I have a dream. In mid-2008 I'll be in Paris. Maybe I'll roam with a Nokia 9N5. I'll use Google Maps on it to find the fastest walking route to the Louvre. There's bound to be contemporary artists at the Louvre copying paintings by dead artists. I'll then head to d'Orsay museum to again see the work of the Impressionists. They too copied dead artists, many of them Japanese. 

Long dead artists have no copyright. As for Google, while it's probably got a solid copyright licence with map owners it has exposure for use of unlicensed content. 

Pull back from my dream and look under Google's hood. There is no doubt that Google is remaking what's OK and what's not under copyright law.

The use of search engines (see table) has a domino affect. People use search engines and then copy found content elsewhere to create what is now known as "user generated content". That's not a technical phrase. The phrase certainly means little in the context of copyright law. There's bound to be more court cases about it sometime soon.

• Is the content original to the user (eg  an original comment to a blog post or original video upload to revver.com)?
• Is the content uploaded with or without permission?
• Is the content without permission but fitting within the exception of fair dealing (Australia) or fair use (America), eg for the purposes of research or for reporting news?
• Is any permission conditional (eg  requiring credits, watermarks or IP notices)?

Major content owners earn from their legal copyright monopoly. Copyright gives them a monopoly. Some critique major copyright content owners as if they are empires. I would not.

News Corp, for example, has considerable copyright-based earnings and power, but that does not make it an empire. There's a difference between gunboat diplomacy (empires excel in this) and user pays. If you want to use all or bits of The Empire Strikes Back, or other films in the Star Wars series, at your cinema or website or even as user generated content, then as a user you gotta pay News Corp. Through its subsidiary, 20th Century Fox, it owns certain film distribution rights to the series. Refer to the above questions - Lucas and his collaborators made an original film (hence there is copyright in it) and they then licensed or granted permissions under copyright law to Fox to distribute the film.

In combination the internet, the copying power of computer chips, and IT architecture generally all increase the threat to the historical, practical and legal monopoly control copyright owners have enjoyed over access and distribution of their content.

So now the copyright wars move to the next phase. The content empires have struck back against Web 2.0 darlings.

This month in the United States, major copyright owners, including those in fear of Google and user generated content, released Principles for User Generated Content Services. It is not intended as a legally binding statement on the copyright holders. It is intended to be their joint statement of what they want others to do to avoid legal attack. Every Web 2.0 player in Australia and elsewhere should read the Principles and obtain legal advice on their potential exposure.

Make no mistake, if there's court cases about user generated content then the Principles will be cited in bundles of court documents.  

In addition to News Corporation (via its Fox Entertainment Group and MySpace), Viacom has signed the Principles. Viacom remains famous for its March 2007 launch of a US$1 billion court case against YouTube which is owned by Google.

Another signatory is French-based YouTube-like site, Dailymotion. Among the most spine-tingling videos you can watch on it is La Boheme, a performance by Armenian-French singer, Charles Aznavour. The clip (with a subtitled version here) I suspect is in copyright and is not owned by the user who uploaded it. Someone has upload it. Is it user generated content just because it is uploaded by a user? This and other questions await resolution on a case by case basis as cases interpret situations just as they have for almost 1,000 years in English common law.

If the content copied to a personal blog or a social networking site offers a Creative Commons licence  then maybe that will simplify dealings with material that is not in the public domain. That 'aint necessarily so. More on the reasons why in a future post on Creative Commons licences.

Other copyright-owning signatories to the Principles, seeking to evolve thoughts on what to do legally with user generated content, include The Walt Disney Company, CBS, NBC Universal and Microsoft.

Google is not among the signatories. It is not an accident that the Principles have been made public in the same month as release of a content filtering technological fix from YouTube, the YouTube Video Identification Beta: http://www.youtube.com/t/video_id_about. Viacom is not too pleased that YouTube has gone with a YouTube-specific filtering technology. The next phase of the copyright wars will draw in content filtering technology standards.

Legal and standards wars are messy business. Each of the old, new and merging media players is in a struggle over technology, standards, business models, spin, influence, law, industry conventions, eyeballs and money (whether that's from subscriptions, advertising or other funding models).

Viacom is reducing its risk by taking a four-way bet. First, it has a legal war on, eg its United States court action against Google. Second, like two of our clients, it has licensed content to Joost and others to reach more eyeballs online. Third, it is using persuasion against unlicensed users, eg it is a signatory to the Principles. Fourth, it has joined Web 2.0 darlings online by opening up selected content to its multiple content websites. Further, if it sees a meaty web start-up to acquire then it may become its fifth bet.

The current four-way bet is not the way Viacom President and CEO, Philippe Dauman put it on stage in San Francisco this month at the Web 2.0 Summit though he referenced each bet, including the fourth. He confirmed Viacom has made available online every episode of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart  at http://www.thedailyshow.com/. There's 7,128 videos there since 1999.

That's a lot of content. A lot more than can fit on any Nokia 9N5. Maybe I won't get a Nokia 9N5 in Paris. But I will go to Paris and bask in content in the public domain.