Thanks Karl for inviting me to co-blog here on vcritic. I thought it would be good to start with expanding a debate we’ve had yesterday about the definition of UGC. As we’re heading in a speedy pace towards the age of mass creativity, YouTube grows by the hour with 65K new videos uploaded monthly and the tools for filming/editing/directing/acting/producing become cheap and mainstream, the boundaries of creativity and copyrights are getting somewhat blurred and we need a clear definition. Luckily, there can be no clear definition without a proper debate on who is User, what is Generated and even what is Content….

There are many practical, legal and creative issues to consider, however, looking for the most inclusive definition, my take on the issue is that rather than focusing exlusively on the making/creating angel, we should focus on the purpose of uploading and sharing.

Karl argues that uploading a clip from a TV show is not User Generated Content but a breach of a copyright laws. I beg to differ on this. The way i see it, we enter an era where consumption and production intertwine - think about your de.lic.ious tag-cloud or the blogroll on the side-bar of your blog - isn’t that content? Isn’t organising, recommending, rating or linking etc. is in essence creating content? So we have user generated content and user oerganised content and user distributed content….people are content!

So, surely there are different levels of UGC and there is a big difference between uploading a 30sec clip from your favourite show to producing/directing/acting/editing/mash-uping a 5min video, but the way i see it, they are just the different end of the same UGC line. If someone bothered to cut and upload a beautiful goal, 9/11 dreadful moments, spoiled Paris, a classic scene from a movie etc. with the inttention of sharing it with the world then this is user generated content for me - as long as there is an individual (or peers) user/s on the other side that has uploaded the content without any marketing/profit intentions.

Of course there are legal issues to be looked at here, but since i’m no lawyer and have no sympathy to blind greedy protection of copyrights, as i see it, everything that was ever aired on TV should be free to the world to take it and do with it whatever they fancy.

What do you think?

Lets just hope that as creating will become more mainstream and the 1% rule will change we’ll see much more of this.