This post is reply to Mark Pack’s post “Election imprints in the online world: what should the rules say?” and originated, for me at least,with a Tom Watson MP blog post entitled “Spoof videos will not be policed in the general election”.
Essentially Tom Watson (on the back of a BBC report on the Election Commission being unable to police the expected explosion in spoof videos at the next election and discussion in other areas) suggested that a set of guidelines could be put together by the Internet community at large, or at least that is how I read his challenge:
“I’m going to write to Jack Straw to ask him to sort it out. It strikes me that between us, we could knock up a set of guidelines quite quickly. I nominate Mark to get the ball rolling with a draft. Anyone else got ideas?”
Since the initial request, there has been a little discussion on both Mark and Toms blogs, in addition Mark put out an initial set of guidelines yesterday to which I thought I might add a little commentary.
Overall principles
1.The logic for having imprints on printed literature – making clear who it is from, informing people who is legally responsible for the contents etc. – applies as well to online material as offline.
Absolutely, any imprint should establish the source and who it is for.
2. Online imprints should be easy to access and should not be so burdensome as to make it impossible or impractical to use a particular technology. If that is the case, the imprint information should instead be readily and clearly available from elsewhere.
I would take this one step further. An imprint in digital media should be available in two ways, firstly in a manner that is obvious to someone using the media in the normal way (listening to a pod-cast, watching a video, seeing an image or reading written text) and should, where possible be included in any metadata so it becomes machine readable too… This is easily achievable when creating such media and could prevent issues whereby such media is taken out of context
3. The information should be readily available, e.g. not requiring someone to watch a 10 minute film to find it.
Agreed, I would say that in the case of audio or video the imprint should be seen or heard before the content.
Information that should be provided in online imprints
1.The same trio of information should appear as for printed material – the electronic equivalent of the printer, the promoter and who they have promoted it on behalf of.
2. The “printer” for web services is the firm who provides the service, e.g. Facebook or YouTube. For distribution services, such as email, the “printer” is the firm whose technology does the distribution, e.g. the firm running the SMTP server used.
I partly disagree with this. The information I would say is required is the source (or author) and the person or group who it has been created for. The problem I see with including the “printer” is that it will vary if something has been reused. For email it is a potential minefield for anyone without a dedicated SMTP server, you could hardly list BT’s or Virgin Media’s just because that happened to be where it was sent through. For other media I see issues where if an image has been created and first issued on Facebook or Youtube, but is then moved and embedded in a blog, or mashed up with other information to create a derivative, the initial “printer” is no longer important, the focus should be on the source and the person who it was produced for.
Audiovisual material
1. In order for the imprint information to be readily available to people, it should be available at the start of any such material or immediately adjacent to the material (such as on the packaging of a box that a DVD comes in).
I would simply say that should be included at the start (unless length restrictions make it impossible).
2. Where audiovisual material can be republished or embedded elsewhere, only having the imprint adjacent to the audiovisual material in its original location is not sufficient.
Material with length limits
1.If, and only if, a technology imposes a length limit on content which means that a full imprint would take up more than 15% of a message, the imprint need not be included with the message.
In these cases (and I can’t think of many) there should be a link to the relevant information, unless that is impossible.
2. Where the message automatically contains a link back to a profile or user page, such as tweets, then the full imprint information should be provide on that profile or user page.
Definitely.
3. Where there are no such links, such as with text messages, either it must be possible to reply to the message, or the message must contain contact details, and either way any reply requesting the imprint information should be responded to within 48 hours.
The only think I would add is that in terms of the information required, a real address (as in brick and mortar) would be preferable than an electronic one for most things,although both would probably be better.
One thing that does strike me is that we should be using a wiki or similar for this kind of collaborative work, although it may not be ideal (and a public wiki would potentially be a nightmare) it would make collaboration generally easier. If it seems like a good idea I could put together something at www.crossparty.co.uk intended as a party neutral discussion area, although I suppose it would have to be by invitatin only, at least initially, indeed policy collaboration was what I intended the domain to be used for initially, however it fell into the pile of my unstarted projects because there seemed to be no interest… That said, I’m not sure if I would be duplicating effort, so if something already exists, please, someone point it out.
