Be wary of twitvid and twitpic.. a cautionary tale

This afternoon I witnessed a friend go through one hell of a ride, all remotely via twitter. Having spoken to him privately, I know that he will not be blogging or tweeting on this subject anymore and that he’s happy for me to tell his tale. I wont mention his name – he’s happy about this! For the purposes of this tale, I’ll call him Mr Yellow.

This afternoon at around 3pm there was a shooting in Southwark, the shooting involved a pursuit with police and open firing back at them in public. Full info on that event can be read on this BBC news page.

Mr Yellow works in a building adjacent to where this was all happening. It was evident that something not quite right was going on below as they were asked to stay in the building and away from windows. Rumor spread in the office so Mr Yellow turned to twitter for some information. As part of this he innocently filmed the police presence and commotion below, from the office window and uploaded it to twitvid. Here is that video..

This is quite a normal reaction for someone who’s into Twitter. Take a pic or vid, show what’s going on, see if people have any more info.

Within ten minutes of posting this a rumble began. Mr Yellow saw his iPhone 3GS footage on Sky News (I’m presuming they have it onscreen in the office.. its a big company). He went onto the Sky News website, his video is the first thing he sees, posted in their Breaking News box. Clicking through to the article his video has been embedded into the news page, with the credit ‘footage from twitter user …….’. Shortly after this I saw the video on the big screen in Liverpool Street station as I journeyed home.

Sky did not ask his permission to use this video, nor did they inform him of the use. By searching communication, I can see that a Sky employee did message him ‘Great fast work, Mr Yellow’, as if he was posting this on their behalf. Heads in the office started to turn. Had their colleague just sold some video footage shot in the company office to sky news on work hours? Thats the fear now running through Mr Yellow’s mind, he works for a fairly well known company, easily identifiable from the location of the video, will he be slayed over the coals for this? Thousands upon thousands have now seen what he shot.

When Mr Yellow gets home he finds that the London Paper are also using the footage on their website. I advise him to delete it from twitvid, cutting the news outlets at their source – none of them are hosting the video themselves, all embedding from twitvid instead. So he does. Five minutes later the video has reappeared. So he deletes again. Guess what, the video is reinstated.. this goes on. Eventually he gets a message from the founder of twitvid asking why he’s deleting the video? They’re reinstating it due to the high traffic volume.. its the hottest video on their site, getting over 11k views in a couple of hours…

Obviously Twitvid are keen to keep this video on their site, they’re getting traffic, people are discovering their service and the video is being used by major news agencies, proving their worth. Its notable that in the last hour they’ve added a twitvid logo to the corner of the embedded videos.

Now Mr Yellow has no problem with the video being in the public domain and with people using it, the only thing going through his mind is the repercussions of it being associated with him. He’s likely to be facing a verbal warning at work, at the very least. His bosses probably don’t understand twitter – as far as anyone can see he sent/sold it to sky, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

The debate that this causes in my mind is two fold:

1. Should news agencies have carte blanche free use over anything posted onto twitvid/twitpic without permission? One does understand that these services put videos into the public domain, but does that mean a company like sky can just take it and credit the source? Should twitvid/pic put basic CC licensing into place for its users? Should media outlets pay to use such material?

2. News broadcasters have all jumped onto the twitter bandwagon. Maybe they should think through their editorial policies a bit more thoroughly. At the very least they should contact the poster asking;

a) if they can use the material
b) if and how they should credit the owner

The result if they don’t is that someone like Mr Yellow could find themselves in a whole heap of trouble that could dramatically alter their life, all because a newscaster rushed to get some exclusive pictures without concern as to where they came from or how they should be presented to the World.

Links to the articles:
On Sky news On The London Paper

Twitvid have come to an arrangement where the video stays but Mr Yellow has no claim to it, it’s now a video posted by twitvid admin. Fair deal I say.

If causal twitter users are to become the new breed of citizen journalist, then maybe we should all think twice before posting something about an event thats in process especially when it could become a news story.

What do you think?