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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."
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.
Nice post. However, I disagree with this:
"there's no reason why commercial and personal uses are in opposition to each other"
if a user values privacy, and it's profitable to sell/market users' data (as is generally the case now), then there's a fundamental opposition here.
At minimum, it is not in most companys' interest to invest large sums of money protecting users' data...
Also, I think there's a vast difference between targeted ads, and taking user generated content, packaging it, locking it down, and selling it back to everyone. It seems to me that the main point of value in sites like eBay, MySpace and facebook is simply that everyone uses them! It's not like the services they provide are that great. The same is true with academic journals. Academics write (and nowdays often render) the articles, other academics review the articles. What exactly are the journals even doing? Printing the damn thing - that's all. And institutions pay thousands of dollars per year to read the articles. What a racket!
To say it again - it's _only_ the users that give these companies value. They're on a total gravy-train, and they know it.
But if the service wouldn't have existed at all but-for the commercial use?
Do you think Google could support 5 gig of storage for every Gmail account if it couldn't target ads? That's an indirect synergistic effect -- a service that wouldn't exist but-for creative commercialization.
And would Amazon be half as useful if it didn't provide the "users who viewed this product also bought ___" feature? That's a direct synergistic effect -- a service that is made more useful by creative commercialization.
I'm not saying every use of data by Facebook is great. They've gone way too far sometimes. But there's no inherent reason why, done RIGHT, commercial use of data can't make the service better. The ground rules still stand---each commercial use must not cause harm, nor may the aggregate---but if we assume that it's done right there's no reason why there must be tension between commercial and private. I want to use the best possible Facebook/MySpace/LiveJournal/etc service and I don't care if Zuckerberg makes a million or two in the process, so long as he doesn't do so by harming me.