Is the value of content going up or down or both?

Andy Dickinson's post Time to get your head round fair use is more than fairly useful. Read it. It summarises the English (and Welsh? or UK?) law.

And it has also set me off on something of a tangent.

While the laws relating to copyright and fair use have not changed substantially, "custom and practice" undoubtedly have.

Thanks to Creative Commons I could illustrate a story about protests over Wrexham's proposed incinerator without getting up from my desk, let alone paying any money over to a photographer. All I need to say is acknowledge "CC BY SA http://flickr.com/photos/vertigogen/58184067/"

In the blogosphere it is pretty much acceptable to quote the majority of another person's post providing you "pay" for it with Googlejuice (a link).

Most of our websites make their video embeddable which is implicitly an invitation to use it for free (in return for Googlejuice, natch) although I had an interesting conversation the other day with Debbie from "reprints & eprints". The roots of this department lies in our print history. Advertisers delighted to be written about in an article often purchase reprints which they send out to their clients. We charged for the privelege, of course.

Anyway, Debbie had a client which was featured in one of our videos and they wanted to put it on their own website. How much should she charge them?

My first instinct was to say "nothing" and then I wondered why that was? When did I stop thinking of content as having value? Has the value of content actually diminished? If so, how come? Perhaps I've been brain-washed by the social media free-for-all and have lost sight of it?

Of course, in some cases the value (or, anyway, the cost) of content has actually plummeted. Photography is the main loser here due to flickr, morguefile (from which the picture on the left is taken) and a thousand other sources.

Indeed, our purchasing department has just struck some incredible deals with image libraries and it's not surprising that Getty is trying to claw something back from the free image explosion.

Yet bizarrely many of the photographers we commission persist in clinging on to the copyright of what they produce for us. Freelance writers long ago recognised that the world was changing and that it was in their best interests to give us all rights to commissioned work, much to the NUJ's chagrin. But really: who would you rather buy a frying pan from? Someone who would only let you fry sausages in it once or someone who acknoweldged that you had paid for the frying pan and were entitled to do what you wanted with it?

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, yes. I'm wondering:

• Are we right to make all of our videos embeddable?
• Is the culture of "use it but give us a link in return" really good value?
• If the answers to these are "yes" and "yes", then where is the money going to come from?

Oh, by the way: my final, considered answer to Debbie in Reprints and Eprints regarding what she should charge the client was "whatever they're prepared to pay". I guess that's the truest value.

Free library pictures

What's with the picture of the senior gentleman adjusting his bow tie?

Well, I plucked it at random from PicApp.com.

PicApp.com lets publishers and bloggers use images from libraries such as Getty Images free of charge. The quid pro quo is that there are ads embedded in the pics in return.

I think it's a great idea - with the cost of photographic images in freefall (i.e. nothing if you use appropriate Creative Commons images through flickr), it's great a great win-win solution.

I think it should be really useful for people looking to pep up their blog posts.

I've got one or two whinges - I can't for the life of me find the place to tell it my full list of blogs (although it says there is one) and I really miss being able to order my search results by Most Recent or Most Popular.

But it's a great start.

Update: It's a bit overblown, isn't it? Quite frightening to a casual visitor to the site I would imagine. And the little avatar poking his head up is rather cheesy. And I'd like to easily be able to run text alongside the images. But, as I say, it's a great start.

I'm demonstrating using Flickr for photos in blogs

Max
Originally uploaded by Pixel Theif 

Well, I was earlier today, which is why I put up this lovely picture of a dog - to show a group of bloggers how easy it is to find a beautiful and relevant - and legally usable - picture on Flickr that will add visual impact to one's blog.

It's all about using Creative Commons licences of course. These seem to be elegant and simple, but in some ways they are a bit of a nightmare. The more you get into the detail of Creative Commons, the more pitfalls you see - or imagine.

I've been doing a project to look at how people in our organisation can use CC licensed photographs without fear of legal recriminations and with a clear conscience.

One of our directors came up with a fantastic suggestion on hearing me present the project - in return for pictures that we use from CC, we should submit photography from our archives under CC licence so that other people may use them freely.

I thought it was a very wise idea and a good solution to the problem that commercial use of (appropriately licensed) CC photographs may be legally OK, but somehow against the spirit of Creative Commons.

Do video mashups necessarily mean copyright infringement?

Not necessarily, according to the American University's Centre for Social Media which has published a report called Recut, Reframe, Recycle (PDF).

This might be some small grain of hope for those of us planning user-generated video projects.

The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.

The announcement post gives examples of mash-up videos which could arguably lie under the "fair use" harbour - satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and pastiche or collage.

These all refer to US interpretation of fair use, of course, but it's an interesting take.

This one, apparently, might come under the heading of "illustration or example":