These days there has been much buzz around the US government trying to restrict the internet with the proposed The Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) proposed in October last year, Wikipedia, Googles, Flickr, Firefox, Facebook, Wired and WordPress were among other blacking out their webpages in response to the proposals. (BBC.co.uk)
In a BBC article on the topic, Richard Mollet, chairman of the Publishers Association criticises Wikipedia and the likes for not engaging”constructively” in the piracy debate.
He also argues that while Wikipedia is a valued resource, it would make more of an impact if rights holders were to switch off their content for a day.
“Think what you would lose….If you walked around the streets of America or Britain with no creative content available to you, because rights holders had decided to shut up shop, you would be deprived of the BBC, cinemas, radio, bookstores and so on.
The argument is between a organisations who are relying on a free uncontrolled internet as a business model, from billionairs such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to Wikipedias visionary co founder Jimmy Wales, who allegedly has not even taken any wage from the organisation Wikipedia, and the interest of big corporations such as represented by Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
There somehow seems to be unlikely that the Internet will continue to exist as it has without states or big capital putting in place laws and regulations in order to protect their interest.
Chris Dodd, MPAA’s chief executive, ironically say that the organisations against are acting out of commercial interest; “It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.”
The corporate interest of Jimmy Wales seems to be outweighed by his organisations ethical convictions. Any one trying to limit the publics right to copy and publish themselves their favourite music or video or photographic content is gonna be fighting a lost battle. There will always be another Pirate bay around.
Here in UK on the other hand there are plans to widen and losen the laws surrounding copyright following Professor Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth. Which could seriously harm the UK clip library business as a whole.
For example one of the proposed change is to widen the “fair usage” of news clips for purposes such as criticism or review , this would considerable impact the usage of clips shorter then a minute.
This is not only about individuals using multimedia but also corporations so it is much wider ranging and if or when implemented could cause a loss of business for many media libraries. Focal The Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries International
A professional not-for-profit trade association are very worried about these proposed changes to UK law and also Videoplugger feels it is a very important issues and that it should be properly debated in the business community as the proposed changes in part would mean a serious blow to our industry of copyrights management and 3rd party license clearance .
