The Reuters Newsmakers Event "Who needs journalists anyway" boasted an impressive panel of speakers from the UK's broadcast and print industry, including Richard Sambrook, director of global news at the BBC and Simon Waldman, digital publishing director of The Guardian.
Jonathan Munro, deputy editor ITV News, spoke of ITN's scoop in successfully securing the exclusive rights on camcorder footage of the arrest of the London bombers.
"It was the picture scoop of the year and I am very robust about paying for it... And it was worth every penny because frankly we made money on that [footage]; it was a profit-making enterprise. Once we saw an email still of what that guy had we knew we had to have [the footage] for editorial content reasons. But.. you don't just write a cheque and never see that money again. We are a commercial business as most of the companies in this room are, [with the exception of] the BBC."
Mr Munro was not keen on the idea that there should be some regulation on how witness contributions are handled.
"We couldn't sustain a position where we have a black-and-white rule that we don't pay for content or we do pay for content or this is a guideline price. We have to run with the quality of what we are dealing with and if you've got 6,000 people at Buncefield saying I've got great footage of one explosion then frankly there is no point in paying any money. If one person has got the shot of the year then they are in a seller's market."
ITN paid £60,000 for the arrest video, a deal which at the time the amateur cameraman was happy with. But he surrendered his copyright, which meant that he did not see a penny in royalties when ITN went on to syndicate his material around the world.
Kyle MacRae of citizen media agency Scoopt.com said that, had his company acted as a broker on behalf of the amateur cameraman, he would have earned far more in subsequent fees, even after deduction of the agency's 50 per cent commission fee. "Had he known about copyright and licensing and understood these issues, which almost no members of the public actually do, then he could have got a much better deal."
When asked whether the BBC might change its policy of not paying for witness contributions, Richard Sambrook said: "I think we may do. It depends on what kind of market develops. At the moment, to be honest, we have no need to pay for it because if you get, for example 6,000 video clips from the Buncefield oil depot fire, it's more than you can handle and a lot of it will be good quality. In that case it's a buyer's market but the market may develop and we might have to consider [paying]. We don't have a fixed policy that we will never pay or that we should always pay, we will adapt to the market which is bluntly what we have done for amateur video for the past 10 to 15 years."
The BBC was in the bidding war for the bombing arrest video, but did not come close to the final sale price. "The BBC wouldn't have paid that much even for footage as fantastic as that was," said Mr Sambrook.
Outside of this debate, the BBC's interactive news editors have consistently expressed their resistance to paying for witness contributions. Pete Clifton, head of BBC News recently told journalism.co.uk "I don't believe that it is the role of the BBC to pay for everything on the site. We couldn't afford to do it... It's not our role to commercialise this."
At a recent NUJ/Guardian roundtable event, Vicky Taylor, editor of interactivity at bbcnews.com, also insisted that the BBC should not pay for citizen media. Witness contributors to the BBC retain the copyright on their images, but they are still vulnerable to exploitation, as Ms Taylor admitted to journalism.co.uk.
She told us that, in one case, someone had submitted a picture to the site of the bus that was exploded in the London bombings on the condition that it was not to be used the Rupert Murdoch-owned press. As soon as it appeared on the site, it was lifted and used by several Murdoch titles. BBC lawyers were able to secure subsequent payments from these papers to the contributor in the form of reproduction fees, but were under no obligation to do so and there were no real deterrents to prevent the image being stolen in the first place.
Others in the mainstream press have been even less scrupulous. The Daily Telegraph notoriously attempted a rights grab for pictures submitted by readers.
Mr MacRae explained: "The Telegraph didn't take copyright but it did take a perpetual non-exclusive royalty-free right. And it also had a right to syndicate the work for its own profit. So potentially the average punter sending pictures into the Telegraph could be paid by the publisher, or not, in the first place. But [the Telegraph] could then go away and sell that image for profit without ever paying the originator another penny. That is just wrong."
The question of payment in the first place is a thorny one. On the one hand, you have the potential commercial exploitation of citizens who do not understand their rights, on the other you run the risk of incentivising people to put their lives at risk or to intrude on the privacy of others.
Simon Waldman said: "It's a combination of news values and the way the market functions. Heat magazine will pay £200 for an unposed photograph of a celebrity. You wonder where all this is leading if any minor celebrity has to put up with having a cameraphone stuck in their face wherever they go. Is this really the society we want to live in?"
Rebecca MacKinnon, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and co-founder of globalvoicesonline.org, agreed: "When it comes to this total surveillance society of everybody reporting on each other, it could get pretty chaotic."
The NUJ recently proposed a code of conduct for publishers to adopt in their usage of witness contributions, which has been derided by several key people in the industry as being unworkable.
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