My opinion

i believe that copyright is there for a reason, otherwise people would not make money for their hard work. However, i think that sometimes the default copyright laws are too restrictive for no good reason and people should be more open to sharing their work.

Unfortunately there is a mentality in some people where they believe that if they have created something then the must get every penny out of its worth, not what it is worth to them but what it is worth to other people. This is why the copyright law is so strict by default.

Creative commons have the right idea, where there is much more freedom when sharing work, even the Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives option, which allows for distribution as long as the author is credited and the work is not altered at all (which i believe is the idea behind youtube and flickr licenses). Obviously this cannot work for everything, where the company relies on the sale of its product, such as books and movies, but there really shouldn't be restrictions if, for example, a student wants to use something in his work as there is no commercial gain involved. In particular i think that the most interesting option put forward by the creative commons is share alike, where anybody can use your work in their work as long as they use the same license for theirs much like open-source computer programs.

Before writing this blog, I was only vaguely aware of the creative commons movement but it is really good idea and more people need to be aware of it to give the option to designers.

Creative Commons

creative commons is a set of rules created to allow creators of work more freedom when sharing their work and using other peoples. It fills in the scale between full copyright where nobody can share anything or use anything and everything is free to use and anybody can claim other peoples work as their own

Creative Commons have 6 main licensing groups, depending on how much freedom you want people to have with your work.

Attribution You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.

Noncommercial You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

There are many other forms of copyright that can be used by combining two or more of these, as described here

Good Copy Bad Copy

Good Copy Bad Copy is a documentary about copyright and culture, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It features interviews with Danger Mouse, Girl Talk, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Lawrence Lessig, and many others with various perspectives on copyright.

The opinion of this film leans more towards free availability of work, but not for commercial use, musch like the perspective of creative commons.

Flickr

One of the most popular websites for sharing photographs is Flickr, this is an online community consisting of professional and amateur photographers alike. They have a set of rules about copyright as stated on their community guidlines page.

These state that you cannot take somebodies photo and pass it off as your own, it also says that you cannot use them for commercial use. You can use the photographs on websites and forums but you must place a link back to flickr.

High-Quality Video

The techniques I described in my previous post are quickly becoming outdated as they mostly use flash embedded videos. There are several problems with this method of delivery;

• they are usually fairly poor quality and sometimes the sound goes hugely out of sync
• depending on the website they may take hours to load which defeats the whole object of streaming
• they can only be watched once, unless you have a program to save them with (such as the VideoDownloader plugin for firefox) and even then it is not usually worth the effort

DivX, the company behind one of the most widely-used video compression techniques have created a website and embedded web DivX players called Stage6. This requires the users to upload videos in the DivX format, which has proved to be incredibly popular as the encoded videos are much, much smaller than raw footage so means that users can upload videos that are much higher quality, sometimes rivalling DVD quality. The stream is almost always instant, providing you have a good enough connection as DivX has obviously invested a lot of money to provide high bandwidth. Every video on the site has the option to be saved to the computer after streaming.

Streaming Video

there are many ways to watch copyrighted material on the internet, whether it is a tv show, movie or a music video you can find pretty much anything out there if you look hard enough and have enough time. One of the increasingly popular ways of distributing material is to 'stream' it from a website. Since the growth of ADSL, more and more people at home have the capabilities to stream video, the most popular website for this is YouTube.

YouTube are part of a multi-million pound company, so they have a lot to lose if they neglect their responsibilities as a video-hosting website. This means that it would be extremely difficult to find copyrighted material on there as they have numerous measures to prevent this, such as people to trawl forums and the website itself for any such material and only allowing users to upload 10 minute videos unless they have a special membership. Despite this, YouTube and other similar video hosting sites still have copyrighted videos on them, and always will.

How do these films get below the radar? The user often posts them under completely different names to what they actually are, or use a code for the title, for example if they were to post the 3rd episode from the 5th series of The Simpsons they may put "TS S05E03" or something similar, that way people searching YouTube for The Simpsons will never return the result they are looking for.

The user still has to have some way of finding these files though, so that is where 3rd party websites and forums start to appear, such as the recently deceased tv-links.co.uk. Moderators and contributers to these sites search the web and other forums for direct links to episodes and films, then simply list the links in their website. In theory this is taking advantage of a loophole in the system, as they are not actually hosting the videos, so are not liable. The same excuse that torrent websites use, which i will look at later on.

Documenting the date of creation

The easiest way to ensure your work isnt used by somebody else is to send your work to yourself by recorded, postdated delivery and keep the package sealed once you receive it. This isn't an official copyright but simply a way to prove that you owned the original piece at a certain point in time in case an ownership issue is taken to court.