Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Information Overload
Information overload is a concern these days with so much information available on the Internet. Back in the days before the Internet when everything was printed - printing costs were high and demand and accessibility for certain material was low. Nowadays because EVERYTHING is available online and mainly for free, how do we filter out what we don't want? How much time do you spend deleting spam from your inbox? How many ads do you avoid while surfing the net? How much do you believe? Who are trusted, reliable and credible sources? Most things published online have NOT gone through an editor or a gate-keeper so people are able to air their grievances and express their opinions to anybody around the world.
Video: Clay Shirky's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure"
Video courtesy of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
My notes from this video:
- Facebook has one of the BEST thought-out and executed privacy management tools of all the social networking sites. What the problem is though is that managing our privacy is an unnatural act - it isn't something that anybody is good at setting up and doing
- Privacy is a way of managing information flow
- We don't tend to worry about having a discussion with a friend in the street and somebody overhearing us. But we do worry about what is 'overhead' online, ie. status updates and relationship statuses on Facebook
We have had information overload in some form
or another since the 1500s.
What's changing now is the filters we used for most of that
500 year period are now breaking (Shirky, 2008).
Copyright
Everything we write is almost always based on something that someone else has written. Privacy is the infringement of copyright, while plagarism is the failure to give credit. If we are repeating something another person has said - we need to credit that person - EVEN IF they stole it from somebody else!
As a Web Designer we need to think about the images and content we create. Do we want others to be able to share our images? Re-use them? Modify them? Or make money from them? We need to either copyright our designs (visual or text) or apply a Creative Commons Licence. This needs to be enforced for future Internet users. Generations to come need to be aware of the dangers and penalties of copyright - whether we agree with the current copyright laws or not!
Lawrence Lessig (US lawyer and anti-copyright campaigner) is well known for his stand on copyright legislation and believes we need a reform because the current copyright laws are smothering creators. Creators are not able to express themselves without the fear of being penalised for plagarism. He believes creativity is not based on coming up with completely new ideas, but from modifying existing ideas. Everything old is new again.
Berry states "the paramount claim of Lessig's prognosis about the fate of culture is that we will be unable to create new culture when the resources of that culture are owned and controlled by a limited number of private corporations and individuals (Berry, 2005). He goes on to say the Creative Commons network might enable sharing of cultural goods and resources amongst possessive individuals and groups. But these goods are neither really shared in common, nor owned in common, nor accountable to the common itself. It is left to the whims of private individuals and groups to permit reuse.
Berry isn't a fan of Lessig and believes that Lessig's attempt to make it easier to understand which creative works can, or cannot, be used for modification has spawned a monster with a thousand heads and resulted in a more complex issue as the current copyright act (Berry, 2005).
As a web designer not only do we need to consider copyrighted images, but also code from other websites. Consider for instance the common practice of downloading html tags that define the layout of a website. Even if you don't include any of the content and only use the html and css coding to style a new webpage - is that copyright infringement? Are web designers obligated to give credit to the original author? What if that author stole it from another...and from another...and so on? The copyright issue in this situation is unclear (Snapper, 1999).
Plagiarism harms the author who receives no credit, but unless there is also copyright infringement, an author has few legal grounds for claiming economic loss for a plagiarised use of his work. There is no direct financial harm.
Snapper believes that the actual harm is not to the author, but to the reader. If sources are not credited - the reader can do no further research via the (un)credited sources.
An interesting point which Snapper raises is although academics write a great deal and profit from their writings with academic recognition, they rarely expect to make much money from copyright licenses.
And another...electronic publications lowers both the cost and the financial risk of publication, and therefore suggests that the electronic publication industry needs fewer copyright protections that the hard-copy publication industry (Snapper, 1999).
It is more likely that as the Web becomes a more important tool for research and distribution of information, we will see a slight shift in the importance that is attached to piracy and plagiarism. In order to protect the scholarly community against plagiarism in cyberspace, we may need to lessen the property protections of the copyright owner in cyberspace.
Snapper asks this in relation to Fair Use:
An interesting question from Clay Shirky on the topic of information overload, but I think it suits the current copyright laws:
Lawrence Lessig (US lawyer and anti-copyright campaigner) is well known for his stand on copyright legislation and believes we need a reform because the current copyright laws are smothering creators. Creators are not able to express themselves without the fear of being penalised for plagarism. He believes creativity is not based on coming up with completely new ideas, but from modifying existing ideas. Everything old is new again.
