Once again you distill complexity into manageable bits and bytes.

You said:

“What’s important is to not confuse prevailing morés with right and wrong.”

I agree with you that, in general, new media does not require new ethics. It does require actual effort to navigate swamplands created by mindless worship of our by our shiny new toys and apply the standards that (still) make up the infrastructure of business and our society.

We create swamps when we refuse to apply standards like copyright and value, without which we’d find meaning so difficult to articulate and protect.

Thanks for helping shine the light to help us find our way back to dry, solid land.

Thank you for some interesting ideas. I’m always open to opposing viewpoints, but I’m not sure you’ve found a fallacy in my arguments. It is illegal to reproduce copyrighted material without permission except under the Fair Use provision in U.S. copyright law. The possible damages to copyright owners, and the potential risks to violators, remain high, despite pundits’ claims that “information wants to be free.”

There are no genies in bottles, cats in bags or horses in barns. In March, 2007, Viacom sued YouTube for over $1B claiming nearly 160,000 copyrighted video clips had been viewed over 1 billion times on the site. While music was freely pirated before that date, when Napster was launched in June 1999 music “sharing” took off. Today, 10 years later, the RIAA estimates that music piracy costs the industry $12.5B annually with 71,000 lost jobs in the U.S. alone. The RIAA http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php
continues to investigate and prosecute music piracy. By one estimate, the recording industry makes money on only 5% of music downloads, the other 95% being illegal. Is stealing music the norm? Yes. Is it illegal? Yes. Is it “right”? I don’t think so, but apparently many people do.

I also stand by my contention that (most) “Bloggers and tweeters are NOT professional journalists.” There are exceptions, like yourself, but the majority of people online simply aren’t professional journalists. Twitter has 12 million users. If 100,000 of them are journalism school graduates (unlikely), that’s less than 1%. Technorati says there are 135 million blogs. Again, how many are written by professional journalists? I see abuses and missteps every day I was “quoted” on the New York Times blog with a link to my blog, but with no attribution whatsoever. I remain to this day infuriated by this.

What’s important is to not confuse prevailing morés with right and wrong.

It’s also incorrect to say that “bloggers and Tweeters are not journalists.” I was trained as a journalist. There are many of us out here. And I apply the rules of attribution, which have morphed into the rules of Web 2.0. You credit your sources. If you are at a conference, you state who is speaking and their titles.

But to say that the conference or speakers have copyright ownership of their talk is simplistic. In this new world, once you put it out there, it’s fair game to use in any way one wants. That’s the world I live in.

Sure, you wouldn’t “live Tweet” a movie, or capture images from it, but I sure would go home and blog about what I thought of that movie.

Live Tweeting of conferences is a different animal. It is in the moment of necessity. The information is at its most valuable as it’s being said. But it is in no way substantively different than covering a city council meeting.

The notes a reporter takes are not copyrighted. The reporter uses them as he/she and their editor see fit. I live Tweeted a Media Hollywood conference, and many people who read my stream that week found it useful. And, as you say, I much more likely see that people might track down these speakers and buy their books or want to do business with them than anything else.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the genie (Web 2.0) is out of the bottle. MSM does itself a disservice by trying to jam it back into the old bottle, using the old rules.

Keep information free, and available to the people. The world will be a better place.