Week5-1:Love it, Please set it free
The article how I learned to stop worrying and love Creative Commons wrote by Andrew Heavens gives me another shock brought by the power of New Media.. Just several photos published in Flickr enable attract “many hundreds of visitors a day” and in the following few weeks, the people related with the issue all around the world, say from Melbourne, from Geneva, from New York, from Rome held their own demonstrations by using those photos.
This kind of situations is not fresh today but it’s really hard for us to imagine in the age of traditional media, firstly, the speed of news disseminating today is so exciting; then, the scales that the new medias covers are so unbelievable. However, meanwhile, another problem turning up as Foust said in his book, Chapter 10 “copyright is especially important on the internet because no previous medium has made it so easy to copy its content.” Absolutely, copying today just means two actions by your finger: “copy” and “paste”.
In China, privacy was not a noticeable topic until recent years. So as a Chinese, it’s very seldom for me to think about copyright and privacy things seriously. However, after reading the several articles about this topic , as a reader, I strongly agree with Lawrence Lessig said “the history of the content industry is a history of piracy”in Some Like it Hot. Especially in the age of internet, the bomb of information and revolution of IT make publishing news no longer the absolute power of few Medias like TV, radio and newspapers. Besides, to me, sharing information is the most outstanding feature of internet, and because of its sharing function, the connection among the world is closer and closer. Thus, too much permission request and copyright debate seems blocks of the sharing. But as a journalist, I also can’t deny that illegal copyright is becoming a big threat for the online journalists’ benefit.
This balance as Lessig said “weighing the protection of the law against the strong public interest in continued innovation” is hard to control. But as founder of Creative Commons (CC), Lawrence Lessig has already given a beautiful answer to the public. After reading the mission of Creative Commons, I think it finds out a method to balance the law and public interest. As it says in its website “protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them”, it provides alternatives to these restrictions from traditional monopolistic content industry and personally another challenge for the statues of traditional media.
Because CC is a nonprofit organization and without boundary in the world, in Hong Kong journalists also can apply it. It’s a good way to avoid the readers or the other journalists to reprint works and meanwhile sharing it with the others. But since CC is really new for me, it really need time for may be all of us to understand it both of its strong points and shortcomings.
All in all, although there are still many problems in copyright of online journalism, for me, even as journalist it’s really not a bad thing to “sit back and watch where your photos (works) end up”. And sometimes, if you really love your works, it’s a good idea to set them free.
