It used to be that a college diploma was a reserved seat in a nice office, possibly even one with windows. Alas, those days are gone. Offices have become cubicles, and that diploma doesn’t guarantee any job, even one that requires you to wear a nametag and work a drive-thru window.

Don’t leap out of that third floor window yet. It’s not as dire as you might imagine. Your time and financial investment in a college degree will make a big difference during your working lifetime, when you do get a job. But that piece of paper needs some back up, and it’s never too early to start developing another important piece of paper –– your résumé.

I can hear you asking, “But what can I put on my résumé? If I don’t have experience, I can’t get experience.” A legitimate question. The answer? GET INVOLVED.

GET INVOLVED IN YOUR MAJOR. There are opportunities to learn more than just what you’re taught in the classroom. Find an organization that gives you professional development and networking opportunities. Here in the SMC we have chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), the American Advertising Federation (Ad Club) and the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA). Membership not only looks good on that résumé but it opens doors to internships, jobs and advancement. Plus, each chapter needs interested members to help put together programs, attend professional conferences and communicate with other chapters or levels of their own organization. And you get to meet other students with similar interests, some of whom might be from other majors around campus.

Each of these groups is getting started on a very busy year of speakers, programs and trips…and membership drives. In addition, Ad Club and PRSSA are also looking for those creative and hardy students that will become members of their competition groups, the Ad and Bateman teams, respectively. (Deadline for Bateman applications is Friday, Sept. 24; for Ad Team applications is Tuesday, Sept. 28.)

Need more information? Find a member and ask how you can GET INVOLVED. Or contact:
SPJ: Jean-Paul Arguello, president; Professor Michael Giusti, adviser
Ad Club: Margaret Sanders, president; Dr. Yolanda Cal, adviser
PRSSA: Ashley Stevens, president; Dr. Cathy Rogers, adviser

I’d like to comment on the sources and contacts of journalists.

I’m prompted to do so because of this:

Reporter Justin Gillis broke the “oil is gone” story for the New York Times on August 4, a day before the official NOAA report detailed in that story was released. While somewhat guarded, Gillis’ story was instrumental in promoting the government position that most of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico had been dealt with effectively.

Subsequently, many have questioned the implications and validity of the NOAA report. And, in testimony before Congress, NOAA spokesman Bill Lehr admitted that most of the BP oil spill in fact remained in the Gulf of Mexico.

Gillis and The New York Times benefited, it seems, from contacts at NOAA. They got a “scoop.” It is not at all clear, however, how the public benefited.

Newspapers of sufficiently high status – The NYT certainly places among these – are often given first access to information by those who wish that information widely distributed. (The recent selective release of the WikiLeaks Afghanistan files through The New York Times, Der Speigel, and The Guardian is a good example of this.)

And, even in more mundane circumstances, journalists commonly establish and maintain useful sets of personal contacts. These contacts are valued for their ability to provide insight and access to information otherwise unavailable – and, if that is what they provide, then rightfully so.

Likewise, broadcast news organizations groom and retain various contacts in the form of resident “experts.” While contacts are normally kept private and (hopefully) exclusive, experts tend to be used more on a public and revolving basis, with attention paid to make sure different experts are given equal opportunities to contextualize controversial issues: one expert from Column A and one from Column B.

In all cases, however, contacts and experts focus and narrow the news. They stand and intervene between the reporting of the news and the news that is being reported.

Increasingly in a new media environment, the news that is being reported — information in the raw — is available to the public without the necessity of professional filtering. For instance, we can now access the pressure readings of BP’s “ambient pressure test” directly from the Macondo well site. In this and other instances (e. g., live BP ROV feeds from the Gulf, the release of WikiLeaks data on its own website, and such), new technology has the potential to cut out the middleman between the public and the information in the news.

Of course, most news organizations don’t think the public is interested enough or intelligent enough to deal with information in the raw; therefore, despite new technology (and in order to sustain demand for their services), these organizations continue to filter and focus their reporting through, ostensibly, the “context” of a story. This contextual filtering includes couching information in summary and in personality: omnipresent talking heads. This filtering process is then much better for ratings and sales than is information in the raw, argue the news organizations; and, ultimately, it’s also better and more informative for an otherwise clueless public.

Contextualizing the story definitely seems better for the ratings. There have been, no doubt, lots more people watching Anderson Cooper’s nightly interviews with Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser on CNN than checking out Gulf of Mexico ship movements on the web. But I wonder what’s truly better for the public.

