What a mess is being made of copyright in the online world.

People steal works from others. People borrow stuff. Some people rely on what they think is the "fair use" provisions of the copyright act. People in Australia think that because they have read an article online about how Google appears to be fighting the Viacom lawsuit that they can use similar arguments in Australia, where copyright law is different to the US.... and on it goes.

And then you see this kind of story appear and you realize that the whole thing is a rats nest of infinite proportions. (And thanks to Laurel Papworth and her blog for pointing to this story).

Seems like Viacom has muscled YouTube into pulling down a piece of content that was part of a program on VH1. Only problem is that the program on VH1 used the material that they have forced YT to pull without permission in the first place. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

We have to realize that copyright in the digital age doesn't work in the way that pre-digital legislators and rights owners contemplated (and the rights owners were the people who lobbied for the laws in the first place, and essentially wrote th first drafts of the statutes anyway).

It is a really interesting time for this discussion too because we are moving rapidly to a point where the amount of time spent consuming media online will be greater than the amount of time spent consuming traditional electronic media. I read the following in a report from Strategic News Service that came out last month:


So you can see with this sort of growth infrastructure will grow apace. And content will then have the air to also grow at a phenomenal rate. And at the same time the dirty little secret of the long tail will be there biting us on the bum. That secret of course is the corollary of the millions of markets scenario. This is the fact that content in the digital realm never goes away and continues to propagate at an ever increasing rate.

Which means that copyright owners (copywrong, I prefer to call them now) are going to find that the instances of their works are going to keep on appearing somewhere...

And unless they start by measuring the number of uses or number of occurrences they will never know how much money is leaking out of the system, how much revenue they are foregoing.

And of course this applies perhaps more strongly to new and emerging copyright creators and authors than it does to the incumbents. The incumbents already tend to be paid more than their due, because of the existing policies of the various societies. The rules of the societies are to pay the black box monies on a follow the dollar basis (of course they always deny the existence of a 'black box' but it is there under a variety of names).

So where does all this lead?

You have to have measurement, metrics, analytics. Not just so that advertisers can figure where the best spot is to place an ad, but so that a proper system of reward can be instituted for the creatives in the community.

This is really an imperative for collections societies, I believe. Whether we move to a Larry Lessig vision for the adoption of Creative Commons licenses or some other model, you need to start first with measuring the market. (Full disclosure: This is the vision for Vquence now, which I am a director of, to measure every aspect of social media online).