Copy and paste everyday

Printer-friendly versionSend by email

Creative Commons licenses in a simple, standardized way  provide authors the opportunity to secure copyrights for their work in the digital age.

When you write the first article in a journalistic agency form, where there is no information about the author, and then you find the same article without any changes in the daily newspaper, signed and published by a sports newsroom reporter as a piece of his own work, is an unpleasant situation for a young journalist.

Using Creative Commons, it is now possible to license a copyright works as a publicly available and open content. Open source gives everyone access to the programming code that can be modified, upgraded and distributed.

"What is somewhat disturbing is that media workers often pay no regards to the protection of copyright, taking over the texts or images from their colleagues or others, without signing and paying attention to the license or fail to protect their own, which may entail a long, uncertain and costly court proceedings. Local media often borrow our content, translate it, without naming its sources, and in these cases it happens that we need to intervene." said the editor of Balkan Insight Ana Petruseva for WAVE magazine.

The right to quality content belongs to basic human rights. Of course, access to information is a fundamental human achievement in the 21st century.

Through the internet, it's now even easier to take someone's text, music or movie using one of the many available applications. It is the torrent clients (uTorrent, Azureus, BitSpirit) which are used for a massive download of so called torrent files from the internet in a very simple way.

Was (not) to say, that "copy" and "paste" are part of the daily operation of internet users.

We also have examples of "stealing" the images. The first relates to a photographer from Croatia Jelena Balic and incident with "Lee jeans" when her image '’Cry and rage", was stolen from an anonymous Bulgarian citizen. Photography has won the competition of the company, and was found on numerous billboards and magazines.

Another example is related to Bosnia, and Husein Sljivo, art teacher from Prozor, who has repeatedly "borrowed" someone else's pictures, and presented them as his own work, sent them to various competitions and even won awards. Of course, when the author of one of the winning photographs recognized his work, Sljivo was off from Tuzla Photo Club, Photo Association of Serbia and from the Photographic Art Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina. You can look at these photos at portal fotografija.ba.

Youthmedia.eu was the first European photo-platform that used Creative Commons license, and remains among the largest with some 70,000 images. Their standard license permits non-commercial use of photographs.

At the end lets recall about the Swedish feature film "Nasty Old People", shot under Creative Commons licence, and distributed via The Pirate Bayjī.