I listened to a podcast from iTunes about the topic of Digital Copyrighting and how “public domain” is different than “public” when it comes to images, songs, files, etc.

In the podcasted it was mostly focused on the use of public images. People tend to confuse public domain images and public images. Public domain allows the consumer to use the image without a fee, however the most used source of images, Google, is just public images.

This means that these images cannot just be taken and used for whatever they want. It may require a License of some sort otherwise the consumer will find himself or herself getting in trouble for copyright.

An example of this can be how on YouTube, When someone uploads a video with an image or song they do not own the rights to, YouTube, takes the video down.

In the podcast. The issue of how the law doesn’t keep up with technology was addressed. They spoke about how there isn’t really a set of laws to deal with the current growth of social media sites and the issues with digital copyrighting.

With the use of images becoming more and more popular, it is important to have a license for the image. Using a Creative Common License can save the consumer from being hit with a larger amount of money rather than just paying for the license and having the rights to the image.

With all the social media sites, (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram) the number of photos being uploaded an hour is increasing by the day. The number of photos uploaded to Facebook worldwide is 10.4 billion per hour.

One way that the “plagiarism” of photos is being caught is with use of new software similar to the app Shazam on the iPhone. (Shazam is used to identify a song based off a few seconds of a song). The software for images can track an image with copying some of the pixels in the image and can find where it was originally from.

http://fatbuzzblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/public-but-not-in-public-domaindigital.html

I enjoyed this podcast because I learned about how the need for licenses for images is growing and how copyright infringement can happen so easily without even realizing that using an image from Google can be “plagiarism”. I would have rather a video podcast but I enjoyed this topic so I stayed with the podcast. I like how easy it was to listen to on iTunes however I couldn’t go back and rewind; it would only let me restart the whole podcast or pause. Overall I enjoyed listening to it and would recommend it as a more interesting way to learn about something especially if the person doesn’t have time or just doesn’t want to read a paper or article either online or in print.