Open source news (CC, copyleft etc.)

Select Al Jazeera video footage – at this time footage of the War on Gaza - is available for free to be downloaded, shared, remixed, subtitled and eventually rebroadcasted by users and TV stations across the world with acknowledgement to Al Jazeera.

This is the first time that video footage produced by a news broadcaster is released under the ‘Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution’ license which allows for commercial and non-commercial use.

A lot of photojournalists also stick things up on flickr (we grabbed loads of it during the CPE), which while not dedicated to news is also CC licensed and would otherwise be restricted to news agencies.

Obviously indymedia's been around for a long time, and most 'lefty' news is copyleft, but recently there's been quite a lot of corporate interest in more open news reporting - which I think is both very interesting, and potentially threatens genuinely independent stuff as well.

I think this poses two issues - if content relevant to this site is posted up, then it's easy for us to incorporate it into content, whereas something from the AP or Getty is both difficult to access (they add nasty watermarks to their photos etc.) and has resulted in places getting sued before. Not aware of any lefties, but at least one local newspaper I think.

On the other hand, there's sites like http://nowpublic.com - which unlike some sites doesn't get copyright for user submitted content, but isn't CC or anything either, which are essentially doing what indymedia claims/claimed to do but without the activist stigma and constant re-posts of conspiracy theories (I realise some international indymedias are better than the UK one, but still).

Obviously this doesn't cross-over with specifically political content so much, but it's a relatively new development and bears discussion I think.