What are the ethics of digital appropriation specifically? To discuss this, we must first understand the issues surrounding digital appropriation and define it to some degree in this context. For the purposes of this discussion, digital appropriation may refer to the taking of digital media content and the reuse of it in a context other than that for which it was intended. To qualify, ‘intended’ here refers to the intentions of those in possession of the copyrights of the content in question. So, we have those who created the content – the artists, authors, musicians designers, producers and then those in possession of the copyright, generally a company like a record company, film studio, book publisher or design house or any media company that produces ‘original’ content. We may consider these stakeholders to be on the traditional ‘supply’ side of the equation, tending to produce the content and then make it available for people to consume. The producer-consumer dichotomy.
On the other side, we have the consumers – people who go out and buy music, books, DVDs, comics etc and sit and watch them or listen to them or read them in the comfort of their own homes, or increasingly in a variety of mobile contexts. This is the way it went – consumers would wait for producers to make new content available for them to buy and enjoy and producers would continue to produce content for the love of their art-form, but also to keep the shillings flowing in. Of course, producers have always been consumers also, getting inspiration from other producers and filtering ideas back into their own work and also consumers have to cross the creative divide in order to become producers and both sides of the scale feed into each other in a continuous loop or cycle. The barriers to entry to become a commercial producer of media content were traditionally very high and so impossible without the financial support and connections of established media companies. Digital technologies changed that, lowering the barrier to entry, breaching the creative gulf and bridging the divide between producers and consumers, or at least, blurring the boundaries significantly. Now, almost everybody is a digital media content producer. Everyone at la=east writes emails, if not Twitter or Facebook status updates, photographs, videos, more music than ever before. And there is no barrier to distribution, thanks to the web, cheap hosting sites and marketing is taken care of through word-of-mouth social media – so to set this up, the entire landscape on which the media content industries were based has utterly transformed in many ways over the last 20 years.