The Ethics of Screencasting in the Read-Write Web Era
Posted by brooks in Misc, New Media, Screencasting, Social Media on Dec 3rd, 2008 | 9 commentsWhile watching a Charlie Rose interview of Lawrence Lessig I was particularly struck by the description of our uneven legal / ethical handling of copyrighted text content vs digital media.
Essentially Lessig questions why we treat the use of digital media differently from text. We freely and frequently quote (aka copy) text from copyrighted sources yet “throw the book” at anyone who uses digital media in the same manner. In Lessig’s view this treatment stifles ideas and creativity, inhibiting our individual and collective contributions to culture.
Call me a twit for saying it, but this has profound implications for screencasting. In fact, I used Jing to “quote” the section of Charlie’s interview with Larry you see above. Is this legal? Is it ethical? A small citation would seemingly fall under fair use guidelines, but there’s been so much FUD that its hard to ascertain how the copyright owners and their lawyers would perceive my use.
In fact, Charlie Rose seems to be open to non-commercial “remixes” of his old content and they make the clips available for embedding / download. They’ve even gone so far as to encourage it in a curious off site manner.
This however doesn’t clear up what I’ve done. I intentionally “copied” a portion of the video with Jing, uploaded it to my server and embedded it on my personal blog. It’s important to note there are legitimate reasons why I wanted to do this. First, I wanted point to just the relevant portion of the video. If I was citing text, I wouldn’t hand you a chapter with a highlighted passage and hope against hope you had the patience to find it. Second, I’m making another one of Lessig’s points. Today’s technology is enormously powerful and highly fluid. It took me longer to find the Lessig quote than it did to record and share the piece on my site (writing this post is another story). It’s absolutely mind blowing to think about combining video literacy / picture superiority effect with instant sharing across the globe. Lawyers and politicians just aren’t prepared to grok the information flow, empowerment and, dare I say, “culture” of it all.
If you haven’t seen it before check out Lessig’s free culture pitch:
Or just watch the entire interview. As always, there’s plenty to chew on. ;-)
9 Responses to “ “The Ethics of Screencasting in the Read-Write Web Era”
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Brooks, how are you embedding the Jing videos into your site with the Jing wrapper like this? I spent a while trying to figure it out tonight but couldn’t get it to work. The video tutorial here http://blog.jingproject.com/2009/01/use-ftp-heres-some-embed-code.html cuts out before the end, and it doesn’t seem to work anyway. I’d really appreciate some insight into this. Thanks,
Tom
You might want to deactivate your wordpress automatic upgrade plugin, since it appears as an error when I leave a comment. 2.7 isn’t compatible with it.
@Tom – Are you trying to get Jing + FTP setup, or just looking to host the player (you manually upload the files and copy paste the embed code from previous posts)? I assume what you really want is to have the player working with thumbnails…that’s pretty easy. I use the kimili plugin for embedding Flash content in my WordPress blog. Here’s what that embed code looks like for me:
http://www.brooksandrus.com/jing2/index.php?name=kimili_embed_code.png&width=779&height=580
Weird you’re getting errors when commenting. I’m not seeing anything in either Safari or Firefox on OS X. What platform / browser are you viewing the site with?
Here’s some “normal” embed code that’s being used on the Jing blog:
http://www.brooksandrus.com/jing2/index.php?name=jing_embed_code.png&width=918&height=234
Brooks,
Let me give more detail of what I’m trying to do. I’ve previously used the Kimili plugin to embed flash from Jing, but now that I’ve upgraded to Jing Pro, I can create videos in MPEG4 format. However, few WordPress plugins allow me to embed MPEG4 videos into posts. I tried the Anarchy Media Player plugin, but it doesn’t seem to work in 2.7.
I see that you’re able to embed the Jing videos directly into your posts, with the traditional Jing wrapper. I just want to know how you do this. Do I just copy the code that you took a screenshot of? Is there a way to set that up so that it’s auto-generated?
You post a lot of excellent resources on your site. I need to look at it more closely.
Maybe the comment error I received was a fluke. I’ll let you know if it happens again.
Also, one nice addition on your excellent blog might be the Subscribe to Comments plugin. Otherwise I’m never quite sure to know when you respond.
One other question. To record Jing in HD, do I just make the capture size 1280 x 720 and upload to a video service that renders in HD? I couldn’t find instruction on Jing and HD.
Thanks,
Tom
To follow up, I’ve tried embedding the screencast.com embed code into my WordPress blog posts, but it doesn’t work. The embed code only works on a regular html page. Is there a tweak to make with the embed code so that it works in WordPress?
By the way, I received the error again when submitting the comment. Here’s the screenshot of the error: http://screencast.com/t/KuwChOqyBrQ.
I made a post with a bit more detail on embedding Jing Pro content. Let me know if you’re still struggling after watching.
http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2009/02/09/embedding-jing-pro-videos-in-wordpress/