4 thoughts on “How An Eyewitness Mode Helps Activists (and Others) Be Trusted

  1. One interesting idea from the ‘Metadata for Good?’ roundtable at RightsCon – WITNESS should be pushing for combined strip out/maintain rich data functionalities in platform. This would follow from the models we and Guardian Project have tried to present with ObscuraCam and InformaCam. ObscuraCam allows you to strip out metadata and blur faces; InformaCam allows you to embed rich metadata. The key is that they are focused on the choicepoint to do one or the other.

  2. Another use case beyond the human rights realm — but relevant to journalists and the news industry — is to use mobile video metadata to protect the copyrights of content creators.

    Writing metadata about who created a video into the file at the time of creation can help communicate and assert the rights of videographers over their raw content. The fact that the data is machine-readable facilitates the ability of platforms to restrict or license content for re-use. This would probably be very useful in the news industry.

    Of course metadata can be lost from video files, but as Sam mentioned, it is possible to build registries where copyright owners can submit their work (analogous to the US Copyright Office, I guess).

    The still photography world relies on embedded metadata a lot for rights management. It may be useful to look at the approaches of organizations like IPTC (www.iptc.org).

    1. Thanks Yvonne, definitely. And in the human rights context we’ve looked at how with tools like InformaCam you can note aspects like consent or the intention of usage of the creator, so that these are retained in the file

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