Copyright and copy wrong

Along with several of my fellow bloggers, I got me along to Kaneva to join up and see what the new virtual world was like. As is already well known, Kaneva has two layers of membership: you begin with a MySpace type of profile and progress by some arcane procedure to be invited to the 3D world.

The differences between Kaneva and Second Life are likely to be many and varied, but one of the biggest currently obvious is that items uploaded to your profile page are subsequently available in the virtual world. The video playing on everyone’s profile shows an overview of what is possible, and includes film of a user page, with an uploaded music video playing on the page.

Like many MySpace and Bebo profiles, the Kaneva page allows one to upload or link to audio, video, photographs and written material. Like MySpace and Bebo, many people put music video, music, photographs they haven’t made and written material they haven’t written onto their pages.

The terms and conditions, which flash past as you sign up, and then again on uploading material, state that you must own the copyright of the items that you are uploading, and basically washes their hands of any responsibility for the things uploaded.

I am an oldbie in terms of blogging, having started my first blog in 1998, when there were only seven - yes! seven - other bloggers in the UK. Or at least, only seven that showed up in searches. However, I have avoided learning how to upload and download audio and video until now… mainly due to laziness, lack of HD space and confusion about the legality.

It seems - although I am ready to be corrected - that linking to an item which the author or creator has placed on view for all to see, is rather different from capturing that same material and then uploading it to a new site. Especially when you have agreed to terms and conditions which assert that you have the right to upload the material.

Now, obviously, a brief trawl through any user pages for MySpace and Bebo will reveal a lot of people using images, video and audio for which they are not the creator and copyright holder. With small excerpts, I presume one could argue fair use, as one can when quoting a few paragraphs from a book… but a whole video? A complete track from someone else’s audio?

I have the same ambivalence that every creator must have. If the profiles have any point, it is to show the world our personality, our likes and dislikes. Part of that is the ability to share the things which move and excite us. I would like to have a complete list of all the works that appeal to me on my pages… on the other hand if someone hijacked my own work, I’d feel more than a bit fed up. I want to respect other people’s rights to own and control their creative output.

It seems to me though, that many of the hosts for these pages also have an ambivalence. They set up terms and conditions that outlaw the very thing they encourage people to do. Not just the hosts… someone posted the procedure for taking video from publicly hosted sites, downloading to your computer and then uploading, via keepvid, and there are a myriad of webpages which provide tools for taking video and audio from one place and putting it in another. All of them require you to acknowledge that you won’t be using those facilities for doing what you are doing - taking other people’s stuff.

I am not even convinced that creative commons licencing would necessarily give one the right to download/upload material in the way that one is encouraged to do…. It seems that even if you are trying to be really, REALLY, careful about what you do, it isn’t easy to find the information required to decide if it’s all right morally, ethically, legally, to do that.

I have been watching a lot of TED videos from previous years, including one yesterday about a plan to make textbooks into a huge available library for collaboration and creating customised materials. I would love to live in a world where all creative material was made available in one enormous pool for people to share, collaborate and create new things. Intuitively I feel that has to start with individuals having control of their creative output… if they are not able to control it, they are likely to guard it all the more. Oddly, I think that having control will make it that much easier to let it go.

Which musings do not make it any easier to decide whether downloading a video from YouTube and uploading it to a profile site is an acceptable thing to do….