I was reading Mapping the Web today and his article about ‘Wikipedia and Ownership‘ and I began to think about the importance of attribution and copyright to Web 2.0.

I am not a massive fan of closed ‘all rights reserved’ copyright but I respect open copyrights and the principle of attribution. Whenever I can, I attempt to use images which are under a Creative Commons copyright because these images are often high quality and it gives me an opportunity to respect the copyright as well as promoting the owner.

But how important is copyright to Web 2.0? When Joe User goes and changes his MySpace layout to one of many pre-coded templates, does he consider copyright for one second? I wonder how many MySpace users acknowledge the creator, and quite possibly owner, of their template or whether they somehow assume the template becomes theirs.

Copyright has landed some start-ups in bother. The problem with giving users control over your site is that they can do whatever they want to it. How many copyrighted clips are on YouTube? Whilst I’m sure some users are aware users are breaking the law, I’m sure many do not. Interestingly, copyright violations are not as strife on Wikipedia as you may expect; the site self-polices, because many users respect copyright and want to keep it an open resource but I doubt many users report copyrighted videos on YouTube because they appreciate the people uploading them in the first place!

The thing is, most people still know far too little about copyright and how to avoid infringing it. Most people will do a Google image search and use the best image they see for whatever they need; how many will use Creative Commons Search to find an image? Most people will download music illegally; how many will use GarageBand?

The typical user needs to be educated about copyright and then, perhaps, they will use open copyrights which will only encourage more people to provide open content.

Tags: copyright, open content, open source