Kati,
I appreciated your discussion on copyright issues for “borrowed” images on a website.
As technology advances often get ahead of settled law, grey areas open up, and uncertainties abound, and even a frontier lawlessness can become the norm.
This has it’s pluses and minuses. On the one hand, if we had to wait for the law to catch up or get out in front of innovation, change would be stifled. Often a period of experimentation is needed to sort out what works and what doesn’t in the “brave new world”.
And on the other hand, eventually civilization requires a codification of norms for “things to work”. Even then, these codes are often problematic in their enforcement, and in the different attitudes persons may have in public observance versus private practice.
In this case, I’m wondering how much “borrowing” and “repurposing of content” is going to be considered just part of Web2.0 common practice, and what is going to shake out as “really illegal”. And what the attitudes of people will be in practice as opposed to in theory.
I’m conflicted on this, but tend to support that which allows online communication to thrive best. Which probably means asking forgiveness rather than permission…in real world terms. But I also know that really doesn’t work for every situation or circumstance either….so no, I don’t have the answer.
I borrowed Ryan’s vocal that you created, and tried to give him some credit, but I didn’t have permission from either of you. Was this a good thing, using the power of the internet to share his creation in a new way, or was it a bad thing because the use was not approved beforehand?
I probably wouldn’t have done it if I had to bring up the question of permissions beforehand, just because of the extra effort involved. In this case, I haven’t put it into the public domain, it’s still in private places. Does that change anything? I dunno, but it was fun to do, and made me happy, and I hoped would make others happy too. You could be unhappy about it, and that wouldn’t be good. Or maybe you would have been happy to grant permission, but would have wanted me to ask first. Or maybe it’s not a big deal…
And I could ask myself, how would I like it if it was “done to” me…my tutorial videos mashed into something? Would I think that was fun, or a problem? I don’t know the answer there either. Part of me thinks privacy as we used to know it is being reinvented to work with the new “connectivity” of online community. And maybe we don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like yet. I want online community to thrive, and if people are very afraid of privacy issues, that isn’t going to happen.
I’m going to post this on my blog, because I still need to think about these things a lot more…
John