For instance, without those Deepwater Horizon pressure readings mentioned earlier – information in the raw – how could we determine which is right: the TP editorial that originally told us “pressure rose” during BP’s pressure tests (apparently based on an erroneous Washington Post article — since changed), or the Thad Allen transcript that clearly stated “pressure has not changed”?

And without public vetting – Wikipedia style — of the NOAA “oil is gone” report that appeared in The New York Times, how could we ever learn that the Gillis article was as much dictated by the motives of his NOAA contacts as the intentions of his newspaper?

Do contacts and experts filter and focus our attention on important information — or filter and obscure our ability to access that information on our own?

Shouldn’t contextualizing a story always include the full story of how and why that story has been contextualized?

Or are we always going to rely on a weatherman to tell us which way the wind blows?

In the September 2009 issue of New Orleans Magazine, the editor marked the beginning of another pro football season with a note laden with wistfulness and whimsy:  wouldn’t it be great if the fifth anniversary of Katrina saw the Saints returning to the Superdome as world champions?

Sure, everybody chuckled. The Saints as Super Bowl champs? In a city still struggling to rebound from the crisis of Katrina, it was a humorous notion. But amid all the loss – family, friends, treasured belongings – the fans of New Orleans never lost faith in the Saints. And on Sept. 9, the Saints will kick off the 2010 season in the Dome, no longer a place of refuge and misery for thousands but the home of the WORLD CHAMPS (still hard to believe).

And while it won’t rival in any way that moment, that very same day – Thursday, Sept. 9 – the School of Mass Communication is also kicking off a new season, the 2010-2011 academic season. We’ll be hosting all mass comm students in a meet-and-greet (and eat) gathering in Studio A during the window. [For you new students, that’s 12:30 to 2:00.]

You’ll get to meet the faculty, hear more about the SMC and learn how you can get involved in student media (The Maroon newspaper, The Wolf magazine) or one of the professional organizations (American Advertising Federation, Public Relations Student Society of America, Society of Professional Journalists). You’ll also find information on two of the centers associated with the SMC (Loyola Center for Environmental Communication, Shawn M. Donnelley Center for Nonprofit Communications.)

If you’re ready to kick off your career in mass communication or want to know more, join us for the SMC Kick-off. Or you can stop by the SMC office (Communications/Music complex, room 332) any time.

See you at the Kick-off! Saints’ jerseys optional.

You might think that faculty members take the summer off and that we’re all sitting under a palm tree eating dates and sipping umbrella drinks. Oh, but no. Here in the SMC everyone stays really busy during the months between spring and fall semesters, and much of that busy-ness is school related.

We’re working on our courses for the upcoming semester, updating this syllabus or that test bank, uploading all those files onto Blackboard so they’ll be ready the first day of class (which this fall is Aug. 30). Some of us are cleaning up our offices, filing materials that have collected over the past school year, adding new books or clearing out old ones.

Dr. Bob Thomas, director of the Loyola University Center for Environmental Communication and Loyola Chair in Environmental Communications, has spent the last few months fielding questions from media about the environmental impact of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Dr. David Myers just published a new book, “Play Redux,” through the University of Michigan Press. Professor David Zemmels is also busy writing, working on his doctoral dissertation, planning to add “Dr.” to his title shortly.

Dr. Yolanda Cal and Dr. Cathy Rogers will join Dr. Sonya Duhé and me at The Power to Transform the World conference at Marquette University this week. We’ll be presenting papers on various research projects. As you can imagine, these presentations aren’t created in a few days. We’ve all spent lots of hours this summer pulling them together.

But it’s not all serious work. We’ve been working in some fun too! Drs. Duhé and Cal, along with Professor Michael Giusti and Dr. Sherry Alexander – and me – represented the SMC at the Press Club of New Orleans 2010 awards banquet Saturday night at Harrah’s. We were there to cheer on the SMC students and alumni up for various journalism awards. Dr. Alexander took photos as one Loyola-connected journalist after another went up to collect their trophies. Recent Loyola SMC graduates Trevor Cassidy, Ramon Vargas and Danny Monteverde took home first place honors.

We are especially proud of our current students, who competed against seasoned professionals to take some of the first, second, third place and honorable mention awards. That group includes Katie Urbaszewski, Eduardo Gonzales, Craig Malveaux, Kevin Zansler and Jean-Paul Arguello.

