Interview with Lane Hartwell

Q&A with Lane Hartwell in "Going to the mat for photo copyrights":

Shankland: What do you think of watermarking to address the issue?

Hartwell: A great idea. Sites like Flickr need to employ an automatic watermarking system. The site I am moving my work to, Photoshelter, allows me to set that all up in advance and I never have to deal with it again. It´s applied to every photo.

Shankland: How much did you bill the Richter Scales?

Hartwell: They haven´t received the invoice yet. I can tell you that I used Fotoquote and calculated the invoice based on usage, the market where the photograph is to be used and various other factors, which are the typical parameters photographers use when pricing an image.

User Generated Content coming to a phone near you

User-generated content will make up one-quarter of the world's entertainment within five years, according to Nokia's "A Glimpse of the Next Episode" report. And much of it will come from young mobile users.

"From our research we predict that up to a quarter of the entertainment being consumed in five years will be what we call 'circular,'" said Mark Selby, vice president at Nokia. "The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group's entertainment."

Efforts to facilitate and encourage mobile content delivery and creation are in the works. People who are producing this content will need to continue to find the distribution channels and monetization mechanisms out there that are best suited for the work they are creating and maximize their contents value. We will have to wait to see who comes out on top.

Sony BMG and Yahoo get Cozy Over Produced Content

TechCrunch reported earlier that "Sony BMG Music Entertainment has agreed, in exchange for a slice of Yahoo’s advertising revenue, to let Yahoo’s users upload videos and music clips containing its produced content.

The deal comes just over a year since Sony made a very similar agreement with Google that also entailed the release of “thousands” of music videos on Google Video (and, soon after, YouTube as well). While Google has actually secured distribution deals with all four major labels by now, this deal is Yahoo’s first and it does not suggest that Sony will actively release produced content onto Yahoo Video.

Yahoo has also suggested that it will begin using “video identification and filtering technology” by early 2008, which sounds similar to the technology deployed by Google last month.

Yahoo Video, while a fraction of YouTube’s size in terms of users, comes in at second place among all video-sharing sites."

Can user generated content be used in ad campaigns?

It wasn't long ago that no one had heard of User Generated Content (UGC). It hasn't taken long though for advertisers to realize they resonate with their target audience and are a great staging ground for a focus group study. Just in the past year or so UG commercials have sprinted onto the scene and created a stir throughout the advertising world. Advertisers from Dorritos to Dove to Malibu Caribbean Rum have held contests to find user-created videos to use as commercials. These types of commercials, and the buzz surrounding them from different media outlets that cover them and the people that talk about them, shows that the advertising world is embracing the advantages of viral marketing.

How does an advertising agency decide whether going in front of their brand with a clip from YouTube is a good idea and won't get them fired on the spot? How much convincing does it take a brand to trust the advertiser that it isn't as big a leap of faith as they think it is to use the content in a campaign? We saw what happened with Virgin Media and using CC Flickr photos. They did it the wrong way and are now paying for it in legal headaches and a botched campaign.

The pros and cons of a UGC campaign have been discussed at length all over the Internet and across boardrooms. It's our opinion that, using UGC in an advertising campaign can be very cost effective. In most cases, the creators are paid as if they are an actor and give up a lot of the rights to the video. That saves a brand a lot of money.

Why wouldn't the creators license the videos to the brand or advertiser to use? It seems like they are short-changing themselves the value of the clip. If you had a hit on YouTube and a major brand came to you and said they wanted to use it, what would you do?

Licensing with MetaCafe?

I tried this same licensing experiment again with MetaCafe. Apparently you can license clips on their site. It doesn't give any information on the site about licensing User-Generated content but forces you to email an address for producers rewards.

I emailed them about this clip on wednesday and still havent heard back. There has to be a faster way to do this if I really needed the clip.