Whether you need an image for your blog post, a soundtrack to your video or that YouTube clip for your documentary, if you’re dealing with multimedia it’s likely you’ll end up using – or wanting to use – someone else’s work as part of your own.

Here are some basic tips on finding and using multimedia across the web in a way that won’t (hopefully) land you in hot water.

The public domain myth

One of the mistakes that has repeatedly landed journalists and their employers in trouble is confusion over the term “public domain“.

Public domain has two possible meanings. In copyright terms, public domain refers to work whose copyright has expired, meaning that anyone can use it without having to ask the copyright holder. Disney – a fierce lobbyist itself for extending copyright – has used ‘public domain’ material as the basis for most of its cartoons, from the work of the Grimm Brothers to a host of other fairy tales, myths and legends.

But sometimes you will hear journalists talk about something being “in the public domain“, in other words ‘public’. For instance, when the Irish Daily Mail published photos of an air traffic controller from her website, they defended the decision on the grounds that the image was “in the public domain”.

But this is not the same.

For example, pretty much every piece of media, almost by definition, is “in the public domain”. Newspapers and magazines sit on the newsstands; television and radio reports are broadcast on huge city centre screens and speakers.

But if you take that content and reproduce it in its entirety without permission, you are breaking copyright law.

It seems odd that media organisations so used to protecting their own, very public, content, should think that another person’s photo, or video, or report, should be fair game because it is “in the public domain”. But they do.

If you want public domain (in the sense of ‘copyright expired’) content, there are some useful sources. The Public Domain Review, for example, publishes a range of public domain work and has this guide to finding them. And Angela Grant writes here about finding public domain video, among other things (note that Angela refers to US law, not that of other countries).

But never assume something is public domain because it is “in public”.

One point to make: while an image, story, or composition may be out of copyright, its performance, re-design or re-telling may not.

Just ask Disney.

Creative Commons – making UGC copyright explicit

If you’re dealing with content that’s been published on a platform like Flickr or YouTube, you may be able to find out the copyright status of that content relatively easily.

Both allow users to easily establish copyright through the Creative Commons licence. You can either look for that licence in the relevant part of the page hosting the content.

On YouTube it is under the video:

On Flickr this is on the right hand side under License:

Make sure you click on that licence to find out what terms it requires.

Creative Commons, for example, has a number of elements:

• Whether the material can be used only in noncommercial contexts, or for commercial use as well
• Whether the material can be adapted and changed, or must be left unchanged
• Whether you must use the same CC licence if you use this material (e.g. you cannot use a noncommercial licence but then allow your work to be used commercially)
• Whether you must attribute the work (this is where many people breach the licence)

If you’re unsure of where your work fits against those criteria (for example, whether it’s considered as “commercial”), then approach the copyright holder for clarity. Remember that the CC licence is only a default position, and can be negotiated. Also, if you cannot get any response and decide to publish anyway, your attempts to contact the copyright holder will be important if there are any legal proceedings.

If you want others to publish their content under a CC licence, it helps if you publish at least some of your own work under a CC licence too. Indeed, if it contains other CC material, their licences may require you to.

Embedding versus re-broadcasting

If the media is hosted on a platform like YouTube, you may be able to embed it on a webpage without seeking permission at all: if the creator* has enabled embedding then they would have little argument in suing for breach of copyright because a) by enabling embedding they have given an ‘implied’ right; and b) they could stop you publishing it instantly by disabling embedding. Also, your embedding of their media would not lead to any loss of revenue (as advertising is embedded too), so it is unlikely that there would be any damages to sue for.

*note: this does not apply to video created by other people and uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder.

Reality bites

Of course, it’s one thing to talk about the strict legal position, and another to talk about what actually happens. Journalists regularly publish content that breaks the law – but make a judgement about the likelihood of ending up in court over that. For example, I can say that the Queen is corrupt (a defamatory statement) and be almost certain that the Queen is not going to sue me (because she has a history of not doing so).

Media lawyers are not just there to advise publishers on their strict legal position, but on the balance of risk involved, and how to reduce those risks. While you cannot always avoid risks, you can avoid them in simple ways:

• Always try to establish the copyright situation regarding any media you use: who holds the copyright (there may be more than one copyright owner: for example, performer and composer), and what are the terms of the licence?
• Try to contact the copyright holder if you’re in any doubt – even if you can’t contact them your efforts to do so will help you if you do end up in court.
• Always attribute authorship and link to the source (this can be done in title credits, captions and/or links on the host webpage). Copyright claims normally revolve around loss of earnings: anything that may have contributed to that (i.e. not linking to the source) will likely add to damages.

For more on these issues, and for related tools and links, see my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/paulb/creativecommons

PHP Freelancer

Karthika Muthukumaraswamy on how crowdsourcing experiments in journalism need to learn from their commercial counterparts – and how the end results could bring financial rewards for everyone.

The crowd has done a great deal for journalism: it has counted the number of SUVs on the streets of New York City, determined Bill Clinton’s financial impact on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and offered valuable suggestions to transform an impoverished Ugandan village.

Ever since journalism jumped on the crowdsourcing bandwagon following innovative business models in T-shirt designing and problem solving, it has been baffled by the intensity of crowd response. Consequently, the media’s implementation of it has lacked the selection process that is essential to use crowdsourcing to its fullest potential.