Jean-Paul, an investigative reporter who is interning this summer at The Lens, was announced as the winner of one of the two Press Club scholarships this year.

And the summer’s not over yet. Who knows what’ll happen before we see you in class. Stay tuned!

History is littered with trends that tanked, fads and fashions that seemed like a good idea at the time but, in retrospect, usually came to be labeled, “What were they thinking?” Elephant bellbottoms, ironing your hair, underwear as outerwear – they all beg the question. Buttery chunks? Is bleaching wide, uneven swaths of yellow through your hair attractive or natural looking? And nude lipstick? Try ChapStick®.

Some fashion fatalities hang around longer than others. Some come BACK into style, dusted off and called “retro,” when they probably should’ve stayed gone. To name a few: platform shoes, blue eye shadow, micro mini skirts.

The ad industry has a bad habit of recycling ideas that weren’t smart – or good advertising – in the first place. One of the worst is spending your ad time/space and dollars to promote your competition. It’s very popular these days. And among folks who should know better…

It’s not a new concept; in fact, it’s been going on for a long time. Pepsi has mentioned Coca-Cola in TV commercials since the 1970s. In 1992 Ray Charles “accidentally” drank a Diet Coke in a Diet Pepsi commercial.

You’d think creative people would be more original. But a quick look at recent TV offerings came up with quite a few advertisers using the same old, tired tricks. In one, the terminally-adolescent boys of SONIC® make fun of Wendy’s Frosty composition, the whole time prominently displaying the Wendy’s logo. Then the BURGER KING®, that scary big-plastic-headed creature, breaks into McDonald’s headquarters to steal a recipe. (Seriously? That’s the best idea you could come up with?) It’s not only dumb, it shows Mickey D’s is so much better that BK has to STEAL to compete – their name as well as their product.

AcneFree, a product you may not have heard of, mentions better-known competitor Proactiv® twice during a single commercial.

Even the “Windows 7 was my idea” commercials from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the same folks who brought us those horrendous BURGER KING® commercials, rip off their tagline (“I’m a PC”) from the Macintosh commercials created by TBWA\Media Arts Lab that ran from 2006 until May of this year. Even though they don’t mention Macintosh by name, you hear “I’m a PC” and you think, “I’m a Mac.”

Blogger Dong Ngo wrote,

“…when I saw the ‘I am a PC and Windows 7 was my idea’ ads, I just wanted to jump into panel to ask the presumptuous-looking guy, ‘What is your idea, dude, really? What’s really new?’ (And speaking of original, come on Microsoft! You can do better than imitating Apple’s …ads!)”

He didn’t use nice words to describe Apple’s ads, but call me prejudiced. I’m a Mac myself. I LOVE the “Mac/PC” commercials and am sad to see them go off to the advertising retirement home.

Not only is it tacky to use someone else’s name to promote your product, it’s bad business. While some people believe imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, using your competitor’s name, images and products in your ad gives them visibility – at no cost to them. The advertisers signing the checks for these ads should be asking, “Tell me again why I’m paying to advertise my competition?”

Beginning on July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau spent two years and two months in semi-isolation at a small cabin on the edge of Walden Pond.  This experiment in self reliance led to the publication of Walden in 1854.

One of the better known claims within Walden is this one:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Lesser known, perhaps, is what follows that famous phrase:

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work.

After spending much longer than two years and two months playing video games, I have come to believe there is similar despair concealed within the games and amusements of contemporary society.  Institutions of work and institutions of society are equally self-sustaining and, in that self-sustenance, increasingly debilitating to free and individual play.

Nevertheless, that play breaks free.

I call this play that breaks free — both base and basic, creative and crude — the play of the “anti-” or anti-play.

***

This month marks the simultaneous print and online publication of Play Redux.  I am very gratified that this book is being released through the University of Michigan Press digitalculturebooks series:  a venture enabling free online reading through Creative Commons licenses (and which is, in the context of the book, a sort of “anti-publishing.”)

Play Redux represents the culmination of a number of studies of video games and video game play that I have undertaken since the 2003 publication of The Nature of Computer Games.

In brief, the book champions free and individual play – even so-called “bad” play – against the distortions and impositions of work, society, and culture.  Play Redux describes the capacity of games to evoke and protect the dynamic play of cognition – the manipulation of signs and symbols — that is vital to the human aesthetic experience.

