A couple of weeks ago I was describing Webjay to several managers at the company I’m working at for the summer. Their reaction was: “That’s really cool, but it must be illegal! They’re stealing bandwidth!”

Now, these are pretty smart and savvy folks at one of the world’s foremost internet companies. They are very web-centric, and would laugh anyone out of the room who suggested that linking to a page “within” a site (like a particular archived blog post) rather than the “top page” was somehow “stealing.”

So I wondered why their thinking changed when it came to multimedia.

There are two issues at work here: bandwidth and context. The first is a technical issue, probably best addressed by things like FreeCache or BitTorrent.

The second is perhaps more interesting. People want to control the context within which their work is seen. At a fundamental level this means proper accreditation–if I put your photos on my website it implies that I took those photos, unless I specifically mention otherwise.

It gets more complex that that, though. An image or a video shot, unlike a blog post or a news article, has no intrinsic meaning. These forms of expression get their meaning from the context in which they are presented. In film this phenomenon is known as the Kuleshov effect. On the web, the possibilities for recontextualization are endless, and it is this fact, the fact that I can totally change the meaning of your work and you are powerless to stop me, that leads to anti-deep linking sentiment.

This is a sociocultural issue that doesn’t have any technical solutions, and I suspect that videobloggers will be wrestling with it long after the technical issues are ancient history. More sophisticated schemes for embedding metadata about authorship, intention, history, etc. in files will help, I think, as well as media players that can understand and use such metadata. But the most difficult task will be coming to grips with the realization that we no longer control the meaning of our expressions.