Blag

An interesting debate on copyright and content theft on the Internet over at Charles Arthur’s blog had the effect of making me think about this stuff more than I would normally and I happened to want to put up a post last week that quoted some lyrics from a Stranglers song. With that in mind, I trotted off to try and find the publisher to ask permission. After a vast amount of time-wasting searching, which had the result of delaying my post by 48 hours, I finally found a company which appears to own the publishing rights to the Stranglers’ back catalogue, Complete Music. They have a single email address, info@complete-music.co.uk. The mail bounced.

At that point I finally gave up and posted anyway, reckoning: 1) It’s part of a larger work and a partial quotation of the original work. 2) It is used for illustrative purposes, attributed and linked back to the artist 3) Sod them. If they ask me to take it down, I will.

In this fast world we live in, where we all slap up posts on blogs that are frequently of great currency and rarely of any commercial (or even intellectual!) value, tracing down rights ownership does all seem a little redundant. And, as I found out, not easy. For instance - how do I obtain permission to quote from The Guardian? How long does it take? Surely in 99.9% of cases, by the time the permission request has been processed and granted, the posting finger has, as it were, moved on. AND the vast majority of posts have a lifetime of 24 hours before the next post comes along - so by the time you’ve granted your permission, I’ve moved on to something totally different and so have my (two) readers.

As long as we’re not distributing whole works of value and charging or distributing saleable property for free - and we’re crediting and also linking back to the rights owner, surely we’re doing enough? It seems to be impractical to impose the standard of rights/permissions regime that you would impose on, say, The Guardian, on individuals having ‘a conversation’.

And so it is: most people are perfectly happy that you quote them and link back to them. The debate, however, was triggered by Charles taking exception to the fact that a number of bloggers had ripped an entire article along with its illustrating photograph from The Guardian. If you go doing that, a link back to the source of the content would, indeed, seem redundant. But the line between acceptable use of other people’s content and unacceptable use would appear to be particularly ill-defined – and that doesn’t even touch the issue of how you could possibly enforce your rights when you’re dealing with the multi-country, multi-jurisdiction Internet.

If you look at current UAE legal practice, for instance, I think you’ll find pretty much anything electronic is going to involve high risk, a lot of court-appointed experts and a great deal of wasted time. Like two years of it.

So I guess it's lucky that we're such honest little bears, isn't it?

Pirates Waive the Rules

I've always loved that headline: it was above the first piece I ever filed in a publication, a column in Arabian Computer News - back in 1986, would you believe it.

Showtime TV has called for content piracy to be eradicated in the Middle East according to Arabianbusiness.com, that most wonderful of Middle East business focused websites. With Showtime and Orbit having a massive vested interest in the cessation of the widespread satellite TV piracy in the region, you'd have thought they'd have made a damn sight more fuss about it years ago: we were working on (successful, natch) campaigns, for the BSA, to change the region's intellectual property (IP) laws so that the ICT industry in the region could survive. I can't say that Showtime et al have been anything like as active or inventive - and calling on regional governments to do something that's in your unilateral interest is something we learned (many, many years ago) simply won't work.

What fascinates me, he who is to be moderating a session on broadband adoption at next week's Media and Telecoms Convergence Forum in Amman, is that the TV companies have absolutely nothing to sell the telcos. The telcos desperately want ready made streams of content to make their DSL offerings relevant and to build 'value for money' bundles for subscribers. The TV companies want to sell content to subscribers. But in the Middle East, the TV companies have got no reason to trust telcos to become their delivery platform and the telco's can't sell subscribers something they're already getting for free. It just ain't happenin'...

Sure, content piracy in the region has got to end. What I think might be interesting is if it ends because nobody wants the pirate content as a conseqence of our already finding something much more interesting, relevant and vibrant - the content we create for ourselves.

Will Web 2.0 rule? Or will we all troop obediently back to Desperate Housewives and game shows at $20 a month?