http://jschooltiger.com/2009/08/19/no-you-cant-just-take-anything-off-the-internet-and-publish-it/ Thoughts on digital media and football at MU Fri, 30 Apr 2010 22:40:17 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 http://jschooltiger.com/2009/08/19/no-you-cant-just-take-anything-off-the-internet-and-publish-it/comment-page-1/#comment-148 Steve Cusumano Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:11:27 +0000 http://jschooltiger.com/?p=288#comment-148 Interesting post. One area where I could see a grey area developing is the act of retweeting. Say Sky News, rather than grabbing the photo to place on their site, had retweeted it using their own Twitter account (actually, they might have done this, but follow me here). Instinctually, I find a difference between retweeting something and posting it to your site (even if credit is appropriately given on the site), but in reality, what's the difference? In both cases, a news organization is taking content from a citizen journalist and redistributing to a larger group of people. Following that line, if permission and payment is needed to publish the photo on the site, wouldn't it also be needed for retweeting on Twitter? Because that would seem to really undermine how Twitter is designed. I suppose the biggest difference between the two is that the news organization is using the site to directly make money (by selling advertising) while using twitter to indirectly make money (by driving people to their site). But sooner or later, someone is going to come up with a working business model for Twitter, and that difference will disappear. And if a news organization (or really, anyone) is required to receive permission and pay for retweeting something, that would counteract what Twitter, and a lot of social media, is really about. Interesting post. One area where I could see a grey area developing is the act of retweeting. Say Sky News, rather than grabbing the photo to place on their site, had retweeted it using their own Twitter account (actually, they might have done this, but follow me here). Instinctually, I find a difference between retweeting something and posting it to your site (even if credit is appropriately given on the site), but in reality, what’s the difference? In both cases, a news organization is taking content from a citizen journalist and redistributing to a larger group of people. Following that line, if permission and payment is needed to publish the photo on the site, wouldn’t it also be needed for retweeting on Twitter? Because that would seem to really undermine how Twitter is designed.
I suppose the biggest difference between the two is that the news organization is using the site to directly make money (by selling advertising) while using twitter to indirectly make money (by driving people to their site). But sooner or later, someone is going to come up with a working business model for Twitter, and that difference will disappear. And if a news organization (or really, anyone) is required to receive permission and pay for retweeting something, that would counteract what Twitter, and a lot of social media, is really about.

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