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KRON launches site for Bay Area blogs
Absolutely fascinating experiment taking place the past couple of days at KRON-TV Channel 4 in San Francisco, which has plunged pell-mell, come hell or high water, into citizen journalism.
KRON's online news director, Brian Shields, posted coverage and images of the protests in San Francisco over the G8 summit -- including clashes between police and anarchists -- under a theory of fair use that I think is well-founded. Brian snagged a few images of the altercation posted by citizen journalists at the Bay Area's Indy Media Center.
Almost inconceivably, the Indy Media folks cried "copyright infringement," and KRON complied by taking down a photo. But why in the world would Indy Media want to restrict the widespread online distribution of such a newsworthy set of photos? What rank hypocrisy.
Read the comments for a preview of the citizen journalism-traditional media divide that we'll see for years to come.
July 9, 2005 at 11:09 PM in Citizen media, Media | Permalink
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» Are you Talkin' 'Bout Me? from The Bay Area Is Talking
I just want to highlight a couple of serious bloggers who have written about what's been going on around here in recent days. J.D Lasica at New Media Musings calls it "absolutely fascinating." Absolutely fascinating experiment taking place the past... [Read More]
Tracked on Jul 10, 2005 11:26:25 AM
Comments
I don't know the exact details yet. Did they credit IndyNews? Would it be ok for IndyNews to run (fair use) big media photos? I need to know more before I judge them. ;)
Posted by: kpaul at Jul 10, 2005 12:06:32 AM
Yes, they credited Indy News. And Indy News runs big media photos under the same fair use claim. But KRON = big media, therefore bad. Gimme a break.
Posted by: JD at Jul 10, 2005 12:11:15 AM
if that's the case, then i agree with you. i didn't know the details, though. and to be honest, i don't follow indy news closely.
Posted by: kpaul at Jul 11, 2005 12:57:46 AM
Many indymedia sites have a copyright (or copyleft) statement along these lines: "© 2000–2005 San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center. Unless otherwise stated by the author, all content is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint, and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere. Opinions are those of the contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the SF Bay Area IMC." These licenses vary between indymedia sites; some use various Creative Commons licenses.
It's up to individual contributors whether or how to enforce their rights under these licenses. In this case, some of the photographers felt it was not appropriate for KRON to copy entire sets of images onto the server of their commercial website, and they contacted KRON to ask them to remove the images. KRON did obtain permission to use the video footage, and in fact paid for rights to air it, but for some reason did not request permission to use the photographs.
Indymedia content is commonly shared between non-commercial websites on a daily basis (even in these cases, permission is often requested as a courtesy). Indymedia photographers also receive frequent requests for permission to use photographs on commercial media outlets, such as newspapers and newspaper websites. It's up to individual photographers whether or not they want to grant permission and/or request a fee for use of the photo.
Posted by: mark at Jul 11, 2005 5:04:13 PM
Thanks for that important background info, mark.
Posted by: JD at Jul 11, 2005 5:10:10 PM
Unfortunately, I gotta go with Indymedia here. If Indymedia wants to restrict use of their material to non-commercial services, they should have that right.
I don't agree with it, but the reason indymedia exists is not just to provide an alternative to news coverage.
Look at it this way: Big Media = Bad? Well, sure! Big media is owned by advertisers which have a vested interest in editorial control. They're often owned by companies which have a vested interest in keeping Republicans in power (or replacing them with Democrats)
And Indymedia is designed to compete with those services for the purpose of undermining them, not just to provide additional information to the public.
There is also the fact that Indymedia exists to provide people with information that the big media companies could easily afford to gather with professional journalists, but simply won't because it's "bad for the bottom line." All over America, newsrooms have to do more with less and of course news coverage has suffered immensely. Were the big news companies to pay their reporters and photographers to go out and get the news, instead of stalking Michael Jackson or waiting for the latest shark attack, you wouldn't need Indymedia.
Posted by: Brian Boyko at Jul 13, 2005 1:16:37 AM
This is an excerpt from a longer post on this over at my blog. Fascinating discussion.
---
I think the dispute about "fair use," while possibly interesting to lawyers and somewhat relevant, is a red herring, at least for Indymedia and for most bloggers and researchers. The argument about fair use largely misses the point. What's really important here has more to do with the notion of a non-corporate alternative to the increasingly misnamed mainstream-media, what that means to Indymedia, what that means to many bloggers, and what that might mean to the "gurus" of the blogging world. Indymedia was founded in 1999 (an enternity ago in the world of the internet) as a specifically anti-captialist alternative to the corporate media. That whole notion of anti-capitalism is as much a part of Indymedia's DNA as the notion of "being the media." Or rather, as I've written elsewhere, Indymedia sees the two as inseperable: by facilitating individuals "being the media" Indymedia also facilitates "media justice," and, by extension, a radical critique.
Needless to say, this isn't the way many bloggers think, especially the people who have written the most about the blogosphere. As Lasica baldly puts it in his comments on the IMC-TBAIT dust-up: "[according to Indymedia] KRON = big media, therefore bad. Gimme a break." For many bloggers, the key to the blogosphere is not anti-corporate anti-capitalism; rather, its the facilitation of "citizen journalism," and the exact facilitator of that "citizen journalism" is not all that important. In other words, the corporate press can get into the citizen's journalism game too; in fact, this is the only way that the corporate press will survive. Many of the best-funded and most talked about "citizen's journalism" projects of the past year or so-- the Bayosphere (to a degree), the Northwest Voice , the L.A. Times ill-fated experiment with the wiki-world-- propose some merger between old and new media.
What's more, Indymedia implicitly advocates for an end to the mainstream media entirely, as part of its radically anti-corporate stance. The buzz in the blogosphere seems to be, on the other hand, that "citizens journalism" can supplement, though not replace, big media (this isn't a universal argument, though its rapidly becoming the "mainstream" one). For Indymedia, then, the position of what's called citizen's media within the capitalist system matters a great deal; what's more, Indymedia sees citizens media as something that can and should eventually replace big media. For most partisans of citizen's journalism, on the other hand, the focus lies on the position of the journalist, and the goal is to get the mainstream media to understand and eventually incorporate citizen's media into its structure.
They key quote in the entire debate is this one, from Terry Heaton:
"Finally, we can argue legalities until the cows come home, but those arguments pale in comparison with the bigger picture. KRON is taking a huge risk with this venture, and I don't think it's possible to overstate that. We're so accustomed to howling at the moon that we don't know how to react when the moon finally says, "What do you want?" This "personal media revolution," as JD calls it, is a new thing. The institutional press will certainly try to "harness" the energy, but we all know that's impossible. In KRON, I submit, you have a group of people who understand this."
vs this, from "k"
"Brian, we have put years of effort, unpaid, volunteer effort in service of a political cause (which perhaps you cannot understand) into building indybay.org. now you want to come along, and your corporation now belatedly recognizing the power of "citizen" independent journalism, turn it to your corporate profit and advantage."
Who is right? Upon this question, I imagine, a great deal hangs.
Posted by: Chris Anderson at Jul 13, 2005 4:44:56 AM
