New Media Rights was born out of the crossroads we face as a culture. Mass media still largely controls production and distribution culture, making decisions about what is and isn't important information. Despite this, the decreased costs of creating and distributing art, entertainment, and political speech have, for the first time, created an atmosphere where individuals can now communicate on the same level as the mass media.
New Media Rights' mission is to support those individuals creating culture who do not have access to the legal services and capital that traditional media outlets have access to.
It is an exciting time because every day we are seeing new ways that the creativity of individuals has been improving people lives. Our goal is to play a part encouraging this power to produce, communicate, and disseminate culture directly to keep it free from gatekeepers.
This revolution relies on individuals understanding and embracing their new abilities and the technologies that enable these cultural changes. At the same time, entrenched interests, particularly traditional mass media such as the recording industry, movie industry, traditional broadcasters, and large telecommunications companies, have chosen to treat the grassroots content revolution as a threat, rather than a complementary piece of a modern democracy and culture. Individuals must understand their rights and responsibilities in this new world.
Our mission is to promote and facilitate the use of new grassroots content distribution technology and provide a community for education on the technology and laws, particularly intellectual property laws (Copyright and Trademark in particular) surrounding grassroots content use and creation. Our philosophy is that there is a public benefit to wider involvement in a creative world in which creators are more closely connected to users in a non-hierarchical creative community. New Media Rights' goal is to assist in fostering a strong, non-hierarchical creative community for the new media user/creator by providing a community where the issues of podcasting, blogging, social media, remixing, mash-ups, wikis, and more can be openly discussed. Users and creators (often one in the same) of content can come here to find assistance, share their knowledge of new media and interesting tools they find, as well as engage in grassroots activism.
