Seth Keen

On video vertigo they have provided some ethics guidelines for aggregating video.

Why are best practices needed?There have been a series of incidents in which the work of independent videobloggers, video podcasters and other creators of video works have had their content appropriated without credit by third parties. This is usually done via RSS, a technology that has led to intense value creation on the Web by making applications like podcasting possible, but acts as a double-edged sword in that it makes “page scraping” and “splogging” easier.

Steve Watkins on the vlogging list has a bit to say on this issue.

This extra wiki resource turned up on adding creative commons licenses to video. Along with this view share remix link.

I attended the ‘rights online’ presentation and discussion held by open channel and the Association for Progressive Communications – Australia (APC.au). The key argument put forward by the conference organiser Andrew Garton seemed to be around the control of copyright over the release of content. In demonstrating his argument he showed a clip of a influential Martin Luther documentary that is now due to copyright regulations very difficult to access and has been taken out of circulation. My understanding of his argument was that copyright is necessary but can also be highly restrictive in terms of the ability to freely access cultural texts.

The first presenter Shaun Miller (Marshalls & Dent) introduced to the audience a brief overview of copyright law. His personal ‘rule of thumb’ as a way of dealing with copyright online is as he stated: “If you think it is worth stealing then it is worth protecting”.

The next speaker Dr Mark Williams (jdrlegal) examined issues of piracy in a statistic example on ipods where only 3% of music on ipods is copyright cleared – purchased from iTunes. His argument seemed to be around how artists – producers can protect their copyright as part of maintaining revenue for their creative work. He referred to an established organisation like APRA/AMCOS which aids musicians, composers etc with the process of recovering ongoing royalites for their creative works. He also referred to some local internet intiatives that he felt follwed a good line in terms of this objective. These where viscopy Visual Arts Copyright Collecting Agency and the art gallery and creative community of redbubble.

RedBubble brings together a community, marketplace and print-on-demand service to help people unleash their creativity.

RedBubble as an image database provides thumbnails only of what users post. Interested buyers can order printed copies of the original. Copyright is explained in easy to read detail on the site. He then moved onto video which he referred to as the “holy grail” of copyright. These video standards where referred to in the powerpoint:

European standards – DVB-S – satellite; DVB-T terrestial; DVB-H – handheld
Content protection and copy management – Copy prohibited; Copy once; Copy unlimited

Williams concluded with he called “identity and integrity”, whereby as far as I can understand the idea is that the content producer and user need to maintain an open transparent relationship that provides for some copyright content to be offered free, along with some like RedBubble that is purchased, returning funds to the creator. His mantra ” Give away good stuff, reserve the better stuff”. There seemed to be a consensus across both Williams and Miller for this type of approach. A perspective that was not necessarily totally positive towards movements like Creative Commons.

In the question session I quizzed them on the way that YouTube handles the copyright of uploaded video. The response in the timeframe was short and to the point mainly focusing on the process that users give away their copyright and allow there content to be re-used by anyone who wants to re-publish that material from YouTube. I would be interested in analysing in more detail the legal differences in the terms and conditions between YouTube and the video-sharing site blip.tv. Overall, the session was very much an introduction towards exploring how MySpace or YouTube handle artist’s copyright. The seminar brief:

Artists were pioneers on the net…now the net is pioneering artists. Is MySpace truly your space, does YouTube care about you? What can you do, what can’t you do and who owns what you put there?

There is plenty more here to debate and cover. I would be interested in seeing whether it would be possible for big content sharing sites like these being more prepared to follow some of the guidelines that viscopy and RedBubble are promoting. It seems important that more copyright education and knowledge is provided online for users. But, the question will always be whether or not anyone is interested to take the time to engage with it.

Creative Commons have a tool ccPublisher for tagging video and audio with a creative commons license:

“ccPublisher is a tool that does two things: it will help you tag your audio and video files with information about your license and it allows you to upload Creative Commons-licensed audio and video works to the Internet Archive for free hosting. You also have the option of publishing the licensed and tagged audio works on your own site.”

Other notes on the ccPublisher CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on CC Tools

A link to notes on self-hosting the license on you own server and more notes on embedding a license.

There has been some discussion in the Guardian online on publishing video art on the Internet, in the article ‘Moving images stay in the dark – Why are video artists so reluctant to show their work on the internet?’ It is interesting to see that reputable institution like the Museum of Modern Art in New York has created a video channel on YouTube to publish video art trailers. Yet as the article points out there is not a lot of video art collections showing up online, instead most of the video art on YouTube is captured and posted by people attending exhibitions (via mobiles etc.) Although it is interesting to see what is happening with tank.tv in the UK via www.lux.org.uk and the luxonline project.

Back to the earlier Guardian article which discusses things like size restriction (working in the miniature), quality and of course the ability for the viewer to scroll back and forth. In terms of YouTube having frame size, file type and therefore compression quality control of your video uploads this does not leave much room for individual aesthetic input from the artist. I see this as setting publishing standards, a referral to old media like TV broadcasting. A video sharing site like blip.tv at least lets you chose some file types, determine frame size and choose a creative commons license. Also there is some key differences in the terms of use in regards to copyright and intellectual property. But this type of flexiability could be taken a lot further. I discuss the notion of standards in more detail here on my blog. The idea that apple also like YouTube aims to gain some form of control over the way content is distributed often in a manner that Nicholas Carr points out as being unsympathetic towards what the Internet offers as a networked environment.

The question here is whether artists, (like YouTube or even Apple with video podcasts) should be thinking of the Internet as a place to reproduce video in a single-channel form (or in the way that it was originally designed for off the web, i.e live etc.)? This approach is emblematic of most television, cinema or even a lot of video art. Perhaps it is more about how video may be repurposed within this environment. I notice on the MOMA YouTube channel that the closest they can come to this, is a lame form of trailer, again a direct referral to cinema.

In this other Guardian article ‘Bringing video art online’ video art as a commodity, along with copyright issues is seen as restricting factors. Although, the writer points out that painting and sculpture has got past this barrier quite some time ago.