Slashdot Mirror
Facebook, Google, and Intellectual Property
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."
The thing about Facebook is that it only knows the information you tell it. If you want to shape your "personal brand" (to use the author's term) on Facebook so you appear to be a sophisticated scholar of the finer things in life, then you're free to do so. Similarly, you're free to make yourself appear to be a slacker, an emo kid, an anarchist, or whatever other image you can come up with.
The commercialization is to some degree inevitable--after all, it's unlikely that Facebook would have ever been launched but for the hopes of striking it rich--but as long as the data is limited to what YOU provide then it's hard to complain about Facebook doing exactly what it promised it would do (namely, using that data to support the servers, coders, tech support, etc).
I don't see why it has to be zero-sum. The author suggests that we need to avoid the personal value of the data being "eclipsed" by the commercial data, but they seem totally synergistic: If Facebook can afford to hire more coders to come up with more innovative new ways to connect to each other, then it doesn't matter to me if they make more use of my data for commercial purposes, so long as EACH commercial use is not harmful. This is like the debate over ad targeting all over again -- a lot of people prefer targeted ads ("commercial value") over broadcast ads because sites can recoup their costs with fewer and less intrusive targeted ads, and targeted ads are far less annoying than the v--gra sp-m that we all get by email.
In sum -- there's no reason why commercial and personal uses are in opposition to each other. If each commercial use is not harmful (i.e., my data isn't revealed or mis used) then it supports the personal use. Synergy, not parasitism.
Basic hosting doesn't come with the interactive feaures -- you can't easily see what your friends are up to, browse pictures of events you attended, etc. Yes, it's possible to remember/bookmark the URL of each of your friends' home pages, and then click from each one to each page to see if it's changed, but Facebook/MySpace/Xanga/Orkut(deadpool?) does all that for you. You can easily see which friends have added pictures, see the "status" messages (the modern .plan for all the terminal warriors out there) and all that. Yeah, it's "possible", but Facebook is popular for the same reason that LiveJournal/Blogspot/Blogger replaced manual HTML editing of the first-generation blogs -- it's easier and more interactive.
There's nothing inherently private about posting on the open Internet. If anything, Facebook provides at least a plausible privacy shield against employers finding embarrassing photos: Don't join networks and set your privacy settings high. Something on the open Internet is out there for Google to find and the world to know. Of course you could robots.txt, but then you lose the "personal brand" aspect above. Or you could give out usernames/passwords to your friends, but that's a giant pain and doesn't scale well. There are some benefits.
Perhaps I am misinterpreting the article. I thought TFA was about a person (or persons) in academia (or whatever) being able to openly (freely as in beer) share their research; which is in opposition to the journals that publish the cream-of-the-crop and then hide the research away from the rest of the world (including possibly the authors). This seems a little out of whack, but it's how it's been for years. There should be a reversal--research needs to be available. If the author(s) institute cannot even afford the journal subscription, something is wrong. How would I as an individual get access to research?
It's amusing to see people exclaim "but the government can't control that!" Well why not? Hume wrote that the universe doesn't bend to ensure people's rights aren't violated- there's not really any such thing as human rights.. there's only how governments agree to protect their citizens. And if the US legislature wants to make IP laws, then there's nothing stopping them until the next election.
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.
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.
The stories are submitted by the READERS (that is you), the comments are submitted by the READERS, the moderating is done by the READERS, the testing of new features is done by the READERS, the polls are suggested by the READERS, the new layout was created by a READER!
Who earns money from this site? NOT the READERS!
Normally you would expect a site to present content the site owner produced and then display it for money. Social sites, wether it is slashdot, youtube or facebook don't have any content of their own, instead they provide a space for the readers to present content to other readers. This is NOT that new. The letters page in any newspaper gives the paper "free" content as well, but it is nonetheless an odd thing.
There is an unspoken agreement that in exchange for giving you a space to voice your opinion, you allow the space provider to use your comment to make a profit. But slashdot trained monkeys who call themselves editors do occasionaly come up with their own stories, and add idiotic conclusions. Newspapers have other pages then the letter page.
But sides like youtube or myspace have NO content at all of their own. It then becomes a rather difficult question of exactly how much you own them for giving you a space to express yourselve. Remember "free" homepages? The one you probably still have with your ISP subscription? It seems pretty clear there that YOU own the contents of the page. Why should it be different for a social website?
