Is Modern Media One Big Mix Tape?
Share My Playlists made me realize that one of the trends of modern media is the relinquishing of control, perhaps this truly is the “mashup generation”?
The play list service I mention is a site that allows people to upload their Spotify playlists and share them with other members. While the obvious association is with the mix tape of yesteryear, thinking about it this takes us into a whole new realm.
Original artists, and their record companies, are not even in control of the distribution, plus these play lists can be taken and edited by the end user – a second round of edit, re-mix and mashup.
With creative commons licensing and other related “liberal” intellectual property agreements, the future is about sharing, extending and expanding on works. Even musicians now are saying they are making more profit from performances and merchandise than they do from music sales.
But strangely it is relatively rare to find bloggers with creative commons licenses. We talk about people stealing our content, or over quoting. On social bookmarking sites “middle men” stories get penalized.
Surely bloggers should be at the forefront of new media?
What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments …
That’s an interesting question Chris, I’ll be upfront and say I never put one on my site because of sheer laziness. I’ve been intrigued about the one on the Zen Habits blog but somehow haven’t gotten around to read it closely to see if it’s something that would be right for me.
Thanks for the kick in the pants to check it out already.
Glad to be of help in the pant kicking dept ;)
While almost all the photographs I upload to Flickr are licensed under the Creative Commons, I think most people are hesitant to do so with their blogs because of the scraper problem. If it’s got a copyright link with all rights reserved in it, especially in your feed, Google (home of the most scrapers via Blogspot) will be more inclined to follow through on a DMCA notice. If, however, it’s CC licensed, and there’s a link back to you somewhere, then you have really no call to complain about the scraper.
If anyone wants to use my work, under fair use, of course they can. And republishing it (a lot do in their organization’s newsletters/magazines), that’s fine too. I’ve never refused a legitimate request. All I ask is for the attribution. So while all rights may be reserved, it’s still share and share alike for a lot of us.
But we have to protect against those nasty scrapers. :)
I am starting to think we have lost the direct battle against scrapers and the only real defense is to build our own domain strength so we always outrank them. Defeatist, maybe, but with an RSS footer plugin and plenty of links pointing at your own site you are pretty much ok without having to chase the crooks down all the time?