Why PowerPoint Is the Biggest Software Pirate and How It Can Be Fixed
Media production tools poorly address one of the most common use cases: The user needs media he doesn't have and lacks the money to pay for. Finding and using externally produced media is typically a cumbersome process. Often users resort to search engines to find the media. They then have to download the files and hope they don't infringe on copyrights in the process. While there are tens of millions of images that can be used with permissive licenses, the license terms are normally too complicated for users to understand. Even the users who intend to respect copyrights fail to do so in most cases. We introduce an application that solves this problem. Our software provides access to various legal sources of images built right into the creative workflow and automates the process of attribution. This application can be incorporated into any media creation software.
Dr. Herkko Hietanen is currently a visiting scientist with the Communication Futures Program at MIT, where he is conducting value network analytics research. His group has examined the disruption that the television industry is facing as it moves to the Internet. In 2009-2010 he was a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the coordinator of the Harvard-MIT-Yale cyber scholars' working group. Hietanen's dissertation examined how open content licensing has shaped copyright's "all rights reserved" culture. During 2005-2006, he was a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Information and did a secondment at Creative Commons' San Francisco office.
