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Industry Moves
Industry Moves: Channel 4’s Adam Gee Takes Advisory Role At Hot Cherry

By Jemima Kiss: Adam Gee, Channel 4’s resident digital creative wizard, has joined the board of web marketing firm Hot Cherry as non executive director.

Hot Cherry has already worked on a number of Channel 4 campaigns (including the briefly controversial 4mations site which had that ‘racy’ adult game) but also managed to get the Osama Loves project - which profiled 500 very normal guys called Osama - into a double-page spread in the Sun.

Gee, who is cross-platform commissioning editor, said Channel 4 encourages these kind of non-executive roles as part of the personal development scheme for its staff, so he is also trustee of the Brighton-based Culture24 project and has accepted another non-executive role to be announced shortly.

“It helps you stay in touch with the commercial dimension because we spend so much time in the public service world,” he said. “It’s a largely strategic role, but there’s a fantastic energy to Hot Cherry.”

Gee’s recent projects have included the web-based elements of photographic community mentoring project Picture This, sex education series Embarrassing Bodies and the public art mapping project the Big Art Mob.

His latest mission is Landshare, which span off from a thread in River Cottage and aims to match people who want to grow their own produce with people or organisations who have spare land. The Church of England and National trust are partnering to find unused land and there’s also a huge demand from the public, with allotments across the country over subscribed.

“It’s a really simple idea but ferociously difficult to implement because it involves so many issues around safety, disputes over access and sharing and all those other areas that humans find so difficult,” said Gee, adding that Channel 4 did a huge amount of legal work and compliance before the project could launch. “We had to create a robust legal framework to give a platform to give this idea, and let us push things a bit.” His next scheme is an ambitious community project, but that’s still under wraps for now.

MediaGuardian Mar 24, 2009 8:37 AM ET
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Posted In: Industry Moves, Companies, Channel 4, adam gee, hot cherry

  • Robert Andrews

    Matt,

    - Re: rights - I *always* contact photographers for permission on works that are copyrighted and fall outside a usable Creative Commons license. I've done the exact same whilst writing stories over the years for Wired, which you mention.

    - Re: Jemima - We're not joined at the hip (and there was *no* image when I cross-posted). As Jemima says in this video (http://seesmic.com/videos/0jspHbie1a), and you'll see from PDA frequently, she uses images directly when they have "the loosest Creative Commons terms".

    - Re: commercial - Our revenues or acquisition have little to do with it if it's a matter of law and principle (see above). It's about the definition of "non-commercial" - the view of Creative Commons itself is hazy and allows for misinterpretation, hence this discussion, but yours isn't, so thanks for the discussion and we'll appreciate your rights from here on in.

  • Thanks for taking the picture down Robert, although if you'd just asked me first, as many people do on Flickr, I'd probably have been happy.

    My issue is not with people using Flickr to find images, but with people not contacting photographers first to ask if they're ok with use in a commercial context. You can send me a mail right there in the Flickr interface - its not hard. I probably get a couple of requests a month, and as its not my day job, I'm normally happy to allow it unless it is for a really commercial use - eg Wired magazine or the BBC (both of whom have asked to use my pictures).

    Its ironic that Jemima Kiss, who wrote this article for The Guardian originally, is very good at using Flickr images on her articles, contacting the photographers and getting their permission first. In fact, Jemima used another image of Adam for the Guardian article - could you not clear the rights for using that on Paid Content? If not, its a bit rich to then source a 'free' image on Flickr and not ask permission.

    Finally, the fact that you're not profiting directly from the photo does not make it a 'non-commercial' use. That's a very weak argument, especially from a site that was bought by The Guardian last year, and has been reported as having over $1m in ad revenue a year (probably a lot more now, as these figures where from 2006:
    http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/paidcontent_bought_by_the_guar.php

    Matt

  • Robert Andrews

    Indeed, it was *under* your CC 2.0 attribution, non-commercial license that I was using the picture, after searching with those criteria, since, while we sell ads on our site, we do not aim to profit directly from the image. Creative Commons itself acknowledges the definition of "non-commercial" is unclear (http://creativecommons.org/?s=noncommercial). So I'm more than happy to remove the image.

  • Hey - its nice that you've used my photo of Adam for the article, but its published under a creative commons non-commercial license. I'm happy for people to use the picture, but not in a commercial context without discussing payment.

    Drop me a line, and I'll let you know my rates.

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