I personally think that this is the wrong way to about it. We really consider what the copyright and intellectual property laws mean before we go around claiming protection through them. The fundamental basis of intellectual property is capitalist. Corporations are using copyrights, patents, and trademarks to restrict speech, commodity and privatize knowledge and creative work. These 'rights' have been used repeatedly to attack activists who critique corporate domination of our society. Look for example at McSpotlight, or Negativeland and others who have been dragged through extensive legal hell for their activism and art.
I think we should embrace the ideas of copylefting which have come out of the free software / open source movement. The creator of the work releases it for others to use, either totally placing it in the public domain, or retaining copyright and using a very open license. There are a lot of variations in licenses some of which state that any derivative works which use the licensed work must be non-commercial, or similarly licensed, or any number of other stipulations. You can find out more about the subject by going to www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Rather than just getting angry at corporate media's using out footage, lets consider the options and implications of playing in to their game. I think we should have a notice up about the implications of intellectual property in a social movement against the corporate globalisation.
We might then want to include an option in the webcast software behind indymedia.org that lets people pick a license for work they post. We'd then display what kind of license the work is released under.
In Solidarity,
Evan
On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, craig hymson wrote:
> Arthur's question reminds me of an interesting point. To my knowledge,
> XXXXX used that clip without permission. I believe IMC folks are looking
> into legal action. What can we do to protect our coverage from being
> exploited by the coroporate media while providing it for free or low cost to
> communiy media?
> We may need to include all rights reserved statements on our site.
> The audio team's broadcast announcement says that our coverage is provided
> free to non-corporate radio stations.
> If big, rich, mainstream media wants to use any of our stuff, they should
> pay!
> What thoughts do others have?
> Craig
> >From: "Arthur Sankey"
> >
> >Reply-To: "Arthur Sankey"
> >To: imc-dc@indymedia.org
> >Subject: [imc-dc] Watermarks?
> >Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2000 17:39:49 MDT
> >Has the idea of putting the indymedia url or something in the corner of
> >your
> >footage? I just saw that the clip of the guy who got hit in the face by a
> >grenade ("this is totally uncool") was on the show XXXXX (I didn't
> >actually
> >see the show, but I did see the "next week" preview last week.)