I just read a disturbing article called, "You Post it, Face Book Owns It". It has been my concern for a long time that the free trade of information may be brought to a standstill if one of the 2.0 players decided to lay claim to the users content.
I alluded to this as a potential problem with Realtor favorite ActiveRain.com a long time ago. Many folks build their entire brands on free websites without concern that the free ride cannot go on forever. (This is a re-edit as I think I should put a notice here that Active Rain is now charging as I predicted they would )
Especially when many of these entities struggle for a revenue stream. Just recently Facebook quietly changed their Terms of Service stating that they have the rights to the users content. So I guess that picture of your kid they not only own, they can also sublicense. Or can you imagine the issue if one of your business pictures are sublicensed? Is that possible? Not so sure if this true as the story alludes. However, I bet many will not be so fast to post up their Alumni pictures. Maybe their new TOS will become one of their more popular pages as we all try to see what we just gave away. What a tangled web this Internet really is.
The question looms. What of Youtube, Twitter, Picassa, Flickr and the hundreds of other Social sites that hold your content? By the way It is not uncommon for sites to cache our content. Google has done it for years. But never has anyone layed claim to it before ( as far as I know).So I suppose more and more people will be linking to files for now on and linking to their good content on their own server space.
You make very interesting points. It does raise the question of how information is traded on the internet.
Posted by: Jim Bigelow | February 17, 2009 at 11:30 AM