From the Washington Post comes this piece about corporations playing fast and loose with images found online. The article is of interest to writing teachers working with new media for its illumination of fair use principles. If one of the four lenses through which we might view fair use is the potentially commercial nature of the use, it's tempting to look at the "photonapping" of images by corporations and argue for more flexibility when applying the profit criteria to use decisions. This, however, might not be true to the phenomenon reported in the piece. It's not that the uses by the corporations are fair. The article quotes Lawrence Lessig, who points out, "There's really no excuse for [these companies] except that they think it's not important to protect the rights of the amateur." For educators, these legal dimensions might be discussed as part of a broader conversation about how to make decisions about using materials in projects. I put a screen shot of the Post article above to serve as the link to the article, which I've attributed and which I'm discussing in terms of educational uses of media. Is it fair? These questions are sometimes complex.

Lessig's quote and the rest of the article, more interestingly, get at what is behind much of the trend of companies wanting to appropriate amateur materials from the Web:

"Authenticity is the new consumer sensibility," says Joe Pine, a business consultant and co-author of "Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want." It is the criterion "by which people decide what to buy and who to buy it from."

It's a byproduct of the user-generated world: the trustworthiness of YouTube, the realness of Facebook. Above all else, we believe ourselves. "People don't want to buy the fake from the phony anymore," Pine says. "They want to buy the real from the genuine."

If nothing else the trend asks us to continue thinking about the power of citizen media as reflected in the desires of corporations to be like Mike, or Allison, or Tracey.

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