blog.teekay.me

The major labels are well known for making increasingly ridiculous inititatives in order to ‘safeguard’ their own material, but this latest attempt to stop Ok Go’s latest viral video “less viral”, is just absurd.

You must have heard of Ok Go. The hipster-cum-rockers who released their treadmilling ‘Here It Goes Again’ of seventeen takes to critical acclaim and almost 50,000,000 YouTube views on their official account alone, have engineered another highly sophisticated, impossibly co-ordinated feel-good video that they want the world to see. Their record label disagrees.

Embedding is disabled for the video, which prevents me from posting it here, or anywhere else on the internet, besides YouTube. EMI supposednly want to do this to prevent any loss of profit from the lack of advertising outside of the YouTube page, but really… won’t sales increase from people seeing it around the web anyway? And Ok Go’s current success stems almost entirely from that first video, so why should EMI let them die again with pointless restraint when ‘This Too Shall Pass’ could rebirth them from the ashes.

The Creative Commons, in my opinion - despite the recent Wikipedia relicensing debate - hold some of the best licenses of the internet age, encouraging the growth of freely available content whilst still allowing for restrictions on certain types of use to be imposed by the owner. It boils down to four major aspects, abbreviated to two letter acronyms: BY, NC, ND and SA. Attribution (BY) is the most common Creative Commons license property to be imposed: it allows the content owner to request that users of their items ‘link’ back to the original page, naming the author and providing some recognition for the work; non-Commercial (NC) prevents commercial organisations from using licensed work for their own gain, unless it is authorised; ND, or no derivatives, prevents people from modifying your original work, and SA, share-alike, allows modification but forces users to also license under CC.

So now that ridiculously long and terribly confusing sentence is over we can move on. The Daily Mail has again used photographs found on flickr, licensed under the CC, without following any of the licensing terms. This isn’t a one off occurrence either, they’ve repeatedly used the internet as a source of free content for use on their stories - and some have barely any text: here photos are taken from a flickr, which is rightly attributed, but in looking at the photo details it’s clearly under full copyright with all rights reserved. The latest article today on the international craze of ‘moneyfacing’, which I’ve personally never heard of and is barely news, here has stolen the photos of @tshannon and is ignoring her requests for them to remove them. According to her latest status update The Sun are also using the content in their print edition. The Telegraph, who initially copied the Mail, were at least quick to get back to the content owner about attribution - and this is really what annoys me: attribution.

It’s not as if, in this case, the content owners are even asking to be paid. The previous article with the incredible pictures of lightning should have never been posted, but this was made to be shared freely; mentioning the author in the story costs nothing and helps generate rapport between producers. It helps the original owner gain some traffic.

How hard does it really have to be to follow a few simple requests? If we stole your content we’d be sued - national corporations should not be exempt from the law, especially when they make a profit from it.

Tweet @MattieTK with your thoughts.