Citizens media and Ourmedia

The most interesting thing about citizens media, of course, is that you never know what we’re going to produce. What’s apparent is that people want to take part in media — and to take it apart, remix it, annotate it, recirculate it. Reclaim their place in the ancient craft of storytelling.

They want to turn media into a circle instead of an arrow.

They want to turn that one-way pipe back on the broadcast media.

Since Ourmedia.org launched two weeks ago, we now have about 9,500 members, with hundreds more joining each day. Something important is happening out there.

One of the things that’s most interesting to me — since I have a book coming out on the subject in one month — is watching the dynamic between our media and the other media — their media.

Sometimes we want to create our own work without much input from the culture at large. And sometimes we want to dip into the larger culture.

At Ourmedia, we’ve been wrestling with copyright and fair use since we launched (and well before that). Yesterday I wrote a long Forum post about where we’ve decided to draw the line: against the uploading of copyrighted music singles, television shows, movies and trailers, but allowing reasonable and legitimate borrowing of snippets of copyrighted works — if it’s done for personal creativity and only noncommercially. It’s more complicated than that, so you’ll have to read the post and see our attorney’s thoughts as well.

In 14 days, we’ve had 14 copyright violations that we’ve spotted — and promptly removed them. But we’ve also had several thousand legitimate uploads — some of startling creativity.

We’re only at the start of this, but the road ahead looks promising.

I’m programming new content for our home page now, and smiling as I’m doing so.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.