Look Back At The Past

"What is multimedia?" may well be an unnecessary question as we enjoy different content forms from texts and images to sound recordings and video clips. From the human civilization perspective, what we are enjoying is quite a recent phenomenon. While the mixed media of books, photographs, sound recordings, films, radio and TV broadcast and cablecast came before me, satellite broadcast, personal computing and the Internet are younger than me.

Without any computing device, it used to be hard for me to co-ordinate what I read (eg from a book) and listened (eg from a radio set). There were no links between one set of information with another (eg newspaper news with news video clips); and what was not reported by the traditional media would not be known. Computing and multimedia facilitate people to communicate and express their messages eg in texts, images or music videos.

As the intellectual and financial investment on Information and communication technology are protected by intellectual property laws to prevent unfair competition, so are the multimedia contents the technology carries. Before a multimedia copyright work such as a TV episode can be disseminated to the public, there is the need to get or clear the layers of copyright licensing from third party licensors. Legal compliance as good governance is essential for any sustainable business model.

As "intellectualpropertization" (a word I coined) is a global phenomenon, intellectual property standards and practice are basically the same here and there. Unlike the old days when normal exploitation of copyright works were often divided geographically, the world in the internet age is basically borderless. Entrepreneurs wanting to mix technology with multimedia but having the catch-me-if-you-can mindset are just like old-style businessmen wanting to look back at the past!

#LookBackAtThePast