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To update an old political axiom: All content is theft. At least, that's the attitude of pirates who disregard copyright law.

Once content is on online, it's out of the creator's control. One of the few ways to combat illegal downloading and subsequent uploading of "protected" content is to exert some form of control over how that inevitable free product reaches the consumer. You mention that the public is not au fait with Creative Commons licences; if so, shouldn't the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ be educating, informing and entertaining the masses about them?

By the way, is anyone surprised that the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Digital Revolution has yet to mention Reithian values?

Creative Commons licences are still a relatively new concept, doubtless full of faults and unforeseen difficulties, but they do represent a chance for commercial concerns to exert some control over content - some being better than absolutely none - and also to create an alternative revenue stream for artists and scientists who do not have a large publicity budget.

I have a CC licence that gives permission for my attributed inane scribbling to be copied and used elsewhere (however unlikely that might be), although I'm thinking of changing it to allow for easier adaptation. As I've said, the CC model is still in its infancy; the crucial point is whether I'd be able to do anything if I disapproved of how my content is used. I suspect that I might be in a similar situation to those who hold a traditional form of copyright, and would have to resort to wallet-squeezing meetings with lawyers - which means I would have to wave the white flag at the Jolly Roger.

If the internet is Usain Bolt, it's important to understand that we are not the other runners in the race; we're the ones sitting in the stands and eating crisps.

Re. Reithian values - apart from the Reith Lectures, of course.

*sigh*

The internet: use it and make your stupidity global.

The concept of online identity (many potential employers Google candidates names) means people are having to become aware of reputation management.

The more savvy Web users aren't now putting everything and anything they produce up for everyone to see or use; they're carefully putting up only what they are prepared to let others see, and possibly use. I imagine many would try and act protectively over any instances of unauthorised use; particularly if meant maliciously or for profit.

Given the Web can be a rip-off (copy n paste) free-for-all, people are becoming more careful about what - and how - they post material.
I've made a couple of minor websites for example; bowing to the inevitable I've put the text under a Creative Commons (non-commercial etc) license; I also made a point of using images licensed under Creative Commons from Flickr or obtained permission from the photographer. e.g.

But the aim of the sites is to disseminate information; had it been to promote any other original work - artwork, photography, music etc - then I would have made a point of claiming full copyright.

Is the idea of copyright and 'ownership' dead? By no means: there are people who are prepared to make a stand where there are blatant cases of rip-offs occurring.

Another instance was when a young woman found a photo of herself from Flickr being used on a porno DVD cover.


Copyright and intellectual property rights are a hot-topic with many users on Flickr, some hope to become pro or semi-pro photographers and take steps to protect their work accordingly.

In another case a popular Flickr photographer found others were making substantial sums by selling unauthorised prints of her work via ebay and her work was also appearing on a photo agency website. Her case got taken up by the Blogsphere, got on Digg's frontpage, was badly handle by Flickr's management - but did result in some redress.


It's possible that there is a duality in how people think of this issue. File-sharing of music and movies may be seen as 'victimless', in that those who suffer are big multi-nationals that are seen as both being rich enough to take the hit and overcharging for their products.

But rip-off one of the 'little guys' (us), particularly of they're a member of an on-line community, and public sympathy is likely to line up behind them. 'Naming and shaming' still has some force behind it too.
The concept and purpose of copyright isn't dead by any means, nor is it likely to die-off anytime soon.

For anyone who'd like to find out more about the concept of Creative Commons, take a look at some from Creative Commons.org. Aleks & Dan, help yourself - you might find some inspiration for your upcoming blogs and programmes.

May we have an "edit" facility to save us all from my typos? And a "quote" option?

Sorry about my over-numerous posts...

Hmm, fascinating. Ive been thinking quite a lot lately about how the web breaks the illusion of control, but very much in marketing terms. This broadens that out. Over and above ease of reproducibility, I wonder if part of whats going on is that the web allows something previously hidden to be seen; the lack of control we have over how others perceive us.

So, taking Aleks porn mashup image as an example (sorry Aleks!) historically, someone so disposed might have looked at an Aleks byline photo and *admired* it, but any images that that *admiration* created could not have left their imagination. Now, they can recontextualise the byline pic and create a shareable artefact, one that escapes their mind and heads out into the world. A reductive act of image appropriation, driven by an extremely one-dimensional view of Aleks-ness, has moved from being an entirely private act to becoming a potentially very public one.

Whats exposed is our inability to control beyond a certain point the way that the world perceives each of us, and uses that perception for its own ends. Interesting to think about that in terms of the job interview thing mentioned elsewhere, too. Historically, thats been a locus of deep control, a performance combining CV, dress, portfolio, responses to questions, etc, designed to present a very specific view of the candidate.

