Copyright Report Calls for Political Action

Creators are under-informed about their rights to reuse material, and the nascent field of participatory video needs to develop best practices, was the conclusion of a recent report from American University’s Center for Social Media.

The key here is that this new font and style of work was unanticipated by legislators, stakeholders and judicial precedent. According to authors Peter Jaszin and Pat Aufderheide [PDF]:

Mash-ups and remixes reuse material to make a new product, in ways that have not been foreseen in previous thinking about unauthorized use of copyrighted material.

We found the report via Revver, which was singled out for its efforts to educate and inform creators of their due rights under copyright law and practice. Most online video services restrict discussion of rights to their terms of service agreements. The report offers realistic suggestions for best practices to preserve the existing read/write web, proposing that creators and providers should band together in order to protect their freedom to continue working with these new tools.

The center convened a panel with the Ford Foundation, Microsoft, Facebook, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons and many academics to survey the results of a study of university-age online content creators queried titled “The Good, The Bad and The Confusing.” Tellingly, no commercial broadcast networks, major music labels or Hollywood studios participated in the study.

While media literacy education was encouraged at all levels, the study implies that the biggest threat to safe harbor provisions is the case between Viacom and YouTube/Google. But as the study points out, service providers and creators are not always easy allies:

[G]iven their divergent interests, platform providers are not completely reliable proxies for creative communities, even though in this case the term “community” may be premature.

The report suggests that similar standards and practices could be developed for the new online ecosystem, and urges free speech and business advocacy organizations to team up in order to fight for creator rights on a political level.