I agree with the article, we seriously need to question just who owns what. Remember the writers strike? One of the things a lot of people mentioned was that reality shows would be on the increase because they don't employ writers. Actually reality shows are written as well (writers do more then just write dialogue), but you might even ask yourselve wether these "real" people that create content through their lives for the TV stations to sell don't qualify as writers as well.
Could the maintainer of a myspace site be listed as a writer? Why is a columnist a writer, but not a blogger? Who owns your content? When do you go from a letter writer to a journalist?
Just how much do you own the hoster of you content in exchange for this service. Myspace has a lot of nudie pics, say it decided to host all these pics on a pay-per-view portion of the site. You agreed for it to be public, but there is a difference between a flasher pic on your own page and it being displayed on a site with nothing but nudie pics. Just how far can myspace go with your content?
Intresting questions, and I fear that sooner or later we will find a story where a site owner goes to far.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That's a gross oversimplification of the whole argument surrounding human rights. Human rights have been noted to spring up of themselves in many societies around the world, even in complete isolation to more advanced societies. This, at the very least, demonstrates rights at a base level of, for instance, the right to defend yourself from attack, or to not fear you will be murdered, tortured, etc. The problem is a lot of things are called "human rights" when in fact they're just rights, or often even just privileges, and this dilutes the term. A human right should not need to be enshrined in law for it to be recognised.
I certainly espouse the ideals of human rights, but the gp points out that these rights are only as strong as any given government's will to protect them. Not only that, but it is possible to read this sort of protection as imposition (see the problems with Islamic head-scarfs in secular countries such as the Netherlands and Turkey).
I also disagree that the content of certain human rights spring up spontaneously. What we know as human rights is a Western import, and thus inspired by Christianity (not even stemming from Greco-Roman philosophy, which had no concept of the universal rights of human beings, only citizens).
I do believe that what we consider human rights are simply the embodiment of a 'beneficial' swing in the movement of what Nietzsche called the will to power. I mean (to put in the least technical language possible): the strongest wins, and luckily (for us) the winning side espouses human 'rights' that concur with our opinions, which is only natural because these our the basis of our culture.
This is not entirely true--the first declaration of human rights was written by a Zoroastrian, not a Christian.
That empire was the first in the world to guarantee liberty and religious freedom, and was not again matched until much, much later. (The legal abolition of slavery in any empire would not be repeated again until the 2nd millenium AD, to my knowledge.)
There is a compelling case to be made that Christianity gave birth to capitalism, which in turn spawned democracy and legal recognition of human rights. (Rodney Stark's book The Victory of Reason is perhaps the flagship of this philosophy.) And while Christian theologians certainly touched on the idea of natural rights, as afforded by the Creator, their integration into legal systems occurred in Islamic empires before they did in the Christian world.
It is very interesting, though, that you can directly trace the concept of human rights to monotheistic religion. Ultimately the doctrine of free will is the precursor to any philosophical recognition of human rights, and Zoroastrianism and Christianity are perhaps the two religions that focus most heavily on free will. (Personally I believe Islam does too, but the theology surrounding human will vs. God's will inspired a very fatalistic bend to modern Islam, which is unfortunate.)
Hm... this makes me wonder: can you really trace the concept of human rights to monotheistic religion, or is it just the formal declaration of such? I don't have any references handy, but I've read in many places about various different polytheistic cultures that believed in everyone's right to defend themselves from harm and some other of the basic human rights that we believe in (although, admittedly, not all of them). It was never set down in law because it just was. There was no declaration needed. Now, without my references handy, I can't be sure of the veracity of my memory, but it does make one wonder...
Did monotheism create the idea of human rights, or were they merely the first that felt that human rights needed to be made into laws instead of merely universally accepted as something so profoundly obvious that no one should need to be told?
And, when thinking about it now, wouldn't any set of laws put down originally been to protect human rights? Admittedly, they were abused as they went on (even our own laws have become ridiculous in some areas), but at their onset wouldn't all laws have been written to protect a person's rights from the violation of others?
These are just some thoughts I had while reading this.
"Does bouncing count?" - Silk, Magician's Gambit by David Eddings