Berry states "the paramount claim of Lessig's prognosis about the fate of culture is that we will be unable to create new culture when the resources of that culture are owned and controlled by a limited number of private corporations and individuals (Berry, 2005). He goes on to say the Creative Commons network might enable sharing of cultural goods and resources amongst possessive individuals and groups. But these goods are neither really shared in common, nor owned in common, nor accountable to the common itself. It is left to the whims of private individuals and groups to permit reuse.
Berry isn't a fan of Lessig and believes that Lessig's attempt to make it easier to understand which creative works can, or cannot, be used for modification has spawned a monster with a thousand heads and resulted in a more complex issue as the current copyright act (Berry, 2005).
As a web designer not only do we need to consider copyrighted images, but also code from other websites. Consider for instance the common practice of downloading html tags that define the layout of a website. Even if you don't include any of the content and only use the html and css coding to style a new webpage - is that copyright infringement? Are web designers obligated to give credit to the original author? What if that author stole it from another...and from another...and so on? The copyright issue in this situation is unclear (Snapper, 1999).
Plagiarism harms the author who receives no credit, but unless there is also copyright infringement, an author has few legal grounds for claiming economic loss for a plagiarised use of his work. There is no direct financial harm.
Snapper believes that the actual harm is not to the author, but to the reader. If sources are not credited - the reader can do no further research via the (un)credited sources.
An interesting point which Snapper raises is although academics write a great deal and profit from their writings with academic recognition, they rarely expect to make much money from copyright licenses.
And another...electronic publications lowers both the cost and the financial risk of publication, and therefore suggests that the electronic publication industry needs fewer copyright protections that the hard-copy publication industry (Snapper, 1999).
It is more likely that as the Web becomes a more important tool for research and distribution of information, we will see a slight shift in the importance that is attached to piracy and plagiarism. In order to protect the scholarly community against plagiarism in cyberspace, we may need to lessen the property protections of the copyright owner in cyberspace.
Snapper asks this in relation to Fair Use:
Scholars should be able to keep a copy of a source -
but this is considered plagiarism.
Therefore it would seem reasonable that copying
for the sake of archiving electronic information
be seen as 'fair use'.
An interesting question from Clay Shirky on the topic of information overload, but I think it suits the current copyright laws:
If we have the same problem for a long time -
maybe it's not a problem - it's a fact (Shirky, 2008)!
Sources of images
As a Web Designer I am always trying to source images to use which are permitted or licence free. This presentation was created by a fellow student, Katrina Comyns. She discusses remixing and re-using stock images and explains the difference between licenced, free and royalty free.
Here is a list of sources which offer free, royalty free, licence free, or paid images:
Here is a list of sources which offer free, royalty free, licence free, or paid images:
- Clip art from within Word etc. (this typically comes with the license to use the program)
- Free clip art sites (Google them but make sure they are free - many want a fee) OpenClipArt is a good one
- Royalty free art (This is art where you pay a once-off fee and can then use without paying royalties. 123RF is a good one.
- Stockphoto
- StockFreeImages
- Shutterstock
- Freepik
- Getty images
- Wikimedia Commons
- Stock.XCHNG
- Creative Commons
- Flickr - search under 'Attribution license"
References:
Berry, D (2005) On the 'Creative Commons': a critique of the commons without commonalty. Retrieved from http://fsmsh.com/1155
Comyns, K (2012) Un-complicating the complex world of remixing and reusing Stock Photography - A guide for graphic designers. Retrieved from http://prezi.com/aowz1lv9k-pm/un-complicating-the-complex-world-of-remixing-and-reusing-stock-photography-a-guide-for-graphic-designers/
Shirky, C (2008) Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
Snapper, J (1999) On the Web, plagiarism matters more than copyright piracy. Dept Humanities, Institute of Technology, Chicago.
Berry, D (2005) On the 'Creative Commons': a critique of the commons without commonalty. Retrieved from http://fsmsh.com/1155
Comyns, K (2012) Un-complicating the complex world of remixing and reusing Stock Photography - A guide for graphic designers. Retrieved from http://prezi.com/aowz1lv9k-pm/un-complicating-the-complex-world-of-remixing-and-reusing-stock-photography-a-guide-for-graphic-designers/
Shirky, C (2008) Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
Snapper, J (1999) On the Web, plagiarism matters more than copyright piracy. Dept Humanities, Institute of Technology, Chicago.
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