Floating Island

This week we look at the legal implications of new media for our work as journalists.

Like Heavens, the thought of licenses didn’t cross my mind when I started posting photos on flickr. Before flickr, my point of reference for photo-sharing was ofoto. Since ofoto required an invitation from a friend to view individual sets of photos, it didn’t implicate copyright concerns in the same way that the more public photo sites like flickr do.

Heavens points out that flickr can be a tool for individuals to participate in the news gathering process by providing access to a vast photo library. However, like the written word, images can also be tampered with, raising familiar concerns over verification. I would be very hesitant to use photos found on flickr in my news gathering if I didn’t already know the photographer and his or her reputation, or unless I already knew the subject matter was authentic. As far as copyrights are concerned, I will take care to note the licensing provisions in any photos I might use going forward. I’ve already started doing this by requesting permission from another flickr member to use a couple of her photos for my essay. Previously, I may just have borrowed the images without thinking of the copyright and attribution issues.

I’m not sure that the new approaches to copyright described by Heavens and Lessig will change my work as a journalist, apart from giving me more control in my capacity as an individual blogger or freelancer. As far as working for a news organization, I expect that my employer will take most, if not all, rights to the work produced in the course of employment, so I don’t foresee any major effects in that respect. At the same time, copyright law must adapt to the reality of new technologies.

Lessig shows how proponents of new technologies have exploited legal gaps to profit from new technologies that facilitate the delivery of content. Stakeholders in the existing copyright regime have battled to extend their legal rights against new developments, such as file sharing, or peer-to-peer technology. Creative Commons licensing presents an attractive alternative to the doom-and-gloom scenarios projected by developing and advocating a “reasonable layer of copyright.”

Addendum on Foust: Chapter 10 of Foust’s Online Journalism: Principles and Practices of News on the Web freaked me out a bit, particularly the section on linking. I hadn’t imagined that the natural urge to link in a free associative manner could be so fraught with peril.

But I also wonder how up to date this material is. For example, I don’t recall ever hearing concerns over deep linking– “the practice of bypassing a Web site’s home page or other introductory material by linking to a page ‘deep’ within the site’s structure” (Foust p. 226)– particularly now that Google, del.icio.us, and news readers have become so prevalent. One could argue that inline linking is a form of fair use, while framing has been adopted by mainstream sites such as Yahoo! (much to my annoyance!).

What’s left is that the rules of this game are changing rapidly, and rather than simply follow what we’re told, we now increasingly have the ability to influence the outcomes of the future intellectual property landscape with our online behavior.