But to some extent that control is an illusion; I tend to assume that most interviewees are broadly capable of doing the job theyre up for, and that the real questions that the interview answers are more subjective ones. Could I sit next to this person 8 hours a day, 47 weeks a year? Theyve got the technical chops, but does their work style suit mine / ours? Is their personality a good fit for our company culture? Etc.

None of these are questions that an interviewee can constructively control the answer to. If they manage to take the interviewer in on this level, chances are theyve created a more or less fictionalised version of themselves that will be rapidly exposed once they start work in a given company or, if not exposed, that will cause them considerable psychological effort and pain to successfully maintain.

This too is a loss of control; no matter how we try to present ourselves, we cant escape from what we are. Beyond a certain point, we have to be passive before our selves, and let others judged us based on years of accreted self-ness, rather than the particular needs of a given moment. The web externalises that kind of judgement by making the years of self-ness easier to access, and making it clear that each of us is judged as much on our deep, accreted selves as on our momentary, controlled presentation of convenient aspects of those selves.

Having said that, cant help feeling that editing is key; and in particular that new social norms will develop to support and encourage editorial behaviour on behalf of people viewing us. Now, we automatically look away from certain intimate events that take place in public (a couple kissing, a mother breastfeeding her baby, etc) I wonder if well start to look away from more personal online content in the same way?

I wonder also to what extent this is a generational issue? For the moment, the younger you are, the more online content youre likely to have about yourself and that content will be mostly you getting drunk at parties etc, because thats what you do. I wonder what more mature standard internet footprints will begin to look like? And I wonder also how the way people engage with that content when everyone has a combination of more personal and more public stuff online, so senior interviewer and junior interviewee can google each other and get the same kind of mix of the embarrassing and the impressive?

Which ramble doesnt really answer the question about what would make me uncomfortable online! As for that, Im not sure. Id be really annoyed about someone using my unadulterated work for economic gain without acknowledging and rewarding me appropriately, but thats more of a passing off / theft issue than a privacy one; if someone used an image of me or similar in the service of a whacky private obsession, Id take appropriate steps to try and stop them, but I hope that people would put it in the context of the rest of my web presence, and see it as more of a comment on the oddness of the perpetrator than on me or my potential endorsement of them.

So perhaps the best way to guard against that is a dense, consistent online presence, that makes it clear that you're a certain kind of person, and that the appropriated image is an aberration?

Oh, and surely the finest ever example of image appropriation

This is where licensing comes in, I think.

To my mind, and I *think* this is something shared by a lot of people, there's a clear difference between republishing and modification, and the Creative Commons does a lot to indicate intentions here.

Republishing obviously takes many forms, but taking some fairly common examples in the world of photos, there's mash-ups (e.g., between a Flickr stream and Google Maps), posting+linking on blogs (saw this fantastic photo, or this great collection of images of London, etc).

In contrast, modification, whether it's for commercial gain or not, involves changing not just the metadata surrounding the content or the location where it's hosted, but the actual content itself. Sometimes this is done nefariously or for the purposes of parody, and it's unlikely that any licensing conditions will ever stop this (or indeed can stop it); but for the more straightforward cases, the CC goes a long way to help and give you a basis for stamping your feet if your content is misused.

Unless I'm fatally misunderstanding, the title of this article's a bit misleading, thoughreally it's Reuse what's your line?. Piracy aint piracy if youre not infringing anybodys copyright.

or boarding ships.

Hmm, fascinating (and rather concise, I thought!). And agreed, all this did develop more into a set of thoughts about privacy. Anyway -

>> Uploaded picture to porn girl, Aleks' porn pic, Sir Alan

Something fascinating here about different levels of anonymity / cultural presence on the part of the original person, which for me means that each appropriation is operating in a different way, and thus is at a different level of fair game-ness.

In the case of the porn girl, the image is entirely anonymous; the issue is a purely personal one, and for me has both a valid ethical and commercial basis. Ethically, an image of her has been appropriated for sexually orientated purposes she no doubt doesn't approve of, and (had she had the chance) would not have given permission for; definite bad.

Economically, the image-snatcher is making money from someone else's creative work, and not reimbursing them for it; had they used the image on (say) an entirely healthy and positive DVD of photography tips, the economic crime would still be the same. The question here - how to police this kind of thing? Something like clear Creative Commons (or equivalent) marking of all web content would seem to be a step in the right direction, but how do you enforce?

Secondly, Aleks and Sir Alan. They're different from the young girl, in that both have deliberately created a professional media presence for themselves. She's out there because the web's a handy way of sharing content; they're out there because it's their job to be out there, which for me changes the way that any appropriation of their images should be judged.

