Science and Industry

I ended up discussing with Erika Reponen, researcher at Nokia Research Center Tampere, in Facebook around the topic of mandatory supervision fee, that the Finnish Board of Film Classification is charging from publicly available videos. Well, not from all — special cases such as research and education videos are excluded.

The story presented in Digitoday discusses this from the viewpoint of hobby filmmakers, which should according to strict interpretation pay the supervision fee, 800 euros per film in 2010. The more interesting thing is, what happens to videos I film and publish e.g. Youtube.

Youtube is a public media, meaning that publishing content there is bound with the legal framework we Finns have. My video could be something that is not excluded as a special case, meaning that I must — according to law — pay the feed. And 800 euros is a big sum for a random video in Youtube, at least for me.

Let’s jump to the next topic, from social to ubiquitous media, but let’s keep the same focus, namely videos, here. What does ubiquitous media mean in practice? Let’s start from the assumption, that cameras will be everywhere — most mobile terminals nowadays have them — and they may be connected to the Internet. Forget the Google Street view, that is tiny compared to this — we can change the world!

But, there are also some problems here. Some problems are created by social norms, things such as privacy. Google Street view caused a mess, and they do an extra effort to anonymize the pictures¹. I remember a few new year’s ago, I walked in the city of Helsinki and streamed video directly to Internet². What happens when pictures of use are pushed to the Web instantly, from the spot? Am I ready to show the whole world that I walked somewhere with someone — the recording is easy now and may become popular later.

These two cases presented above mean, that two key technological changes, the Internet and mobile technology, will change how we think of certain things³. At the same time there is both legal and social frames, that bound what is accepted, but these frames must adapt⁴ to the changes information- and communication technology have brought and will bring.

How do you feel about related topics, such as the copyright, privacy and publicity? Are those ready for 2010 and the networked society of tomorrows?

Notes: Author does not hold any degree in law and thus this discussion may not be legally solid.

1. Well, most of the issues are related to the fact that Google creates an easy to search index, not separate sources of data that need to me mashed up by the user [↩]
2. I did do an extra effort not to shoot faces to the film, as I didn’t feel that would be fair. [↩]
3. Obvious cat is obvious here. [↩]
4. Or do they? Can the frames behave in same way even when context has changed? I shall argue no, as we can see from the copyright laws, which seem to be more and more hilarious when I follow up news on those topics [↩]

I just came back from Mindtrek 2008 conference. The conference is related to new media and it’s usage in different fields, mostly about social media, ubiquitous media and games. So what I actually learned there? Maybe it was the tendency that social interaction is going to push itself to all areas we’re working on.

On the other hand it’s interesting to be in social media event where the use of social media seems to be… exception. I did Jaiku during the event, as did other’s too. But rather many did notes in the old fashion way (nothing against it — I love to work with pen&paper), which seemed strange. Actually this is every now and then happened in other places: for some reason formal settings seem to kill the use of social media tools.

So, I got an CD-rom with all the papers. I need to read the paper Social is the New Pink
by Damien Marchi, as it might have some new radical views. Then I got some new colleagues and met some old ones.

I spoke of ubiquitous media and political life, trying to argument that this new way we communicate has changed and will change how we do politics. Not allways in the good way but in some way anyhow. To see the presentation, head to Qik and SlideShare.

Updated: Link fixed!