I find it quite amusing in the way non-professional content creators seem so keen to ape a dying model and think copyright is such a great creation that they bow before it’s altar in all the silly ritualistic ways we humans like so much.

The Olympics, had it occurred to you that the effective copyright owner for all those UGC snap shots is in fact the the stadium or arena where they were taken? It’s a trend I’ve noticed that possibly as a professional journalist your shielded from that site owners retain the media rights and only release very narrowly assigned rights to the events they host.

Slightly more constructive, wouldn’t it be great if media sharing sites such as Flickr offered Creative Commons enforcement as a benefit of their pro account? I’m sure a couple of dollars would cover legal insurance of some sort, there’s a huge workforce of motivated volunteers to sniff out big media stealing users images. Then again, in the web 2.0 era why does it need to be Flickr, imagine plugging into all the API’s out there to form a Creative Commons registration service. You sign up, pay a tiny annual subscription/insurance premium and every time you upload some content the register gets pinged and logs your content, if you later see your holiday snapshot of an iguanadon’s poo in palaeontology weekly you report it, sit back and wait for your compensation to arrive.