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Facebook, Google, and Intellectual Property

Posted by kdawson on from the value-of-the-commons dept.

Scott Jaschik sends us to Inside Higher Ed, where a librarian explains why the tradeoffs we're facing with social networking sites — e.g. privacy vs. a space to build one's personal "brand" — echo issues faced years ago by academics who publish in journals that their institutions' libraries can not then afford. The author argues that, as the Open Access movement is busily restructuring academic publishing, we need to find a way of retaining the personal value to the individual of social networking and Web 2.0 sites, and not allow that value to be eclipsed by the commercial worth of the data the sites obtain about us. In the author's view, the tension is in "...the fundamental relationship between the individual's desire to share their thoughts and experiences with others and the commercial entities that provide the distribution channel for that act of sharing."

4 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Room to shape personal brand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Synergy is when something NEW and greater than the sum of its parts is created.

    I fail to see how targeted ads based on the user's preferences is synergistic when
    it only serves to enrich ONE side of the equation - the seller.

    If perhaps they offered exclusive offers with such (lets face it, spam) marketing,
    THAT might be synergy. As is, it's marketing targeted at one's privacy ignorance.

    The user stands to gain nothing more than carefully selected spam. It's still spam.

  2. Re:Room to shape personal brand by Dada+Vinci · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But there's another gravy train pulling up right behind: reputation management companies that clean up the messes left behind by data breaches. Maybet hat's the real "synergy" the grandparent was talking about?

  3. OSN: An Open Source Social Network by gordoni2 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This syncs with what I am trying to do with OsnLive.com - pull control of the social networks away from proprietary websites and host them on a open source network that give users the freedoms to do what they want with their profiles. So far however OSN has yet to achieve a critical mass.

    Obligatory marketing blurb follow: OSN is a shiny new open source open protocol distributed social network. From a user perspective all the individual sites in the OSN federation appear as one. Users can search, browse profiles, send messages, and link to each other without regard to which sites other users are using. S/MIME public key cryptography is used to unambiguously identify senders and is combined with the social network to make the system resilient to spam. Spammers get voted off the island. User profiles are based on the FOAF XML file format and users can migrate their profile from one site to another. OsnLive.com is the first site running OSN.

  4. Aren't there ample precedents that cover this? by serutan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Do phone companies get a cut of any business deals made over the phone?
    No.
    Do UPS and FedEx get a share of the goods they ship?
    No.
    Do ISPs and carriers have a claim on the value of web content?
    No.

    Moving bits around entitles network providers to their monthly fee and that's all. People have been carrying, packing and storing other people's things for centuries. The fact that it's the Internet doesn't add any new complicated twists. The plumber has never had the right to use your bathtub.