In the world of structured blogging partnerships with publishers, you can't avoid the flipside of
Defamation (when your previously passive audience can now create blogs under a publisher brand and then write bad stuff which exposes Publisher) Followed by :
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Copyright (people upload content they dont have the right to like that video aggregation site today that is aggregating Australian TV shows on YouTube -
Peekvid.com)
- As well as the standard
online community concerns : Profanity, Sex of a too hard type;
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Crafty businesses as well as splogs, and biggest of all that write junk and then link back to their dodgey site
- Boring, bad quality user generated content that is not meant to be viewed as
"media" content at all. As The Dual Citizen-ship James Farmer (who navigates the Orange Building in Spencer St during the day and edublogs.org at night)
has cheekily argued and polarised (to much amusement), there are only so many voices that warrant turning the Bose Heaphones up (mine are actually Sony's of yesteryear that work oh so much better than the Ipod white buds), rather than neutralising the White Noise. Creative Juice is finite.
In between writing business plans and waiting for bus dev deals to progress this week and scanning the blogosphere, I often have the daily papers next to my imac + ibook babies. I've been hearing about these potentially new impending copyright laws (and hoping they'd go away) that could make owning an Ipod with music on it, end up with you sharing a cell in the Collingwood lockup with the real grime'n'underworld.
So when I came across the blog :
Weatherall's Law: IP in the land of Oz - written by a Lecturer of Law at Melbourne Uni, I thought I might find an easily quotable solution I could put into powerpoint to assuage any publisher jitters. As with everything in life, there is no black and white, just lots of shades of grey. There was a good link to the Law Reform on ABC, which incl a
Transcript of a recent discussion with Professor Brian Fitzgerald who is the head of the School of Law at QUT in Brisbane.
It sounds serious. It is. And makes me envious of an economy like the US where they let services like YouTube, MySpace, Blogger and such grow, and only start dealing with the issues when there is a huge competitive acquisition of the startup, which brings in the lawyers who dont want competitors to have in effect an unfair advantage. (with the loser nearly always being the consumer, who then needs to stay one step ahead of the corporate law moves of the media co's) I've included some non-linear soundbites :
Brian Fitzgerald: "The amendments to the Copyright Act that are currently before parliament run for a couple of hundred pages, and a
big chunk of that does relate to the criminal provisions. They introduce a very wide-ranging group of provisions that will apply in cases of strict liability, meaning that people could find themselves in trouble,
even if they didn't really know what they were doing was wrong."
"
I might have uploaded a video I've done in my bedroom of myself lip-syncing a pop song to something like Youtube or one of these user-generated websites. And because other people can see that and I'm infringing copyright in doing that, I could find myself with an on-the-spot fine under these new strict liability provisions."
"
I think we would all hope that the real mischief here is to stamp out copyright infringement on a commercial scale, and that's what we hope the provisions will remedy. But unfortunately, the provisions are drafted in fairly broad terms, and really, if the government is minded to stop copyright infringement on a commercial scale, that's what we should be trying to put into the provisions. They're just too broadly worded as they currently stand."
"
Someone could be running some sort of website or web interface and on that they might have some infringing copyright material, well that would be regarded as a distribution of infringing material. Does it prejudice the copyright owner? They would be all questions that would come up. So there's an enormous possibility and potential for liability here because copyright really"
BB : Jeepers. How each publisher interprets this is definitely going to be pretty broad. In terms of tested situations, I've heard some local publishers suggesting it's better to not moderate at all a site (minus automated and obvious errors post publishing), rather than moderate selectively. Others go with heavy post moderation. And of course pre-moderation.
What is missing so far is the technical, algorithmic and machine learning smarts which could wipe out dodgey content and keep the smart content automagically. Especially on the text/blog/defamation side. I've definitely included some of my 2007 tech budget to building these type of smarts to help solve publisher problems.
To end with a hypothetical, as we are talking about law here - it would be interesting to hear what the lawyers think about what it means for publishers practically (as well as the end consumer) :
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Imagine I got a "virtual space" from Publisher or Website Provider A (could be an ISP, a content site, search engine) and received X megabytes of storage space.
- And then all my electronic communications - whether they be
emails, text messages, standard blog posts, photo and video storage, I uploaded/backedup to that virtual file directory so I could access them anywhere from any PC with the net and edit them on the fly.
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Each piece of content would have an internet/web address ; - I would also leave the default
"public" settings on this content so much of it could be viewed by public.
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There would be 2 more levels - one for friends, which could view certain files and communication, and another specific temporal authorisation because I was emailing/talking to someone and various content needed to be viewed on the web, privately. eg for a meeting
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I'm wondering where the new laws stand on that. It's definitely a case for samizdat7 and other wunderkind business affairs type that can see the opportunity through the legal mindfield.
I'm thinking maybe if we change the name of "blogs" to "public email" maybe that could come under a different ruling ? Feel free to leave any notes.
The Australian : "
Peekvid, which The Australian understands is based in Perth, provides direct links to pirated content hosted on YouTube, with videos playing in pop-up windows... including episodes of Home and Away, The Simpsons, Prison Break, and Little Britain... Peekvid has already been the target of the music industry's local enforcement body, which has successfully requested takedowns of music videos from 50 Cent, Alicia Keys, Coldplay and Anastacia... '
It would be fair to say it's considered a large problem. There have been a number of issues for Australian artists' said Sabienne Heindl of the Music Industry Piracy Investigations group."
Update : There is a fantastic response, much appreciated, at Weatherall's Law to the hypothetical I posed. (i'll be digesting it once I finish my current excel chart) Let's hope Red Barren doesnt get shot down :)
