In the light of the recent events of the pictures taken by an authorized Reuter’s photographer and the withdrawal of his pictures from the Reuter’s picture archive, it is interesting to take a look at the credibility of any news and information in general too. I have been lucky to browse through the picture archive and I must say that the number of pictures are amazing so is the quality of them. Are they credible and authentic? Not sure.

I have done my fair share of photoshopping and I am aware of the tricks to change pictures and to enhance and improve what you see. This phenomenon has been known in ages in the model environment. We have been spared altered images in the news, images where events have been manipulated to the better, rather than portraying a cruel, less beautiful reality or recently a more cruel reality such as the case of the Reuters photographer. It has also been reports of the Israeli forces.

Maybe we have lived in denial. I don’t know. What I do know is that the blogosphere here fills a crucial need. I have had several discussions lately about the credibility of the new improved media. I have continuously claimed two things:

• the blogosphere needs to learn from the traditional media about how to handle credibility, filtering and so forth
• the traditional media on the contrary can use the blogosphere to create and check the credibility as well as the authenticity

This is of course much simplified, but for the sake of the presentation bear with me on the two points. This is something that I think we have to explore more and which I personally am doing presently.

On a slightly related note, some thoughts should be put to who owns the rights of the citizen media reports and especially the photos, audio clips and videos. If the rights to the material are not clear, the publisher will not be able to publish it at all.

Who owns the rights to the content? The sender? The object at the picture? The publisher? What is needed? And so forth.

Unfortunately I do not have a clear or complete answer at this stage and I do think we will just have some faith in the legal work being done. Here at Stanford I have met the director for the freedom of speech institute, which give me great faith in the progress. The most common answer I get is the Creative Common License, which if done properly is certainly a terrific choice. However, what is needed to fulfill the license? Is it enough with a disclaimer? Who knows…

- Come on, Erik. Now you sound too negative!
- I am certainly not. The scenario I am interested in is when you apply these techniques in areas of war and/or less secure areas.

A agree that this is mostly a technology problem to secure the sender as much as possible, but we need some legal protection to secure the source after the information sent in. It brings me over to the prolongation of the argumentation. Who owns the copyright for the material?

I did not think of a solution until a PhD student in Toronto added me on MSN and started to talk about his work. I got intrigued by his work and especially how they solved the copyright issues. We could question whether it is a doable solution on the long term in journalistic applications, but it is definitely an interesting angle.

He was working on something called “sousveillance”, that is the opposite of surveillance -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance. Think of it as people being able to look back at the big brother society and thereby creating a balance. Very interesting thought even though I am still not convinced that more cameras are the true solution to our problem. We can leave that discussion for later though.

However he brought up the idea of “subject rights”. Think of that as the same agreement models do when they are taking their pictures. They are giving away the rights to use their images by a consent form. The same can actually be made for the case of citizen journalistic contributions.

A simple scenario to explain how it could work: Someone takes a picture of you. Who owns the image? The photographer or you? Without a copyright release form the photographer will own the picture. However by making the contributors sign a consent form this can be solved and the copyrights moved to the subject of the report.

This solution is of course filled with complexity, and is really a kind of a blurry area. It is a step in the right direction even though I think that we have to do much more work and there is a need to get some lawyers involved to solve these issues. Yet covering all different legal aspects will be impossible.

Therefore, as I see it the easiest solution now simply is to put some faith in the contributors as well educating them not to violate the privacy laws and other legal issues. It calls for a mechanism to handle the contributions from citizens to ensure that the individual rights are not violated. Briefly, the key is in the review system, which needs to be constructed in a way to be sustainable and easy to use. I have proposed a way to use citizen editors to edit it, and to use the cell phone platform to do so. Here the traditional media can contribute much to implement existing structures they have, yet in a community sense.

I will come back to a better description of the full solution in a later blog entry.