Information Seeking World. Citizen Journalism.

Date: 15/06/13

Review of the article 'Fair Game' by Sarah Laskow published in CJR

The article 'Fair Game' by Sarah Laskow was published in Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) on 07th June 2013. It talks about how the reporters and editors look out for information, especially for breaking news. These days reporters and editors look forward to the developments on Facebook (FB) and Twitter for information. The photographs and videos which are shared on the social networking websites often become the main content of their news. However, the strong argument is whether the FB and Twitter pictures content created by someone else be a part of the publication? In that context let's go through an youtube video:

From this video we can find out how a breaking news becomes viral on social networking websites.

So, the point is whenever there is a piece of art created by people which helps the editors or the reporters to get the news, there is always a question of ownership. It’s all been copyrighted and belongs to someone else. In that context Patricia Aufderheide, director of American University’s Centre for Social Media has found a problem. The problem here has lead to release a set of principles in fair use of Journalism.

In New Media age different shops have been set up throughout the internet. The new principles are meant to give journalists a tool to make these decisions based, instead, on the consensus of their professional community. The Centre for Social Media started to conduct research with a point to find out the problem and the effective solution of that problem. They began by interviewing people in the field about how they do the work where copyright concerns might arise. They interviewed 80 journalists. They found people who were very rigorously employing their fair use rights in text and going to the other extreme when using audio for video.

The seven principles are:

1. Fair use applies to the incidental and fortuitous capture of copyright material in journalism.
2. Fair use applies when journalists use copyrighted material as documentation, to validate, prove, support, or document a proposition.
3. The use of textual, visual and other quotations of cultural material for purposes of reporting, criticism, commentary, or discussion constitutes fair use.
4. Fair use applies to illustration in news reporting.
5. Fair use applies to journalistic incorporation of historical material.
6. The use of copyrighted material to promote public discussion and analysis can qualify as fair use.
7. Fair use can apply to the quotation of earlier journalism.

If journalists just follow this set of principles, they might find they have more freedom to gather and share information, in all sorts of forms, than they thought.

We will try to find out the issues related to copyright through another article named 'Daytona crash video tests fair use, copyright for fans and journalists' published in an website called Poynter. The article was written by Al Tompkins. The link to the website is mentioned below:

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/als-morning-meeting/205225/daytona-crash-video-tests-fair-use-copyright-for-fans-and-journalists/

This article states that the fan video on the recent horrifying Daytona crash was removed from YouTube. When the crash happened NASCAR  fans like Tyler Andersen recorded the crash video. Now, in the ticket it was mentioned that NASCAR holds the right of any picture, video and sound created by any fan to be their own. However, journalists especially citizen ones look forward to cover all sorts of events. But the recent NASCAR massacre had put up a new scenario in front of us. The officials of NASCAR claimed that any person recording a video of their event and then uploading on YouTube is a violation of its copyright and that is also a crash where 14 people died. 
So, journalists are still not sure about the fair use of their rights. There are some questions like

1. How many seconds of a copyrighted video can a journalist use in a news story?
2. How many lines of a book can you use without impinging on a copyright?
3. When can you use an image or a logo that you did not create and still be on solid legal ground?

The answers of these questions are pretty much unclear. So, the argument over the copyright is on, whether the photographs taken or video recorded during an event by any journalist is a copyright owned material by the author himself or is it a copyright material owned by the organizers of the event? Over a period of time many journalists have raised concerns over the principles mentioned in the 'Fair Game'. Many are still unclear as to how to take care of the copyright issue. However, in that context its always better to learn every rights before dealing with others.