Who own your copyright?

The intellectual property question of ownership of material submitted to social media sites is heating up as corporate acquisition talks for YouTube and other startups catch fire, says BL Ochman.

She has some very interesting points such as: "Interestingly, you don't own the rights to material you submit to video contests, or to YouTube, but you do own the rights to coding you do at Second Life."

She adds: As Mark Cuban ever so succinctly puts it: "The copyright shit is going to hit the lawsuit fan."

The market for real goods created from the digital objects coded in virtual reality could be enormous in a virtual world like Second Life, where the creators own the rights to the objects that they make, Michael Buckbee told Wired

Robin Good says of participatory sites like YouTube, MySpace: "While paying lip service to the democratic, free sharing of information, then, services like YouTube reserve the right to co-opt, edit, repackage and sell on the citizen produced media that they distribute."

As always, there is more good stuff on her post.

Mean time Shaun Woodward suggests new technology is the key to beating movie piracy, the UK film minister has told industry executives reports the BBC.

Making films available on demand as soon as they are released at cinemas could help stop fans watching illegal copies, Shaun Woodward said.

"The real answer is in the technology," he told the BBC News website, citing the success of legal music downloads.

There is another issue and that is the differences that will emerge between interpretations of copyright between countries and cultures. At present the big moves are in the USA next I guess will be Europe but when these things get to the authorities in the Middle East and China, there is a whole different culture and a few billion people who are not going to sign up to copyright as we know it.