As the wireless industry and others that provide content and value in the supply chain wrestle with digital rights management in the age of the third screen, those same players delve deeper into participatory and community journalism endeavors wherein the users become the content creators.
It’s ironic. Big media wants to protect its precious information and data properties while it invites its audiences to a free-for-all of content generation and publication. And for the privilege, participants give up their rights to the material.
Here in Denver, the Denver News Agency has launched YourHub.com, a Web site and accompanying weekly print insert to the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post that provides a venue for reader-submitted news, photos and other content broken down by small geographic areas. The idea is that readers supply content important to them, and the result is a local Web and print forum for each community. Make no mistake, the effort is a direct attack at the advertising dollars of small-town weekly newspapers and one with much lower overhead. The writers and photographers at YourHub.com are free! Meanwhile the journalists at the weeklies make only meager wages as their publishers fight to stay relevant and alive.
And the YourHub.com-submitted content becomes the property of DNA. As stated in the site’s terms of use: “All materials on this site, including, but not limited to, text, files, images, graphics, illustrations, audio clips, video clips, sounds and photographs posted to this site by DNA and its affiliates and related entities … are protected by copyrights, and other proprietary and intellectual property rights that are owned by DNA or by its affiliates.”
I wonder how many users realize that they are giving away their content. What if the submission is a creative work like a short story or a poem? I am sure only a small percentage of users are reading the fine print.
Where one person sees a money-making opportunity one way, someone else sees it entirely differently.
Scoopt.com dubs itself as the citizen journalist’s photographic agency. “Who will take tomorrow’s front-page photograph-a professional press photographer or a passer-by armed with a camera phone?” screams the Web site.
Scoopt says it represents the everyday Joe by brokering his camera-phone pictures to media outlets and making sure that he gets paid. For this representation, Scoopt gets 50 percent of the proceeds from each sale or license and will maintain the copyright for three months.
DRM has been a hot-button issue in wireless for several years, and a solution remains elusive. As with many wireless issues, innovation comes with more challenges and questions about proper use.