In elevating free and individual play, Play Redux reduces the importance and emphasis placed on group and social play within contemporary game studies.

Here is some of the flavor of the book….

From Chapter 1 (re game studies):

Computer game studies have quickly become, like all other forms of academic scholarship, very much like all other forms of academic scholarship: serious. And, imbedded in this seriousness of method (not so bad in and of itself) is a set of seriously debilitating values.

From Chapter 6 (re narrative):

In the late 1800s, railroads were “iron horses”; in the early 1900s, automobiles were “horseless carriages.” And, in the late 1900s, computer games were “interactive fictions.”  … The importance of the horse and the importance of narrative fiction… are on similar and diminishing trajectories.

From Chapter 8 (re MMOs):

…currently popular MMO game designs, particularly those promoting cooperative play, operate most fundamentally as a means of social control – and this function  must be weighed heavily against their more productive outcomes.

From Chapter 12 (conclusions):

A virtual world that traps, regulates, and purposefully distorts the overtly selfish behavior of individuals—including, prominently, play—appears to be a well-built bottle for one of our most destructive and most useful genies. I would hesitate to trap that genie permanently inside.

There’s a lot to write about #oilspill.

Since the oil came ashore and provided the photographs and videos for the mainstream media that, prior to that oil coming ashore, were missing, there’s been a whole lot of shaking going on.

Prior to that oil coming ashore, mainstream media news organizations had other things to talk about:  Arizona’s immigration law, the decline of the euro, the NBA playoffs.   This talk took place despite the huge and growing presence of the oil spill/leak/disaster in the Gulf and despite the incontrovertible reality that that oil would, sooner or later, without recourse or remorse, come ashore.  Somewhere.  Some time.

But there were no pictures.  No pictures – and no emotion.  No heat.

As long as the oil was floating in the Gulf, out of sight and out of the visual mind, it seemed widely assumed that BP’s efforts and claims of control were sufficient.  These claims were, after all, meticulously documented with long lists of boats in service, booms in place, and dollars spent.

Some disagreed.

SkyTruth, for instance, disagreed.  Based on satellite imagery — the same imagery available to BP and the US government — @SkyTruth was persistently tweeting the reality that there was much, much more oil in the water than anyone seemed to realize and certainly more than the 5000 barrels a day claimed by BP and widely reported, parrot-like, by mainstream media.  (Also check the archives of the excellent ROFFS site, which continues to compile and manipulate satellite imagery more quickly and informatively than you’ll find in video and sound bites elsewhere.)

Congressman Edward Markey also disagreed.  At Markey’s insistence (according to Markey), BP agreed to make their live underwater ROV video feed available to the public.   This happened on May 19, almost a month after the initial Deepwater Horizon blowout, and has probably become the single most significant event affecting subsequent media coverage.

Given early access to that live feed (viewed by BP from the very beginning of the incident), NPR was able to confirm the conclusions of SkyTruth:  there was much, much more oil leaking into the Gulf than BP claimed.  And, importantly, the NPR report was not made possible through NPR’s “professional” media contacts nor through interviews with “professional” media pundits.  The NPR report was based on the analysis of Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, whose demeanor and expertise are quite different from that of, say, George Stephanopoulos or James Carville.

To the extent that mainstream media can access – like NPR – information and expertise beyond that of their politically motivated and easy-to-access usual suspects, their reports have increasingly diverged from claims and reports by BP and, disappointingly, by NOAA and the Coast Guard and other local and federal government officials working in collaboration with BP — and increasingly converged with the arguments and analyses of alternative and social media.   (See, for instance, this disturbing account of the BP-government collaboration on Grand Isle by Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland.)

Unfortunately, however, trusting in the informal and the unofficial doesn’t come without its own set of problems – including verification.

Public access to the live feed of BP’s ROVs – truly a spectacular technological accomplishment – provides its own sort of verification:  we implicitly trust a camera more than we explicitly trust its operator.  On the other hand, public access to social media content and analysis — such as that available on The Oil Drum website – can be extremely valuable but also potentially hazardous, leading to misinterpretation and, intentionally or not, rumor and panic.  (See, for instance, the still unexplained Monkeyfister report of “Major Changes Down Below…”)

And check out this series of tweets…

The @jgrindal Twitter account has been represented as coming from a consulting engineer on the BP #topkill attempt and, during that attempt, quickly became widely reported and attended.  After weeks of confusing and contradictory reports from BP and no news whatsoever coming from the Deepwater Horizon site itself, the @jgrindal tweets seemed, finally, to provide insight into what was actually happening:  first-hand, immediate, accurate.  The final tweet from the @jgrindal account was this one:

Wow, just got a scathing call from mgmt, requesting I tone down my twitter info… 9:02 AM May 26th via web

Was the @jingrindal account really what it was purported to be?  Or, was that account, like @BPGlobalPR, merely a technologically sophisticated form of roleplay?

