It's hard not to find someone jumping on the multimedia bandwagon: end-users wanting flashy new applications; hardware vendors hoping to pump up flat sales; and programmers developing tools and applications that put full-bore, full-motion video and full-fidelity sound onto a PC.
But as promising as it is, the road to multimedia is littered with landmines. By definition, multimedia involves a variety of information forms--audio, motion video, still photography, text, graphics, and more--which can be integrated into an application using electronic cut-and-paste. Technically, this isn't a problem. Legally and ethically, it's a mess.
Try this scenario: Let's say you have a multimedia authoring system that enables you to quickly build a presentation like that on the cover of this issue describing the 80486. The application includes full-motion video taped from an Intel television commercial, still-frame illustrations scanned in from a book, and text descriptions. Further assume that the commercial you videotaped includes a popular song performed by a renowned recording artist, and an equally famous actor pitching the chip.
While today's authoring tools let you quickly put together a sophisticated presentation like this, the problem remains that it still might take you months to get permission to use the information. For starters, you'd go to Intel for the okay to use the commercial. Assuming the company gives you its blessing, you'd likely next have to contact the recording company, composer, and singer for permission to use the music. Luckily, music-related organizations like ASCAP, BMI, or others might help you here. After that, you'd track down and negotiate with the actor, the book publisher (and author), photographers, and so on. What you've learned in the process is that virtually all of the information forms--literature, music, drama, pictorial, video, and sound--used in even the most minimal multimedia project are protected as intellectual property, and you legally and ethically need permission from the copyright holder to use them. And once the copyright issues are attended to, you might have to then deal with trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
After going through all this, you may consider alternatives: works in the public domain (beware, however, of movies in the public domain that contain songs covered by underlying copyrights), going to stock houses for photos, film, music, and sound effects, or contacting a rights and permissions agent to do the legwork for you. Or you may decide that it's faster and less expensive to produce the entire application--including sound and video--from scratch.
Jumping through the permissions/cost hoops scares the big guys, too. When Microsoft was looking to team up with a book publisher for its multimedia application development, it chose Dorling-Kindersley (publisher of David Macauley's wonderful book The Way Things Work) because D-K owns full rights to its illustrations, photographs, and text. And IBM, which is heavily committed to multimedia, is reportedly ready to buy a piece of the Time-Warner rock, providing ready access to movies, TV shows, and music. Ditto Sony's purchase of Columbia Pictures and CBS Records.
Developers aren't the only ones who might get stung. For instance, I and every other editor in the country receive stacks of press releases that include text, photos, and illustrations every day. There's never any problem with using this material for editorial purposes--that's why it's sent out. In fact, it's generally assumed that press release info is released into the public domain. Within the past couple of years, however, the latest rage is to send out "video" press releases--ten minute VHS tapes instead of printouts and photos. The question in my mind concerns the rights being conveyed with this tape. Is it purely for information purposes, or is it, like its paper counterparts, being released into the public domain? Does the company who sent out the video own all rights to its contents, or are there underlying intellectual property rights pertaining to actors and sound? Can I take clips from one of those tapes and use it in a commercial multimedia application? Can all of these video press releases be compiled into a public-domain video library?
There are changes on the horizon. One suggestion is support for public and private media-specific archiving, distribution, and licensing organizations. The music industry has BMI and ASCAP, magazine publishers have the Copyright Clearance Center, there's Valentino (and others) for sound effects, the Picture Network International for electronic images, and The Image Bank for still photos and film footage. This whole area is what they call a "growth industry."
Furthermore, proposed legislation before both the U.S. House and Senate would automatically extend the copyright of pre-1978 works for another 28 years. (Works copyrighted prior to 1978 currently expire unless authors renew the copyright.) The good news is that this eliminates the question of copyright (you assume that everything is still copyrighted), thereby saving you time; the bad news is that the flow of works moving into the public domain is severely choked off.
In short, the per-project royalty and rights costs associated with commercial multimedia development can make it an expensive proposition. How we deal with these issues will make or break multimedia.
Copyright © 1992, Dr. Dobb's Journal