The Crazy Permission-Asking Media Scrum That Descends When Photographic News Happens On Twitter

from the insanity-in-the-making dept

Just landed in Vegas to see this...plane on fire on the Tarmac...people still onboard and running off! pic.twitter.com/ul10hFFw9j — David L. Somers (@DL_Somers) September 8, 2015

Just landed in Las Vegas, plane is on fire. People were on boaard but it looks like they all got off in time. pic.twitter.com/0AN5HvBB5G — Eric Hays (@ericmhays) September 8, 2015

@Bradley_Hampton Please reply if you agree with attached statement so @AP can use your photo of plane fire. Thanks. pic.twitter.com/84npYJ5XBw — Joseph Altman (@APaltman) September 8, 2015

@ericmhays may we have permission to feature your photo? Verify here: https://t.co/HKODFM0luo — The Weather Channel (@weatherchannel) September 8, 2015

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As you may have heard last week, a British Airways plane caught fire as it was taxiing on the runway preparing for takeoff. Thankfully, everyone on board escaped with just a few minors scratches and bruises. The plane wasn't so lucky. However, there were lots of other people around on other flights witnessing the whole thing and -- not surprisingly -- many of them have Twitter accounts. And, as has become fairly standard when visual news breaks somewhere with people around, they started tweeting photos. Here's David L. Somers at 4:16pm:And here's Bradley Hampton at 4:17pm:And here's Eric Hays at 4:20pm:There were a bunch of others as well , but those were three of the earliest that got the most attention.Now, some of us might marvel at this amazing world we now live in, wherecan be areporter should news suddenly happen around them. It's kind of amazing. But, perhaps even more fascinating is the somewhat insanethat immediately follows. All three of these guys were almost immediatelywith news producers from TV, newspaper and online media, all asking for permission to use their photos. This is just a sampling because if I posted them all, i think my hand would cramp up from cutting and pasting so many embed codes. Notice that a bunch of the requests come from the very same news organizations, many asking if they can use it on all platforms/affiliates and such:What's kind of amazing is that all three guys basically sat around after all this graciously giving permission to most of the requests over and over and over and over and over again. Some of the requests were more detailed. Some asked the tweeters to get in contact to sign something. The most forward one was the AP who actually sent a "social media release form" as an attached image to a tweet:The Weather Channel wanted Eric to "verify" his permission:A bunch of other people noticed the nutty scrum and had fun with it, including jokingly asking for permission to retweet to look at and (my favorite) to look at and then not have nightmares about flying So what to make of all this? On the one hand, it seems like a fairly strong graphical representation of permission culture these days. In nearly every one of these cases, the news organizations in question would likely have extremely strong fair use protections. And it doesn't look like any of the three guys above were looking to profit from their photos. To some extent, having taken and posted the photo may have actually been more of a nuisance for them, since they all then had to spend time responding to all those requests. As filmmaker Nina Paley has discussed in the past, permission culture gets super annoying when everyone has to keep asking, and you just want them to be free to use it. But, of course, in an age where every news organization is afraid to get hit with a massive damages award in a copyright lawsuit, they're all going to ask.That system seems fairly broken. We have at leastsolutions for this. Creative Commons can handle some of it, but Twitter has no way to officially designate a CC license on a photo you've posted. That would certainly help a lot. But, overall, the whole thing just seems silly. These photos are-- and they're initially being posted on public social media for a reason -- because those who took them wanted them to be shared and spread. It seems silly that we need such an insane level of permission gating that every news agency on the planet has to bother these guys to ask for permission.

Filed Under: airplane, copyright, fire, journalism, las vegas, news, permission, permission culture, photographs, social media, twitter