“If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.”
- Sir Issac Newton
Where we’re at
Throughout history our progress has come by building on the work of those that came before. It’s been taken for granted that ideas will be copied, tinkered with, and improved for the greater good. This approach has worked well overall and we’ve all benefited from the wide view to be had from the shoulders of giants. But now this process has collided with another meme, the Digital Age and effortless, instant, perfect duplication at virtually zero cost. Throw the Internet into the mix, bringing mass distribution to the masses, and mass confusion ensues.
It’s a hot topic. Our copyright and patent system is poorly equipped to deal with this massive increase in consumer publishing power. Content producers feel threatened like never before and have thrown up a maze of laws and lawsuits around digital reproduction. Simultaneously services like YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, etc. have thrust users into the centre of this issue without the tools to deal with the complexities at play.
Where to go
On this blog we want to talk about media reuse on the Internet and enabling reuse in a responsible way. Media companies’ reactionary response of restricting all use is throwing the baby out with the bathwater but conversely doing away with copyright on the Internet altogether is no better. There’s a middle way and we need to build tools to facilitate that path. Tools to recognise media and enable reuse.
Our immediate challenge is discovering what licensing and ownership attributes are associated with a given piece of media. There are millions of discrete pieces of media on the Internet, how can software tell which are reusable, which are licensed, which are public domain, etc.? A simple solution to this problem is offered by microformats. By embedding meta-data with media in a standardised, machine-readable way we open the door to all kinds of applications that rely on this knowledge.
We’re in this together
The more a microformat is used the more useful it is, we sink or swim together on this one. The tools around media reuse will all benefit from the publication of a standardised microformat to enable further reuse while preserving ownership, attribution and licensing information.
Obviously this post is a very high view of a complex issue and is meant only to introduce this aspect of microformats and media reuse. We’ll periodically post more information to this blog about our efforts to spur this initiative along and we hope anyone interested will participate in forming the ideas that emerge.
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