As we learn the hard way with the Richter Scales bubble 2.0 video, what is happening is that there are really two core issues here.

1. People will be annoyed if you rip their stuff, might just go right to the annoyed pissed off stage and resort to the legal system if you use their stuff without their permission.
2. There are alternatives

There are piles of free stuff out there, the images you have seen on this web site lately have all been coming from our smugmug account, and if it is not marked proof, and if you can right click, save as, we will not care if you use it. We would like attribution, but realistically the numbers along with attribution means that 33% of people who use our images will not credit back to the person who did the work.

What we are learning as a community, and a big part of it centers on the use of flickr. The use of images without a license is also not new, just ask any picture licensing company like Getty Images. This is not a new argument; it has been going on for years with the MPAA and RIAA. We as media producers are right in the middle of 1999, and we are dealing with the same issues that the MPAA and RIAA had to deal with when Napster reared up and took the world by storm.

Then there is the putative “theft of content”, if you look at the number of spam site links this place gets, (up at 8,400+ right now) we know that folks are going to rip content because it is easy. We could shut down RSS feeds and subscribe by e-mail, but 50% of our daily reads come from RSS, we would be foolish to do so. We accept this as part of the normal everyday part of how syndication works.

We know that it is impossible to “take a bit of a picture”, we know that there is fair use, we understand the idea of what is and what is not fair use. There is a huge pool of public domain material out there, people just need to start using it, but still give credit to the person who took the image, made the music, or made the video.

The current status quo is to allow the rip, with the hope that there is a pay off somewhere in the system. While we are not busy suing the Hades out of people, when can we say RIAA/MPAA is wrong if we are whining about the same very issue? How can we say that copyright laws stink when we need to use them to get money because that is how someone makes their living? It is a cut and paste generation.

This split, the dichotomy of rip/don’t rip is a societal issue, one we won’t stop from being discussed with a lot of heat, anger and emotion. Yet if we rely on the copyright system to protect our stuff, then we cannot claim that anyone else has any less rights or privileges. If we do not care if people rip/copy our stuff then we morally have a leg to stand on. Moreover, it all depends on who you are what stake you have in what you produce, and what kind of living you make off works that rely on copyright and licensing fees.

We can not have it both ways, there can only be one winner here, while there is middle ground, it is hypocritical of bloggers to say that it is ok to rip off one industry, and then support the copyright claims of another person in a separate industry. It is ok to quote people, and link back; it is ok under the doctrine of fair use, to use bits of another’s work to make a point. The real issue comes in when whole works are lifted in total without attribution, and we deal with this every day.