My assumption is that Aleks dealt with her transgressor in a 'that's regrettable but inevitable' kind of way; I suspect he's the digital version of the kind of fruitbat that would previously have sent in long, mad missives scrawled in crayon on toilet paper, and who's unavoidable once your public profile achieves a certain kind of critical mass.

Of course, this kind of appropriation is wrong; but, for me at any rate, it's less wrong than the one above, because it's a non-commercial and difficult to avoid by-product of a process of being in the public eye that is for the most part positive and productive. I hope also that it was easily dealt with; taken down by the relevant image sharing site, etc.

And then there's Sir Alan. Yup, I have seen that - and, rather than being an appropriation of something personal, it seems to me to be a witty counterblast to the way he's presented in the programme. Rather than being a personal attack on Alan, or a mad re-use of his image, it's a deliberate critique of a particular media construct rather than of Sir Alan himself, based on footage designed to be seen and consumed by a wide public. Fair use in action!

So, given the above, and trying to wander back to the theme of all this, I'd say only the first one qualifies as a true case of piracy. The other two are more about privacy, and about a complex set of negotiations between personal privacy, the demands of having a career or career component that is (more or less) lived out in public, and differences between fruitbat and more considered responses to that kind of public presence.

All this has set me thinking about something quite interesting too - we still don't know what a fully mature (ie complete life spanning) web presence will look like, and we probably won't for another 50 or 60 years or so.

One fascinating question is what kind of search tools will evolve to help people root through the data mass (there'll be an awful lot of stuff!) - for example, will there be GoogleProfessional that only pulls out all your speeches, conference attendances, CVs, etc, and GoogleHome that only gets your baby pics, drunk party mayhem, and last year's camping trip? And will part of our curating job be to make sure that there's a clear divide between the two, to make it easy for people to look in the right places for the right info? Perhaps the lack of online privacy we're experiencing now will lead to development of more clearly defined lifelong open / friends only / family only areas of web presence for each of us?

Yup, I saw vanboy74 too - fascinating to think that googling could be an active handicap to good interviewing!

It may be applicable here to raise the small point about the employers who use the online life of their employees to keep track of their doings? There have been cases quoted in the press of people supposedly off work on sick leave and then being found out that they were in fact doing something else.

In this example the Employer argues that there has been an abuse of trust and the Employee accuses the Company of spying:

With many people working 'remotely' from an actual workplace the trust between employer/employee can also be reinforced by their online presence giving evidence that tasks are being completed.

A rather random thought about 'freelance' or 'self-employed' personages who lead more exotic lives online via, say, twitter - it would be quite easy for the Inland Revenue to track their work/play record if it were felt necessary.

I firmly believe in the evolution of Netequette idea and the way communal decisions have changed, for example, simple text based ones like the way one can format an email. I remember the heated discussions pro/anti it having to follow the same rules as letter writing. Similarly the use of abbreviated text, something I felt could become a 'New Pitmans' for everyone rather than the old shorthand available to the few. Now with audio visual as well the communal rules on acceptability will surely evolve. They may even cross national boundaries in setting actual legalities.

Meanwhile some like me can continue to be as selective about the content they choose to access as back in the pre online days when it was only print, tv, radio and films that had to be negotiated.

Piracy has existed for centuries, and is often not just a case of who created the work, but more often, who has paid for the rights form the original copyright owner. Many argue that record labels are getting too excited about piracy on the internet because it has happened for as long as the industry has been alive; backing up of cassettes and CDs between friends and the like. However, internet piracy differs dramatically from traditional piracy.

The internet issue is twofold. Firstly, the perceived anonymity of the internet leads users to publish carelessly. The internet, particularly the web, is rarely anonymous. This enables firms to be able to track perpetrators, but also track losses with greater accuracy.

The second problem, particularly for firms and copyright holders is mass replication with a single publication. This is something that was rarely achieved by traditional methods, particularly in music and film without professional equipment. This also extends to distribution, as there is a negligible cost for spreading illegal content on the internet where in physical examples there are considerable costs.

There are then a few questions. Is piracy a problem of the web / internet medium? Not particularly, but free and easy distribution is. Is piracy a problem of attitude by industry and copyright owners? Perhaps, but only in commercial terms. Recognition is something easily removed by the web, but it also serves to promote. The first single by La Roux and its Skream Dub-Step remix is a case in point. So is piracy a problem of consumer attitudes? Probably.

Certainly there is a learning curve for all stakeholders, one which is unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future. Piracy is not unique to the web, or indeed the internet. It has become the latest medium by which the practise has emerged.