We just don’t know.

But, here’s what we feel:  If @jgrindal doesn’t currently exist, then, in the future, we need to invent him.

WOW! What happened to the last five months? 

Today, as I delivered media kits from the PR Writing class (Clear Sky Communications) to our semester client, LatiNola, I started thinking about what all’s happened this semester. Seems only yesterday we were explaining our spring syllabi. Suddenly, it’s May.

Looking back, I’d say we were so busy we didn’t have time to notice how fast time was flying. In January and February, we cheered the Saints through the end of a miraculous season to a Super Bowl victory. Then we danced in the streets during a celebratory parade, the likes of which this city has never seen. And we’ve SEEN some parades. Add in Mardi Gras and Spring Break and – don’t blink! – it’s graduation (or as someone put it, grad-DREW-ation). Where else are you going to hear “When the Saints go marching in” played during commencement?

We did manage to squeeze in some school work along the way. Just ask anyone who took a mass comm campaigns class this spring.

The Ad Team (aka Advanced Advertising Campaigns) made us proud at the District 7 AAF National Student Advertising Competition in Mobile, sharing their campaign for State Farm, “Driven to be there.”

And the 2010 Bateman Team (aka Advanced PR Campaigns), keeping up a tradition of excellence in the PRSSA competition, was named the number two team in the nation for their campaign, “Down for the Count,” for the U.S. Census. (Didn’t you love the video on facebook?) Dr. Rogers and the PR majors who made up the team – Jodi, Kate, Christine, Dom and Mari – deserve a huge round of applause for making us all look good.

My own PR campaigns class, PR504, created a rebranding campaign for the Episcopal Community Services of Louisiana, spending six months (they started at Thanksgiving, even though the class didn’t begin until January) crafting an effective campaign for this newly-reorganized local nonprofit.

The halls on the third floor are pretty quiet these days, but if you listen closely, you’ll hear echoes of campaigns past: laughter, intense discussion, sometimes disagreements and always creative strategizing. And while I’m glad to have some time off, I’m looking forward to having those halls filled again. Who knows what’ll happen once August gets here?

The most immediate reaction came from those monitoring oil stock prices.

Transocean Ltd. today reported a fire onboard its semisubmersible drilling rig Deepwater Horizon. The incident occurred April 20, 2010 at approximately 10:00 p.m. central time in the United States Gulf of Mexico. The rig was located approximately 41 miles offshore Louisiana on Mississippi Canyon block 252.

Subsequently, on April 21, NOAA published their first incident report (now considerably enhanced).

The first news stories, particularly the local New Orleans news stories, focused on the loss of 11 lives in the explosion and ensuing fire.

By April 23, the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had received global attention.

And then the story began to change. On Saturday, April 24, the U. S. Coast Guard, which had been searching for the 11 missing oil rig workers without success, acknowledged an oil leak at the rig site.  The Coast Guard estimated the leak at 1000 barrels a day.

Twitter and other social media were already covering the event — the #oilspill hashtag was in use early — but these were, at the time, mostly echoing information that had already appeared in more conventional media.  From this point forward, coverage of the Deepwater Horizon incident by mainstream media and by social and alternative media diverged.

Because of the isolated location of the Deepwater Horizon site, there were few visuals for broadcast media to run and rotate.  In the beginning, aside from footage of the oil rig fire recorded by the Coast Guard, the Gulf area maps distributed by NOAA were, by default, the most oft used and repeated images in the mainstream news.

Stymied by this lack of live action, corporate broadcast media turned to their stable of talking heads:  interviews and opinion pieces that mentioned the environment and President Obama and British Petroleum, but revealed little about the cause and extent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Conventional print media sources – some, at least – manipulated NOAA and other government data in creative ways, turning one sort of graphic into another sort, based on the same data.  None significantly questioned that data – in particular the widely quoted estimates of the amount of oil released and the area of the Gulf covered by that oil – until a leaked government memo was turned over to the Mobile Press-Register, and, later, when a revised set of Gulf oil estimates appeared on SkyTruth.

