#Right Click
A lot of issues have been raised recently about freedom of speech on the internet, due to the inability of super injunctions costing £50,000 a pop to actually work, as huge numbers of people flaunt them on social networking sites.
American based Twitter has recently handed over the confidential details of a British user in a case brought about by South Tyneside Council in South Shields. The court action was taken out in America, reportedly costing the council £75,000 to unmask the author of not super injunction breaking, but slanderous accounts. This shows that if you have enough money and go about things in the right way, you can get people silenced. The reason Ryan Giggs wasn’t successful in unmasking injunction breaking tweeters was because he went through the British courts.
This got me thinking about the different ways in which information is now ‘freely’ shared over the web and the implications this has for intellectual property. If you are on Twitter, you may have heard about a recent and fairly high-profile incident of an independent jeweller getting her designs copied, mass-produced and sold by Urban Outfitters. All this without any permission being granted by the designer or any money changing hands.
A large company screwing over a small creative isn’t that uncommon, but the jeweller wrote on her blog that they had even gone so far as to steal some of her descriptions from her website to market the items.
In a recent Adam Curtis documentary for the BBC ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’ an early user of the Internet discussion board ‘Humdog’ states “I have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and I did so myself until, at last, I began to see that I had commodified myself. Comodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value”.
User content driven sites such as Facebook and twitter are valued at vast fortunes; Facebook at a staggering 50 billion dollars. The growing suspicion is that it has been way over valued. Surely there is another dot-com bubble a-brewing.
Facebook like Google gets its revenue from effectively spying on you, targeted marketing and people clicking adverts or sponsored links. If people simply stop believing in it, stopped clicking, stopped using it, then its value would crash.
Nearly all of the content on Facebook and Twitter is uploaded by unpaid contributors or ‘users’, who create profiles to broadcast their on-line persona, but who is really being used? Julian Assange of Wiki-leaks said recently in an interview with Russia Today that Google and Facebook are very much in cahoots with the CIA. So maybe we should be mindful of typing that acronym? I sent a draft of this article to a friend in a Facebook message, the next day the whole thread had disappeared without me having deleted it, other threads with the same user were still there, but that’s probably just a glitch. It seems silly to think that ‘they’ are watching me in particular, but you have to admit Facebook is a pretty awesome spying tool in general.
Another very real and worrying thing about Facebook is its terms and conditions regarding the copyright of pictures uploaded to the site. Kate Day of the Telegraph newspaper comments “if you upload a picture of your family and Facebook want to use it in an advertising campaign, for example, there is nothing to stop them, even if you are no longer a member of Facebook”. All a bit Orwellian, a large American company owning the copyright to your holidays snaps, don’t you think.
When information is shared freely for the good of humanity, re-tweeting an article about human rights abuse’s, or emailing it to friends to raise awareness of the issue for instance. Then that’s a positive thing right? Another example that springs to mind is of course the use of social networking sites during the ongoing ‘Arab spring’. Showing that it can be an important tool for empowering people. But exchanging information can have a hidden cost, what about if you’re a small designer and a large company rips off your work? or if Facebook decide to use a picture of you from your infamous trip to Amsterdam, tied to a lamppost with feathers sticking out of where the sun doesn’t shine, on billboard adverts? Clearly very unlikely, but the point is that they could if they wanted to.
I know all of this is sounding a bit paranoid and I normally envy the paranoid for their feelings of self-importance, the thing is I’ve been having a dilemma recently, how should I go about showcasing my artwork. If I simply post it on the web i.e.on Facebook, they then own the copyright, or someone can just come along and simply right-click and steal it.
A few years ago my mum was commissioned to do some artwork for an online festival ticket booking site efestivals, she did the artwork and gave it to them, they told her they didn’t like it and that they weren’t going to use it or pay her. A couple of months later one of my mum’s friends spots a moving logo on their site, that looked suspiciously like my mum’s work. All they had done is changed one or two lines and turned it into a moving gif, the cheap bastards.
In conclusion I will not be posting any of my artwork online, when I get some t-shirts screen printed, I will be no doubt proliferating images of them about on the Internet with reckless abandon, because at least then the images have been published in some real sense and are not just a barrage of zero’s and one’s floating in cyberspace.
Copyright Laurie Barnes
