Copyright Corundum Here comes another bubble video

The “Here comes another bubble” video was yanked from YouTube earlier this week due to a copyright enforcement take down from Lane Hartwell. Wired is running a great interview with her, and if you do pictures, or well any media at this point this is something you want to read this morning.

The issue of copyright is quickly polarizing between two camps, those that make the media/material and those that want to use it. While there is a lot of creative commons and public domain media out there for people to use, view, see, mashup, mixup and other wise use, there is an even more vast pile of media that is copyright.

For one example, we have a smugmug account here that we have both kinds of pictures, those we hope to one day sell if we ever get good enough, and those we just simply give away under creative commons, usually those are the ones you will see here on the web site. Outside of company logo’s, which we use to offset some of our stories.

In blogging, it is almost a requirement to use graphics and photo’s to break up the long lines of text that we use. The picture is a distraction, and one that is just plain good old fashioned user friendliness.

Lane had the video taken down for the unauthorized use of one of her pictures without credit to her anywhere in the video. That is fair enough, she makes her living off of pictures, so she has the right to control how and where they are used. Her mistake was to use Flickr, which is popularly viewed as a vast repository of free photographs for anyone’s use regardless of how they are licensed at the bottom of the screen. The only real way to make something private is to literally take the pictures private.

For Hartwell, who says she has had images used without her permission over and over again, the run-in with the Richter Scales was the last straw. “It is stealing,” Hartwell said of the unauthorized use of her photo in the video. “I’m not a charity…. This is my living.” Source: Wired

What is interesting is the popular perception, in our “End of an Era” we noted that just about anything we do with media short of putting it in a DVD player or CD player is going to run afoul of some sort of media licensing somewhere. While it would be great to copy a DVD to an Ipod, literally that single act breaks a law. There is no real substantial reason to go into the P2P networks, much of the content on it belongs to someone else.

Realistically Lane did what she thought was right, regardless of how we feel, the video was funny as all get out. The Richter Scales could remove the image and put up the video again, that would be great, or they could pay Lane for the use of the picture, which would be great as well.

With the constant churn over what is and what is not copyright, places like smugmug where you can easily copyright or not copyright a picture on upload (watermark with the word proof, and make sure no right click save image as) makes a lot of sense for folks that want to do professional photography, want people to see the work, but want to make money off of it.

The problem is the perception around flicker, that it is a storehouse of free pictures.

For some, it is not.

The problem with Hollywood and the music industry is something altogether different, but altogether the same. The bottom line issue, the right to make money or not make money is a choice that each person who creates content has to deal with. While there are multiple ways to enforce what ever decision is made from the time the digital media is created, the follow on to that is how that copyright is enforced.

While we have chosen to take increasingly draconian measures in how we protect copyright, and nearly gutted the public domain system, people want to use what others have created. How we as a society determine how those works will be used and protected is something that we all need to decide. While we are not copyright crusaders by any measure of the phrase, there has to be a middle ground, there has to be an accommodation between legitimate and non-legitimate uses. And everyone is going to have to adhere to that.

Those uses also have to be simple, and easy to understand. Without that, we all suffer, and we all eventually loose.