In their unrelenting scrutiny of corporate press releases, contrived media events, and, most of the all, the money, social and alternative media have been consistently more insightful than a barrage of conventionally packaged and repetitive news stories sandwiched between Lost and Glee.

On CNN, for instance, there have been some informative comparisons of Deepwater Horizon and the Exxon Valdez – but based on little more than what was already available through Google and Wikipedia, and on much less than you could find and learn about the more relevant example of IXTOC 1.  There was a widely distributed, live-action video of a pelican with oil on its wings, and a full day’s worth of dead-turtles-on-a-beach stories — without much consequence.  There was an interview or two with General Russel L. Honoré — with obligatory references to Katrina.  And there were lots and lots of commercials.

Similarly, the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s reporting on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has remained dedicated and professional, but can do little to match either the stamina or the information flowing from innumerable Twitter lists such this one, compiled by a faraway correspondent for OnEarth magazine and including, among others, local @HumidCity updates.

And now, as the Deepwater Horizon story slides off the lede and breaking news agenda of conventional media — failing to provide live-action images of oil lapping onshore — social and alternative media continue to bring the heat.

Yes, probably the best information has come from a combination of mainstream and alternative/social media sources.  But, if you had to choose only one source of information about the Deepwater Horizon incident — something like Twitter, or something like CNN — which would you choose?

Another good question:  How can an organization with the limited budget and staff of a SkyTruth – or a Wikileaks – accomplish what conventional news media, with all their resources, can’t?

You may not know this, but YouTube has an interesting policy regarding downloading their videos:  They don’t allow it.  Here’s what Youtube’s online Terms of Service says…

Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only and may not be downloaded, copied, reproduced, distributed, transmitted, broadcast, displayed, sold, licensed, or otherwise exploited for any other purposes whatsoever without the prior written consent of the respective owners.

Yet there are many, many tools that allow YouTube videos to be downloaded.  (For examples, check out the Firefox add-ons here.)  And there is widespread sentiment that this is probably a good thing:  sentiment similar to Joyce’s here.  There is also the fact that if you can display something on your computer screen – regardless of its source – then you can also record and store it for later use.  Or, in other words, in order to watch YouTube videos, you are forced, in effect, to download YouTube videos.

With downloading tools widely available and with the practice of downloading YouTube videos widespread, why exactly does YouTube prohibit it?  Because YouTube is forced to comply with existing copyright law.  YouTube operates much like an ISP under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).  Their position, under that Act, is basically this (from Ars Techina, 2006):

As the EFF’s Fred von Lohmann explains in an editorial for The Hollywood  Reporter Esq., YouTube is shielded because the site is an “online service provider,” arguably similar to your own Internet Service Provider (ISP). Among other things, the DMCA provides protection for service providers against being held responsible for the actions of their users. Much like the RIAA can’t sue Comcast for little Jimmy’s pirate web server he hosts on their broadband network, so too with YouTube.

This means that YouTube users can download Youtube videos and YouTube is indemnified. Officially, however, YouTube must and does comply with existing copyright law – through, for instance, their takedown policy:  If the owners of videos don’t want YouTube to display their videos, then YouTube, in principle, doesn’t display them.

Some have criticized YouTube for being overly willing to restrict and remove videos based on frequently spurious complaints and claims of ownership.  (The most recent criticism of this sort involves parodies of the movie Downfall)  But, given the inevitability of downloading tools, practice, and sentiment, all these arguments and peccadilloes regarding YouTube’s takedown policy grow irrelevant.

We now have a legislative process that constructs laws at a much slower pace than new technology confounds those laws.  This leaves new media services – like YouTube – in an odd position that results in mysterious documents like YouTube’s Terms of Service (as well as the ubiquitous and arcane EULAs that preface our use of word processors, spreadsheets, and video games).  These seldom read and poorly understood contractual obligations float somewhere between the impossible and the absurd,  creating an anachronistic, steampunk-like world clearly different from the one in which we live.

If laws and documents such as YouTube’s Terms of Service retain meaning only in a court of law, and are there only used to punish a randomly chosen and unlucky few, then there is the tendency to ignore these laws and documents.  I do not think punishment alone is enough to make us do otherwise.