Steve Bryant of the Hollywood Reporter has an interesting post: If I can’t reuse your media, then your media is useless.
Back in the 90s, utility meant links. If I could link to your content, then that content mattered to me and mattered to the people who read what I was writing. In the digital world, that content became useful.
But in the last two to three years, the very idea of useful content has changed. These days, people who’ve grown up with digital media are beginning to expect more than linking. As we’ve seen with YouTube, they want to appropriate the content. And as we’ve seen with mashups, they want to reuse and repurpose the content. Everybody wants to be part of the content creation life cycle, whether they were the ones to do the original creation or not.
I wonder what he and others, in this light, would think of my contention that professional journalists can’t, in good ethics, explicitly allow remixes, such as through Creative Commons, because of the risk that remixes will change the meaning or context of news. Journalists have an ethical obligation to accuracy and fairness and while in the digital age is is harder to control how our content is used, we still need to retain some rights to how news content is used.
Previously: Creative Commons: Share and Share Alike
(via King Leonard).
