Citizen journalists giving away copyright?
Jeff Jarvis has interesting commentary on Scoopt, a website that offers to represent to the media normal people who take newsworthy photographs.
So someone who takes a good picture of say, a Tsunami, would have Scoopt license the photograph to the media on his/her behalf, in exchange for a share of license revenues.
Jarvis rightly points out that this is a very “closed” old-media way of approaching content just when the current is flowing towards a more “open” model. He also mentions that much of the mainstream media in the UK solicited pictures of the terrorist bombings in London from citizens. The media asked for these contributions for free, and for the most part citizens seemed not to mind giving the content away.
Now my question is, does that content stay uncopyrighted, and in the public domain, or is the old media just taking ownership of this content itself? Seems to me citizens willing to give up photos to the media for free should do so explicitly under a Creative Commons license to prevent the mainstream media from just appropriating it themselves.