photography ethics, YouTube & welcome to the future

[Cloud]

Something that's caught my interest lately is trying to watch the ways new media is affecting our society. It's hard to notice this stuff while it's happening; the world is changing around you and it's going faster and faster and you can't keep up . . .

whew! Just a second while I catch my breath! A lot of this has to do with copyright and intellectual property law, which is just exploding right now. Specifically:

1) photography ethics--what responsibility does one owe the owner or original photography of a picture? If you alter a picture, should you indicate that on the face? I ran across a discussion of this channel surfing the other day, but I've also considered this question with regard to evidence photography at work.

2) YouTube. It's 3 years old this month, and already it's evident, that like other web-based innovations preceding it, video sharing is changing the way we relate to the world.

I'm pretty late to learning about video stuff on the internet, but just a quick look at the Wikipedia article on YouTube is mind boggling: Far from mere copyright violation, in 3 years YouTube has been connected with espionage, animal abuse, Neo-Nazis, school bullying, spam advertisements, censorship, political promotion . . .

Pretty powerful stuff.

and, thank you, for letting me ramble on. Don't know where I'm going with this, just that it's an interesting topic, and I'm keeping my eyes and mind open on it.