Lan Bui is a friend of mine and he produces a wonderful videoblog that I rarely miss called Noodlescar. When he told me about the situation he was going through with Podtech several weeks ago, I was pretty surprised. If you're not up to speed, Lan's blog post will get you there in a hurry. To sum it up quickly, Podtech used a photograph of his (pictured at right) in a poster promoting The Vloggies at SXSW. Lan originally published this photo on Flickr under a Creative Commons license, so someone from Podtech took his photo and used it for commercial purposes without compensating him, which in turn also violated his usage license.
I've met John and Linda Furrier a couple of times and found them to be intelligent, charming folks. Robert Scoble is a very prominent blogger and an important member of the tech community, and is always responsive to people. I don't know any of the other higher-ups at Podtech, and I don't deal with them for business on any level. Some of my colleagues in the videoblogging world such as Irina Slutsky, Eddie Codel, Ryanne Hodson, Jay Dedman, Oscar Grimm, Tanja Andrews, and Bill Streeter have content partner and/or employment contracts with Podtech. There are others, but I know these folks the best.
I think the most alarming thing about Lan's issue is the disrespect paid toward Creative Commons licenses. It's one thing to be dismissive of a single individual, as wrong as that is. It's another to knowingly violate a license that we have all sacrificed a lot to support. Jon Phillips's keynote at Pixelodeon showed me as much.
So what is so hard to understand about this issue from Podtech's perspective? Ok, you used something you shouldn't have. It's not the end of the world, we've all done it at some point or another. But when you're called on it, you do the right thing and spare yourselves the shitty PR. Duh. It's a business move. Better to pay Lan a few hundred bucks for his photo than start seeing blog posts like this one, which damages your credibility with content creators. No amount of money will get that back for you.
Maybe they don't care about content creators. Then I could understand flaunting a licensing violation for this long without proper compensation. I sure hope that's not the case. We all need companies like Podtech to succeed at what they do, but apparently they are not even responding to Lan's continued inquiries at the present time.
Please blog about Lan's situation so we can demonstrate that this community must be taken seriously. It could be any of us in this position, so let's make our voices heard.
I've been inspired by Chris Brogan's prolific blogging. It seems like he's always able to ask interesting questions and make good observations, even though I don't always have the same conclusions. But that's ok, because it's the doing that matters most, and it's the doing that I respect the most.
So I'm going to take the next few minutes to jot down some thoughts. I've given up on the day-to-day blogging thing, since it's just not me. But there are a lot of things I've wanted to talk about and this is supposed to be my outlet.
In the past couple months we've won a Webby Award for JETSET, launched MIX, JETSET's amazing community site, organized Pixelodeon with the inspiring Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson, and asked Rick Rey to join the team and take a big role in our future. And that barely scratches the surface on what is actually going on behind closed doors.
What's interesting is that with all the incredible opportunities we've been presented, we are still very much on the brink of failure. We are also on the brink of extravagant success, too. Seems like we've been teetering on that fence for longer than I care to remember. I'm not really good at managing the middle ground -- I prefer to be at a full stop or at full speed ahead. The in-between space makes me feel stagnant and wasteful.
That makes this time disproportionately long and painful for me. I'm finding myself getting overly aggressive with decisions in the effort to move decisively in one direction (preferably forward toward success). It's become something of a daily ritual to remind myself that this is the time I will look back upon with wistful memories of the struggle to establish ourselves and an industry. It's really not that attractive a thought, frankly. I used to be a real romantic, embracing the image of the individual, the artist, soldiering on against the tides, waging a war with the ignorance of the establishment, blah, blah blah.
So over that shit.
Now I want partners that know how to get shit done. The days of the lone individual fighting the good fight seem corny, childish, and self-serving. Partners are everything. A good partnership can lift you both to new heights, and a bad one can plop a giant shit sandwich on your plate with no choice but to take a big bite.
The most important thing I've learned from the past two years is how to select partners and what to look for when you know you need help. Above all the obvious things like action vs. inaction, decisiveness vs. stagnation, and so forth, the quality I look for most of all is a perspective that is different from mine, but not totally different. What I mean by this is a partner who shares the same ultimate goal, but who can show you and teach you a new way to get there, or a new way to look at the same situation.
What do you look for in a partner?
