As german news magazine DER SPIEGEL reports in it’s online channel, two german public prosecution service offices have declined thousands of complaints of an offense by the music- and movie industry against users of file sharing services over the last months.

This would mark a 180 degree change of direction in the public policy against file sharers in Germany. Just two years ago the direction seemed completetly different, as BBC reported on 23rd of May 2006 (screenshot of their story):

A spokesperson of the Public Prosecution Service in Wuppertal said according to SPIEGEL online, that the expedition of proceedings against private file sharers would cost too much human ressources and too much of the tax payer’s money. Since the music industry just tries to get the personal data of filesharers out of such proceedings to sue afterwards individuals for “compensation of loss suffered” and not for the criminal offense itself, public prosecution is just beeing utilized.

Further the spokesperson is cited with the interesting remark, that an expedition of proceeding against private file sharers is “disproportional” since those individuals have no financial interest. Of course, if there are references to “unconventional high data transferred” and/or of “financial interest involved” in the distribution of copyrighted material, a proceeding would be expedited.

It will be interesting to see the developments in the future and how this new policy will or will not remain.

Here is the original german article from SPIEGEL online.

While the last weeks where really busy for me, I stumbled yesterday in the late evening merely by accident over a cool new site that describes itself as: “Photojournalism & Storytelling, Create a media wall of photos, video, text & music.” The site is called VUVOX.com.

Although the service is for now in private Beta (and I unfortunately have no access to the Beta for now) I was really impressed by the concept and the description of the user interface they give on their site. The concept is quite easy: they give the user the ability to create a multi-media photowall by stitching together photographs, adding hotspots that link to texts, music files, video or anything else. The output is rendered as a flash movie. While you could do this in the past already if you where Flash savvy, the main point of the service seems to be a set of tools given to the average user. So creativity is not restricted by the lack of technical expertise. They describe their features on the site as follows:

“Features include:

• Dynamic media positioning and assembly tools
• Image Cut-out and Masking tools
• Layer positioning and Compositing
• Interactive ‘Hot-spots’, providing links to media,
  text or other websites
• Ability to add rich media details”

All sounds very intuitive and the samples on the site look promising as well.

This service will change definitely what photoblogging will be in the future. I can’t wait to get my hands on a working version of COLLAGE!

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Tags: web2.0, photography, rich media, vuvox.com, photoblog, photoblogging, phlog