THE LYING, THE TWITS AND THE WARDROBE

Q: What lies steaming in the corner?
A: A drunk jobby.

By adding the letter ‘r’ to the above joke, here you have a glimpse of the future, a future where a single click of the mouse adds to the profits of the major media conglomerates while your overdraft/credit card bill gets depressingly larger.

How does that work, you wonder? Well, when you decided to buy that new HDV camcorder/MP3/digital stills camera/laptop, I bet you didn’t think you were capitalising big outfits by helping them to get your content on their netspace. Welcome to the world of User Generated Content.

Following on from my blog about YouTube, I have Andy to thank for this link –

technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1876697,00.html

In a nutshell, it comes down to this – by uploading your movie/music/snaps of your cat – you’re handing over the rights to big business. By agreeing to their terms and for as long as you stay on their site, they become the owners of your content. In other words, they’ll make the money, not you. Why? Because unlike you, they can. They own the bandwidth, they own the marketing muscle – and in the end it’s their brand, not yours.

We should have seen it coming. Recently, while watching the decorating show, Home, on BBC2, tiny alarm bells went off while watching a set of pictures of other people’s bedrooms uploaded to the BBC website. With no incentive other than their own vanity, viewers were invited to send in their snaps. It soon occurred to me that when the programme makers eventually sell through to Estonia, Venezuela and wherever else they flog this stuff, the unwitting, houseproud punters supplying snapshots of IKEA wardrobes won’t get a cut of the profits.

Just how bad can it get I wonder? If you cast your mind back to BBC’s ‘Video Diaries’, what we saw on screen then was the infant of reality broadcasting. This kicked off a trend in DIY telly where the subject became the author, with the schedules chock full of camcorder confessionals, from gardening shows to bad drivers to plastic surgery – all on prime time TV, all ultra-cheap to produce, all grabbing ratings. How could it fail? How long has You’ve Been Framed been running? The best you can say about YBF is they’ve always coughed up for the clips.

We're all willing participants. After all, you bought the damn camera and that edit package - what else are you going to do with it? How long before the BBC start soliciting entire homegrown soap operas, light entertainment shows and six-part dramas? You don't think in some corner of Shepherd's Bush there isn't an office working out how to get you to do their work for them and not pay you? At a time when a 30 quid rise in the BBC licence fee is expected, how long before we vote with the remote?

With the rise of the internet and interactivity, we’re all content providers now where, by sharing the same space, the cream and the scum rise to the top. Some might argue that these sites give the undiscovered the chance to shine from some dingy corner of My Space (owned by the News Corporation) If only it was that easy. Go tell it to Sandi Thom and the Arctic Monkeys, who had more than a bit of bandwidth behind them to thank for their careers. For the vast majority, they’ll stay where they are – in obscurity - with 6 downloads and no comments.

There’s always Creative Commons, you might argue. Well, I’m not so sure that by choosing the CC method of licensing, both the BBC and Channel 4 are falling over themselves to share the spoils with the UGC providers, and not when a growing slice of their content is commissioned through independent production companies. Try untangling that in a courtroom.

The hypocrisy here is the idea that somehow UGC is about community and sharing. Yeah, right. While MTV Flux bleat on about ‘finding new talent’ (where have I heard that before?) none of these outfits seems willing to pay you, the mug providing the free content. The moral? If you think Tiddles deserves a shot at fame, fine, as long as you know it's about their kitty, not yours.