There are only so many T-shirts that Threadless can make and sell; there are only so many solutions to Innocentive’s complex problems; and there are only so many photographs that iStockphoto consumers will purchase.

But when the News-Press in Southwest Florida turned to its citizens for help with investigating the rising costs of local public utilities, much of the voluminous response – amounting to 6,500 pieces of user-generated stories – was published in six weeks following the investigation.

The difference lies in the ultimate goal. A company that aims to create a product is merely looking for the best idea to create one, and one that is looking to solve a problem is looking for the best solution. Journalism, on the other hand, while seeking the best stories, is also hoping to mobilize the maximum number of civilians and fulfill the ideals of democracy.

Stimulating citizen participation is, and should, in fact be, an important goal of crowdsourced journalism.

However, when it comes at the price of quality, as any cursory glance at citizen journalism sites would reveal, it not only compromises the media’s role in society, but also belittles the effectiveness of civilian engagement.

Not surprisingly, there is now an increasing desire for more reliable information on the Web, as seen from the popularity of sites such as BigThink and Mahalo, which rely on expert and professional sources rather than random, large groups of people.

The aim of crowdsourcing is to effectively enhance the quality of journalism because of crowd contributions, not despite them. And that is why distilling the best ideas, and thereby their utilization, becomes important.

Selecting for the top contributions and contributors is not new to citizen journalism. Establishing a community of dynamic civilians that a news organization can tap into on a regular basis is an important objective for most crowdsourced journalism projects.

The citizen journalists who established their credibility through productive efforts in Off the Bus have been largely retained to help report on the parent news site, the Huffington Post.

The investigative journalism site, Propublica, hopes to build a similar community of citizen journalists through its recently announced pro-am project.

The News-Press’s Team Watchdog went one step further and implemented a rigorous screening process that involved resumes and interviews to select twenty citizen volunteers from the Fort Myers community.

While such organization is essential for the success of open-source projects, news entities should be careful so as not to replicate the top-down hierarchy that still prevails in conventional media. This could defy the tenets of decentralization and independence that are essential to James Surowiecki’s concept of crowd wisdom.

It also ends up reinforcing the digital, intellectual, and economic divide that crowdsourcing already perpetuates.

The pharmaceutical company, Innocentive, has used a less conventional approach to seek out experts. Its website posts open calls to solve complex chemical problems to its large global community. While many of the 160,000 registered members of Innocentive are from highly specialized fields with advanced degrees (over a third have doctorates), almost anyone can register and take a crack at a problem.

Little surprise, then, that the company has turned up some unlikely problem-solvers in the form of patent attorneys and college students. Hence, real-world degrees and professional experience may not be the defining parameters for expertise, a finding that is reinforced by research from Harvard University.

The open-source technical support site, Experts-exchange.com has the luxury of using a more democratic approach to source “experts” from the crowd. The best solutions to technical problems are voted on by users, and the higher a contributor’s rating, the higher his authority and credibility in the community.

While the idea of allowing communities to choose their own experts would be desirable to citizen journalism, this form of user rating does not appear to work in more subjective areas.

While quantifiable answers to technical support questions are easier to rate, crowd wisdom is less reliable in judging more creative fields such as art and journalism. We all know that sensationalism would sooner get a Digg story on the home page or make an Internet video go viral than high-quality journalism would.

Hence, it would probably be in the best interest of news organizations to make these determinations at the editorial level.

In addition to improving the quality of content, such a strategy would promote better submissions from users. Crowdsourcing ventures like iStockphoto and Innocentive have shown that providng rewards – in the form of fame or bounty – works. As Jeff Howe, who coined the very term that all the fuss is about, has learned, community standing and recognition might be the key motivators in crowdsourced operations.

If you are one among thousands of people and don’t get recognition for your particular effort, there is little motivation for you to come back and participate.

If the more deserving contributors are acknowledged, and given special access privileges (such as being able to post content without moderation, for instance), it would encourage them to contribute more, and urge other contributors to compete at a higher level.

The unique, creditable, and more attractive content that would result from such moderation will eventually lead to higher site traffic, increased number of unique visitors, and hence, more advertising revenue. This might legitimize charging for content, thus allowing greater profits for news organizations, and possibly payment of individual contributors.

With contributors specifically chosen for the merit of their submissions, news organizations could finally explore the possibility of compensating the crowd for the product it creates. The opportunity to make money has been shown to be the most popular reason to participate in crowdsourcing projects.

Three years ago, when crowdsourcing first made a splash in the world of business and journalism, its democratic, freewheeling ideal was intriguing in all its novelty. But now, critics – and contributors themselves – have begun to question the legitimacy of a concept that puts people to work for little or no monetary gain while holding complete ownership over the product. “Is crowdsourcing evil?” asks Howe in Wired this week, detailing a backlash that is brewing in the design community.

It may be argued that the weeding out of contributors goes against the grain of grassroots citizen journalism. However, it is important to remember that news organizations are also entities that offer a service to people, and it behooves them to perform this service well.

In the field of business and innovation, companies are implementing a division of labor – specialized tasks are sourced to “experts,” while more general assignments are sourced to crowds. It is tempting to speculate that such a practice would work well for journalism.

Seeking ideas for stories from general readers, as well as involving them in the debate and discussion would fulfill the core purposes of journalism. On the other hand, the knowledge and skills of more prolific contributors could be utilized for specialized reporting. This would ensure the dissemination of quality content while still utilizing crowd diversity.

PHP Freelancer