regicides today, it is not outrageous to suggest that, with the help of the internet, the mob is back.
The digital mob is everywhere: forming opinions, putting pressure on companies, and prefiguring trends. How did the Celebrity Big Brother affair lift off? A petition set up on Digital Spy helped to boost the number of complaints to Ofcom to a colossal 44,500. Want to guess who will win the final of Britain’s Got Talent? The mob will tell you; last week, ahead of the result, Paul Potts had the most clip watches on YouTube (2.4 million roughly). Of course, the singer won.
Sometimes the mob can build a business from scratch, although predictably not in Britain. Facebook, the American social networking site noteworthy for its growing domination of US colleges, has been taken up by the British middle classes with incredible speed. And it doesn’t even have the music that MySpace offers. Already 135,000 people have signed up to a group dedicated to helping to find Madeleine McCann.
The mob also divides up into small groups and Facebook contains all sorts of instant groupings. If you want you can join a group that is campaigning against the impact of Adjustment A (whatever that is) on Lambeth council’s services, which must be fun for some.
The interesting question, though, is how to harness the mob, or at least survive it. Facebook owes part of its success to its viral methodology; it is extremely easy to invite friends to join a group, and so come to a shared view (far easier than turning up for meetings, which can take up far too many weekday evenings). So this is the key. Anybody else hoping to take advantage of the new energy needs to understand the power of sharing and networking.
Take, for example, ITV. As the digital mob moves to endorse Paul Potts, how much money does the commercial broadcaster make from the 4.3 million views of his most popular video on YouTube? Of course, some viewers were encouraged to watch the television programme, but however many came to ITV.com, YouTube is still snatching a big slice of the audience. That is why discussions between BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to create a single web portal make sense by way of a fightback. What the broadcasters must ensure is that it is easy to share and embed their content, including a small amount of advertising before or after a clip, and thus maintain financial control.
The mob, mobilised, demands satisfaction, and quickly – as Channel 4 found this year. Part of Channel 4’s problem then was not realising how big the race row would become; its rapid action in ejecting Emily Parr from the Big Brother house this month shows that the broadcaster had learnt a valuable lesson – swift, decisive action is needed to end controversies quickly (even then, about 800 people rang up the broadcaster to say it had been unfair: there are mobs for every point of view, of course).
The mob can change news agendas, and it should be allowed to; the BBC realised only gradually how big an issue rubbish collection was to people by the sheer volume of listener responses it got to radio items on the subject. Once considered too parish pump, the subject is now, correctly, seen as mainstream – an exercise not in dumbing down but in reflecting what the audience says.
What is required in this new era is quick intervention, a point that Ofcom has to appreciate as it grinds its way slowly through the reviews of various phone-in scandals. By acting slowly, Ofcom, or any media regulator, risks being seen as out of touch. What large, unwieldy media organisations have to realise is that times have moved on since 1789. In 2007 the idea of top down media, or indeed top down anything, is as dead as the absolute monarchy of Louis XVI.
Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, YouTube’s founders, were in Paris this week to launch YouTube International, but for all they have achieved in less than two and a half years, their appearance was disappointing.
They were evasive on copyright – “it affects only a tiny proportion of our content” Chad said – and on censorship, where the mantra “we comply with local laws” is OK in the US, but hardly compelling in China or any other authoritarian regime.
Nor, interestingly, did YouTube – now owned by Google – feel the need to share any statistics with its audience; so those attending were left not much the wiser, save for the fact that YouTube plans to conquer the world.
However, we knew that already; it would be nice to get a firmer sense of YouTube’s ethics and principles. YouTube is already too important.
So, it turns out the Pearson, home of the Financial Times, and General Electric, owner of financial TV channel CNBC, was toying with a joint bid for Dow Jones, to compete with News Corporation, parent company of The Times. Maybe Pearson recognised it has a scale issue in financial information after all. Now it looks hard to see if anybody can stop News Corp getting Dow Jones, although if Pearson and GE had tried harder, at least that might have pushed up the price. Yet, if the Pearson/GE combine isn’t going to work, that does not mean the two should give up. After all, a combination of CNBC promoting the FT in the US, and vice versa in Europe could be interesting. CNBC subscription revenues would support the cyclical ad-driven FT; while some of Pearson’s other businesses, such as the little understood IDC, bring growth to the party.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article1968893.ece

Talk One.

I had a talk with Pauline Amphlet today and some interesting points were brought up.

Here are some thing I need to look at:

Tabloids -

The Guardian and other tabloids were recomended for reasearch into articles into the subject area.

Music -

This area of reasearch will focus on P2P software and how people are downloading music for free, therefore not completley ethically kosher.

Association of Illustrator & Chartered Society of Designers.

To look into both organizations and how they help designers make their work safe.

Creative Commons

Just some of the types of copyright options http://creativecommons.org are helping people with

Attribution (by)

Choose by licenseThis license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

Attribution Share Alike (by-sa)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. Attribution No Derivatives (by-nd)Choose by-nd licenseThis license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)Choose by-nc-sa licenseThis license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Digital Copyright

"We live in fluid times, where it’s difficult to keep track of changes to rights in the digital world. Take, for example, a design you’ve created. Store it on the wrong server, and the terms and conditions you may have agreed to without reading properly could assign the service owner the right to do what they like with your design.Previously, I’ve looked at how easy it is to accidentally assign rights to a third party, but here I’ll tell you how to fight back, taking control using Creative Commons.To understand how Creative Commons works, it’s necessary to understand what copyright is. The modern notion of copyright – literally the right to copy – gives a limited set of rights to authors of original works.In 1988, the UK passed the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, which declared copyright would be given automatically without the need for application. Among these rights is the ability to display the works publicly, to produce copies of the work, to create derivative works and to assign rights.All too often the copyright for original works is assigned to publishers, who have the most to lose from unauthorised copying and distribution. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a set of digital restrictions that hamstrings many modern distribution formats in an attempt to prevent any form of unauthorised copying.DRM often flies in the face of the notion of Fair Use, or the limited rights for end users to make copies of works for their own, non-commercial use. Publishers don’t like Fair Use, as the implied freedom has the potential for mass duplication, a particular problem for digital formats. On the other side of the fence are creatives who want to see their work widely distributed, advocating Fair Use and the liberalisation of the existing law.Flexible protectionCreative Commons was introduced in 2001 as a non-profit organisation promoting copyright that enables holders to grant some of their rights to the public through contracts and licences. The goal is to sidestep some murky areas of the current law and to counter the trend for restrictive permissions. The beauty is that this offers a scalable approach, rather than the traditional all-or-nothing scheme. It allows content creators to take back control, but it has still faced criticism from publishers who feel it undermines the notion of copyright.Interestingly, the Dutch court upheld Creative Commons licences in the case of an MTV VJ Adam Curry, who published photos on Flickr under a Creative Commons licence. These were used by a gossip magazine, Weekend, which claimed that it wasn’t aware it needed permission.Creative Commons’ CEO, Lawrence Lessig, said: “This decision confirms that the Creative Commons licensing system is an effective way for content creators to manage their copyrights online.” The support of the courts is a victory for those who want both wider distribution for their work and legal protection when their rights are violated.So, for any artist – well down the road to success or otherwise – Creative Commons grants flexibility within the intimidating world of self-promotion. Our advice though, as ever, is to read the small print.

"Creative common sense"

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/in_depth/Opinion/creative_common_sense